EBRAINS welcomes Pompeu Fabra University as new associate member

The membership will give Pompeu Fabra University the opportunity to co-design future iterations of EBRAINS’ cutting-edge tools and services. These state-of-the-art capabilities - which include an extensive range of brain data sets, a multilevel brain atlas, modelling and simulation tools, and access to high-performance computing resources and robotics and neuromorphic platforms - aim to help European researchers to address major challenges in brain health.

Founded in 1990, Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) is a public institution with a clearly international outlook rooted in the city of Barcelona.

UPF operates on three urban campuses (Ciutadella, Poblenou and Mar). With 29 undergraduate studies, 35 university master’s degrees and 9 doctoral programmes, the University hosts a community of some 12,700 students. Its size is conducive to personalized teaching and a marked cosmopolitan character, where almost 50% of postgraduate and doctoral students come from abroad.

The central thread of UPF’s educational model is to train critical citizens and professionals with a capacity for leadership in global environments. UPF’s prestige is founded also on its high-impact research and its ability to harness competitive funds, especially in Europe, for both of which it is the leading university in Spain. Through a cross-cutting, open approach, UPF promotes knowledge transfer to achieve a tangible impact on society and provide solutions to major contemporary challenges.

All of the above defines a public university that not only generates and conveys knowledge, but also puts it at the service of the improvement and well-being of society.

”Joining EBRAINS represents a strategic milestone for UPF, allowing us to integrate our advanced whole-brain computational models into a world-class digital infrastructure", says Gustavo Deco, ICREA research professor at Pompeu Fabra University. "This partnership enables our researchers to share transformative tools—from Alzheimer’s modelling to disorders of consciousness—within an open-science ecosystem that accelerates clinical discovery. By contributing our software repositories to EBRAINS, we ensure that our work has a direct, scalable impact on European healthcare. For UPF, EBRAINS is the essential bridge between theoretical neuroscience and personalised medicine."

“We are delighted to welcome Pompeu Fabra University as an associate member at EBRAINS”, says EBRAINS Joint-CEO Philippe Vernier. “The university brings with it a wealth of experience in computational modelling.”