EBRAINS User Stories - Ingvild Bjerke: brain development and open science

This time, we talk to Ingvild Bjerke, a neuroscientist combining studies of normal mouse brain development with neuroinformatics and digital atlasing. Passionate about open science and FAIR research, Bjerke has just started a second postdoc at Pennsylvania State University (United States), where she hopes to deepen her understanding of neurodevelopment and related disorders. 

With International Women’s Day approaching, she also shared her thoughts on the progress made toward gender equality in neuroscience careers, and steps that can support women in academia and help them overcome challenges around work-life balance.

How do you use EBRAINS for your research? Are there specific tools that you use mainly? 

I have used the EBRAINS Data and Knowledge services throughout my PhD and postdoc periods to share data from my research. I started sharing my first datasets around 2019, when the services were still in their early stages. As such, I have had the chance to see how the Data and Knowledge services have improved over time to make the data sharing experience smoother, and to provide increasingly detailed representations of my datasets. I have also been using the EBRAINS tools for atlas registration and region-based analyses, which have allowed me to carry out multiple brain-wide studies on cellular composition in rat and mouse brain. 

What makes atlases of the mouse and rat brain so useful? 

In short, brain atlases provide standardised references for navigating the brain and analysing data from it. In the same way geographical atlases allow us to navigate a city and communicate where we are to people we want to meet, brain atlases allow us to find our regions of interest and define them in a standardised way. When we refer to these atlases in our publications, it also helps other researchers interpret our data and navigate to the same positions if they want to. Modern 3D atlases and associated digital tools have also had a transformative impact on the scale with which we can study brain structure. With pipelines to connect our data to digital atlases, we can efficiently analyse features of interest across whole brains. These types of analyses are only possible because the atlases providing high-quality, detailed references for all the different brain regions. 

During your time in Oslo, you were awarded the Digital Life Norway FAIR data award. What is FAIR data and why are you engaging yourself for it? 

Most of the data produced in the field is only communicated through research articles, where selected images and analyses are shown. The FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles state that data should be treated as first-class research objects, which involves publishing the raw data underlying our findings. There are many aspects of data sharing that can make data more or less FAIR, but essentially data are FAIR when they are shared through a repository and associated with detailed information about how they were generated and how they can be reused. I believe that publishing data in a FAIR manner is simply part of the scientific process. It is partly about openness and transparency, ensuring that my data can be understood and evaluated independently of any conclusions I may draw from them. And it is partly about increasing the lifespan of the data and reducing waste. In ten years, we will have tools and methods I can’t even imagine today, and certainly more detailed brain atlases, and the analyses I have done might seem outdated. The data, however, will still be valuable and should be available for re-use. Lastly, and importantly, a lot of neuroscience research is performed on animals, and I believe it is our moral obligation to make sure that as much value as possible come from that research. I recently elaborated on this latter perspective in a publication in the European Journal of Neuroscience. 

You are now in the US after many years in Europe, and you collaborate closely with an Australian lab. What are your future plans? Will you still work with EBRAINS? 

I am indeed embarking on my second postdoc in the US, where I hope to acquire new skills and gain a deeper understanding or neurodevelopment and related disorders. There have also been substantial efforts on data sharing and public repositories here in the US, which I will become more acquainted with in the coming time. In the future, I want to combine research on brain development with neuroinformatics tools and atlases. Through EBRAINS, I have learnt a lot that prepared me for this and established several fruitful collaborations that I am hopeful will play a role later in my career as well. 

Why is it important to have combinable tools and data, and to collaborate across continents? 

The information we can extract from data is dependent on the tools we have. I have spent about a decade in the field so far, and have seen truly amazing changes in the analyses we can do due to tools development. For example, when I started my PhD, counting neurons in even a small region of interest across many animals was a major undertaking. Today, we can quantify cells across an entire brain within days. Thus, the continued development of analytic tools gives us increasing value and insight from our data. These advances can only be achieved when researchers with different skillsets to work together. I think international collaboration is an important extension of this principle – it allows us to bring together more diverse expertise and perspectives. 

March 8 is International Women's Day. In your experience, are women catching up in neuroscience careers better than in the past? What obstacles remain and how could they be addressed? 

While I cannot speak for the past, I can say that I feel incredibly lucky to live in a time where my gender – for me, personally – has never felt like an obstacle. I believe we have come a long way in terms of equal opportunities, with the ratios of men and women in higher academic positions becoming more balanced. That said, an academic career typically requires long periods of temporary positions and may involve frequent, even international, relocations. This period typically coincides with the time people are starting families, and it might be particularly challenging for women to combine the two. While I have seen both men and women abandon their academic career over considerations of work-life balance and stability, women are probably more likely to. There are indeed indications that women more frequently leave their academic career than men. So what can we do? I think being mindful that starting a family is a different process for men and women is important. For example, the European Research Council’s rules about extending grant eligibility windows due to parental leave are now particularly generous for women, recognising that they face an added burden by being pregnant and giving birth. Measures such as these can help even out differences in the obstacles faced by men and women in academic careers.