Three exciting Open Science initiatives will receive critical support thanks to The Neuro - Irv and Helga Cooper Foundation Open Science Prizes. The recipients of the 2024 awards have advanced neuroscience by improving inclusivity and access to neuroimaging and genetics data.
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International Main Prize, The Global Parkinson’s Genetics Program (GP2)
The Global Parkinson’s Genetics Program (GP2) is geared toward creating a worldwide collaborative effort to dramatically accelerate identification of genetic contributors to disease and establishing a research network to leverage this understanding to investigate, diagnose, and treat Parkinson’s disease across the globe. GP2 researchers are generating dense genetic data in more than 150,000 participants. They generate whole-genome sequence data from more than 10,000 individuals to determine the genetic cause in monogenic cases and generate critical reference datasets. They are also using long-read DNA sequencing to support the analysis of structural and repeat variability that is relatively resistant to interrogation using traditional genome sequencing methods.
Since beginning in 2019, GP2 has created a global research community with over 145 cohorts from 59 unique countries. They have genotyped over 35,000 samples from patients and control participants, and released data from 25,000 individuals to the scientific community. To date, GP2 has received almost 1000 requests from the scientific community to access the genetic data.
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International Trainee Prize, Arabs in Neuroscience (AiN) by Mohamed Abdelhack, Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics, CAMH
Arabs in Neuroscience (AiN) is a non-profit organization that has been working to build a large network of Arab scientists across the world on all levels. It started by building capacity in the field of computational neuroscience which is a field that is non existent in the Arab world. Abdelhack gathered seven Arabic-speaking instructors from universities in The US, UK, Canada, and Saudi Arabia to provide the first content on the topic in Arabic language. This resulted in an introductory course on computational neuroscience where the applicant numbers grew from ~250 in the first year to over 1,000 in the third year.
Many of AiN’s students and teaching assistants scored prestigious paid scholarships for graduate schools around the world and continue providing for the community. They release all the school materials openly online where videos are published on Youtube and codes are released on Github. Their Youtube channel has racked up over 6000 views with over 540 watch hours.
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Canadian Trainee Prize, Nipoppy by Michelle Wang, The Neuro, McGill
Nipoppy is a framework that specifies how researchers should organize and process neuroimaging-clinical datasets. It builds upon existing efforts and aims to facilitate the adoption of good practices by providing user-friendly and flexible software tools. Nipoppy’s focus on flexibility and decentralization of data processing makes it unique and valuable in the current neuroimaging software ecosystem.
Nipoppy has been used to process data from the Parkinson’s Progression Markers Initiative and the Quebec Parkinson Network using existing open-source pipelines and with all parameters documented for reproducibility. Raw data and processed magnetic resonance imaging data are currently stored on a central server and shared with other research groups at The Neuro.
