BRAIN CONNECTS aims to revolutionize our understanding of the brain by creating high-resolution wiring diagrams that span entire brains — across species, across scales, and across technologies.
This initiative brings together scientists, engineers, and institutions to:
Develop scalable methods for mapping brain connectivity at multiple levels, from synapses to systems
Generate open, shareable datasets that capture how brains are wired and how that wiring changes across development, health, and disease
Support tool-building and standardization to accelerate the neuroscience community's ability to generate, analyze, and integrate connectivity data
Enable discovery by linking data to behavior, function, and disease mechanisms
By coordinating efforts across teams and technologies, CONNECTS aims to lay the groundwork for a new era of circuit-level neuroscience — where understanding how the brain is wired leads directly to insights into how it works, and how it breaks down in disease.
To achieve its ambitious goals, BRAIN CONNECTS is structured as a collaborative network of specialized research teams, each focused on a key piece of the connectivity puzzle. This includes developing cutting-edge imaging and labeling technologies, creating scalable workflows for brain mapping, and building computational tools to integrate and analyze data. The initiative emphasizes open standards, shared protocols, and cross-team coordination — ensuring that data and tools are interoperable, reusable, and accessible to the broader scientific community. Together, these efforts form a unified, scalable pipeline for generating comprehensive brain wiring diagrams.
The consortium includes 20 project teams spanning XX institutions across YY countries.