Abigail Morrison

Jülich Contributions to HBP

The Forschungszentrum Jülich and its institutes contribute substantially to several areas of research within the Human Brain Project. The Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-1), for example, provides fundamental neurobiological information about the structure and function of the human brain and is responsible for developing the HBP Human Brain Atlas as part of the publicly accessible infrastructure. INM-1 director Katrin Amunts leads Subproject 2 (Human Brain Organization) and the Science and Infrastructure Board (SIB), and INM-1 group leader Timo Dickscheid is the co-lead of HBP’s neuroinformatics platform. INM-6 develops multi-scale models of the brain, develops and maintains the NEST simulation code for large spiking neuronal networks, and advances digital workflows for the analysis of electrophysiological data. The INM-7 creates workflows for the analysis of structural and functional MRI images of the living human brain that can be used as input into machine-learning models for the prediction of individual phenotypes in health and disease. The mission of the HPAC Platform, which is led by Thomas Lippert, Jülich Supercomputing Centre, is to build, integrate and operate the federated supercomputing and data infrastructure for the Human Brain Project enabling scientists to run large-scale, data-intensive, interactive simulations, to manage large amounts of data and to implement and manage complex workflows. The Simulation Laboratory Neuroscience has a bridging function, connecting neuroscience applications with the methods and resources of high performance computing.

In future, virtual models of the brain will make it easier to understand the structure and function of the healthy and diseased brain, and enable new drugs to be developed and tested. The human brain will also be used as a model for neuro-inspired/neuromorphic computing technologies.

These and other research activities, which are carried out within the framework of Jülich’s Supercomputing and Modeling for the Human Brain (SMHB), comprise the focus of this session.

Speakers: Thomas Lippert, Abigail Morrison, Anna Lührs, Timo Dickscheid, Simon Eickhoff, Forschungszentrum Jülich

Short CV

Abigail Morrison is the group leader of “Computation in Neural Circuits” at INM-6/IAS-6, Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany, the leader of the “Simulation Laboratory Neuroscience” at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre and a professor at the Ruhr University of Bochum, Germany since 2012. She holds a master’s degree in artificial intelligence and received her PhD in computational neuroscience in 2006 from the University of Freiburg, Germany. Between 2006 and 2009 she was a scientific researcher at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Wako-Shi, Japan; she subsequently held a junior professorship at the University of Freiburg from 2009 to 2012, as well as a group leadership at the Bernstein Center Freiburg. Her research interests include learning, representation and computation in spiking neural networks, dynamics and computation in neurodegenerative diseases, and high-performance simulation technology.