Development Launched for EBRAINS HealthDataCloud

EBRAINS, the digital research infrastructure created by the European Human Brain Project (HBP), offers a range of resources to support brain and brain-inspired research. Large data science approaches to the brain, and to health in general, need to address an important challenge: All research needs to strictly protect privacy, and thus the freedom and rights of each individual, and to comply with the rules of the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). To this end, EBRAINS will add a new service for sensitive medical brain data that is available to the scientific community – the EBRAINS HealthDataCloud. The project is coordinated by Europe’s largest university hospital, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, and is being provided with € 1 million in funding.

Over the next two years, a multinational team of academic and industrial partners in the HBP, including JSC, will develop a GDPR-compliant, federated research data ecosystem that enables neuroscience research consortia across Europe and beyond to work with sensitive neuroscience data originating from human subjects as well as defined routes for sharing the data and results. The EBRAINS HealthDataCloud will be based on the GDPR-compliant Virtual Research Environment (VRE) at the Charité, a product of the EU project Virtual Brain Cloud that is compatible with the EBRAINS infrastructure and provides a secure and scalable data platform for multi-institutional research teams. An important goal of the HealthDataCloud project is the federation of the platform and the integration of HPC centres such as JSC and other Fenix Infrastructure sites as satellite nodes for compute-intensive simulation and analysis workloads. For further information, please visit https://www.healthdatacloud.eu/.

Contact: Dr. Boris Orth, b.orth@fz-juelich.de