Global Outreach & Citizen Science Initiatives
From crowdsourced retinal mapping to whole-brain consortiums: how citizen scientists, high school researchers, and global open-science consortia are illuminating the brain.
🎮 1. Citizen Science & Crowdsourced Mapping
Empowering hundreds of thousands of non-specialists and students to reconstruct neural circuits alongside top research institutes.
EyeWire →
>250,000 PlayersDeveloped by Sebastian Seung's lab (Princeton / MIT), EyeWire turned 3D retinal neuron reconstruction into a multiplayer web game. Players solve 3D puzzle cubes to color in dendritic branches of ganglion and bipolar cells.
FlyWire Consortium →
Whole Adult BrainA massive collaborative crowdsourcing effort connecting 280+ researchers across 76 global laboratories alongside community citizen scientists to proofread and curate the first complete connectome of an adult fruit fly brain (139,000 neurons, 50 million synapses).
Allen Brain Map & BigNeuron →
Community StandardsOpen-access brain atlas infrastructure by the Allen Institute for Brain Science. BigNeuron brought together international computational labs to benchmark automated single-neuron reconstruction algorithms.
🎓 2. Student & Workforce Training Programs
Preparing high schoolers, undergraduates, postbacs, and early-career scientists for authentic computational neuroscience research.
🧠 NeuroTrailblazers (NIH BRAIN CONNECTS)
A research-incubator training network supporting students and mentors across the BRAIN CONNECTS ecosystem. Provides an open technical curriculum (Units 01–09), a 2,000-paper OCAR literature graph, 25 teaching session kits, and hands-on capstone pathways.
🔬 Janelia Undergraduate & Visiting Scientist Programs
HHMI Janelia Research Campus offers intensive summer undergraduate research programs and visiting scientist fellowships. Scholars work directly with FlyEM and Project Technical Teams on FIB-SEM acquisition, proofreading, and machine learning segmentation.
HHMI Janelia • Summer Fellows • FlyEM🌊 MBL Woods Hole Neurobiology Summer Course
The Marine Biological Laboratory's legendary neurobiology immersion course at Woods Hole, MA. Features hands-on modules in ultrastructural electron microscopy, electrophysiology, and connectomics graph theory.
MBL Woods Hole • Graduate & Postdoc • EM Bootcamps🌐 3. Open Data Ecosystems & Community Portals
Cloud-native platforms hosting petabytes of open volumetric data for worldwide access.
💾 bossDB (JHU APL) →
The Brain Observatory Storage Service and Database. Cloud-native spatial database serving petabytes of volumetric EM, X-ray, and light microscopy data for the NIH BRAIN Initiative.
🕸️ neuPrint (Janelia) →
Graph database portal allowing researchers to search neurons by cell type, find direct upstream/downstream synaptic partners, and analyze connectivity matrices with Cypher queries.
📊 Neurodata Without Borders (NWB) →
Community data standard for neurophysiology, enabling seamless co-registration of structural connectomes with in vivo optical and electrical recordings.