[Abstract] 

The human brain has a multi-level organisation and high complexity. New approaches are necessary to decode the brain with its 86 billion nerve cells, each with 10,000 connections. Moreover, it is necessary to link the different levels of brain organisation to each other, and to derive the rules, by which findings on one level, e.g., the cellular one, can be translated to the next higher (e.g., cognitive systems) or lower levels (e.g., molecular organisation). The Human Brain Project creates a cutting-edge HPC and HPDA infrastructure to address such challenges including cloud-based collaboration and development platforms with databases, workflow systems, petabyte storage, and supercomputers. The talk will provide an overview of the activities of the Human Brain Project, and provide examples of recent research including human brain atlasing.

[Biography] 

Katrin Amunts did postdoctoral work in the C. & O. Vogt Institute for Brain Research at Duesseldorf University, Germany. In 1999, she moved to the Research Centre Juelich and set up a new research unit for Brain Mapping. In 2004, she became professor for Structural-Functional Brain Mapping at RWTH Aachen University, and in 2008 a full professor at the Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics at the RWTH Aachen University as well as director of the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-1) at the Research Centre Juelich. In 2013, she became a full professor for Brain Research at the Heinrich-Heine University Duesseldorf, director of the C. and O. Vogt Institute for Brain Research, Heinrich-Heine University Duesseldorf and director of the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-1), Research Centre Juelich.

Since 2007 Katrin Amunts is a member of the editorial board of Brain Structure and Function. She is member of the German Ethics Council since 2012, and since 2016 vice chair of the German Ethics Council. Katrin Amunts is the programme speaker for the programme Decoding the Human Brain of the Helmholtz Association, Germany as well as speaker of the Helmholtz Portfolio Theme Supercomputing and Modeling for the Human Brain (SMHB). Since 2013 Katrin Amunts is leading the Subproject 2 Human Brain Organization of the European Flagship Project, The Human Brain Project (HBP). 2016, she has been elected as the Chair of the Scientific and Infrastructure Board (SIB) of the HBP. In order to better understand the organizational principles of the human brain, she and her team aim to develop a multi-level and multi-scale brain atlas, and use methods of high-performance computing to generate ultra-high resolution human brain models.