At the end of the first day of the HBP Summit, three winners of the Best Abstract Awards were announced: Maria Sacha from CNRS - University Paris-Saclay, Julia Thönnißen from Forschungszentrum Jülich and Sophia Pieschnik from the University of Oslo. The winners were selected out of 173 submitted abstracts based on scientific quality by the Abstract Evaluation Committee.

During the Best Abstracts acceptance ceremony, Maria Sacha presented her work on dynamics of conscious and unconscious states. In her research, Sacha demonstrated the TVB-Adex brain model to be a powerful tool to investigate the effects of anesthetics on whole brain level-activity. With the model, Sacha elucidated brain responsiveness to external inputs and how input information propagates across the brain as a correlate of the level of consciousness. Her abstract is titled: “Simulating the emergence of conscious and unconscious states at the whole-brain level (Showcase 3)”.

Julia Thönnißen was awarded the Best Abstract Award for her research on “VoluBA: Interactive registration of high-resolution volumes to 3D reference atlases”. In her acceptance speech, she showed that VoluBA is able to anchor volumetric image data to reference volumes at microscopical spatial resolutions. VoluBA enables interactive manipulation of image position, scale and orientation, flipping of coordinate axes, and entering of anatomical point landmarks in 3D and is openly accessible in its most recent version at http://voluba.apps.hbp.eu.

Sophia Pieschnik from University of Oslo was awarded the Best Abstract Award for her work on the role of the curation services entitled “Pioneering open neuroscience – the role of the curation services”. Researchers who share their work via EBRAINS are supported by data curation scientists of diverse neuroscience backgrounds. The data curation services ensure that the data is organised in an understandable and consistent manner, that the data are annotated with sufficient metadata, and that the curated data are connected to an ecosystem of tools and services facilitating its reuse and analysis.