EBRAINS welcomes Université de Mons as new associate member

The membership went into effect on 6 January 2023. It will give UMONS the opportunity to co-design future iterations of EBRAINS’ cutting-edge tools and services. These state-of-the-art capabilities – which cover data sharing, atlasing, modelling, simulation, high-performance computing, and neurorobotics – aim to help European researchers to address major challenges in brain health, benefiting from insights into data science, brain organization, and artificial intelligence gathered from the EU Flagship Human Brain Project.

The University of Mons («UMONS» for short) is a French-speaking university located in Wallonia, Belgium, close to the French border. Established from the merger of the University of Mons-Hainaut, created in 1965, with the Engineering Faculty of Mons, founded in 1837, UMONS celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2019. UMONS offers more than 100 degree programmes to our 11,000 students of some forty nationalities. 

The University of Mons contributes to the development of society, notably through quality research ensuring the emergence of new projects capable of meeting the societal, environmental and economic challenges we face.

Research at the University of Mons (UMONS) relies on some 1000 researchers spread over a hundred or so departments. It is structured into 10 research institutes, accompanied by the Department for Research Support and Technology Transfer. The strength of the UMONS research institutes lies in the multidisciplinary nature of their teams (a department may be associated with one or, at most, two research institutes) and the flexibility of their organization.

Specifically, the UMONS’ HEALTH Institute is a multidisciplinary institute bringing together biologists, clinicians, pharmacists, chemists, physicists, engineers, psychologists and sociologists from the academic departments of UMONS whose research activities concern the health sector. Their common goal is to improve both individual human health and community health. This objective is underpinned by the establishment of collaborations with various operators in this sector.

One of the Institute's research areas is Brain Diseases. Brain diseases are addressed within the HEALTH Institute in a multidisciplinary and cross-sectoral manner. Emphasis is placed on collaborations with academic, industrial and hospital partners in an approach combining cutting edge technologies and preclinical ( in vitro and in vivo) and clinical expertise.

 “EBRAINS will bring to UMONS researchers the opportunity to share their expertise in machine-learning-based brain data analysis and give them access to large scale data and high-performance computing capacity”, explains Laurence Ris, Vice-Rector in charge of International Relations, Mobility and Cooperation and researcher within the Health Research Institute, for the Brain Diseases area.

Thanks to the quality and excellence of its research, UMONS is recognized at the national and international level. The growing number of publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals and citations in international scientific publications have earned it a place among the top universities in international rankings.

About EBRAINS

EBRAINS is a new digital research infrastructure (RI), created by the EU-funded Human Brain Project (HBP), to foster brain-related research and to help translate the latest scientific discoveries into innovation in medicine and industry, for the benefit of patients and society.

It draws on cutting-edge neuroscience and offers an extensive range of brain data sets, atlases, modelling and simulation tools, easy access to high-performance computing resources and to robotics and neuromorphic platforms.

All academic researchers have open access to EBRAINS’ state-of-the art services. Industry researchers are also very welcome to use the platform under specific agreements. For more information about EBRAINS, please contact us at info@ebrains.eu or visit https://ebrains.eu/

EBRAINS is listed on the ESFRI roadmap

About the Human Brain Project

The Human Brain Project (HBP) is the largest brain science project in Europe and stands among the biggest research projects ever funded by the European Union. It is one of the three FET Flagship Projects of the EU. At the interface of neuroscience and information technology, the HBP investigates the brain and its diseases with the help of highly advanced methods from computing, neuroinformatics and artificial intelligence and drives innovation in fields like brain-inspired computing and neurorobotics.

Media Contact

communications@ebrains.eu