Dr Adam Tyson receives RMS Award for Life Sciences

We are delighted to announce Dr Adam Tyson as winner of the RMS Life Sciences Award.

Adam is Head Research Engineer and Head of the Neuroinformatics Unit at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour and Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, University College London, UK.

He is the co-founder and lead of the BrainGlobe Initiative, and has made significant contributions to the field of neuroscience.

The BrainGlobe Initiative is an ecosystem of tools that help neurobiologists, microscopists, and imaging scientists to understand their data in the accurate neuroanatomical context. In recent years, digital high-resolution 3D brain atlases have been produced for several model organisms providing an invaluable resource for the research community.

Effective use of these atlases depends on the availability of an application programming interface (API) that enables researchers to develop software to access and query atlas data. However, while some atlases come with an API, these are generally specific for individual atlases, and this hinders the development and adoption of open-source neuroanatomy software. The BrainGlobe Atlas API overcomes this problem by providing a common interface for programmers to download and process data across a variety of model organisms.

By adopting the Atlas API, software can then be developed agnostic to the atlas, increasing adoption and interoperability of packages in neuroscience and enabling direct integration of different experimental modalities and even comparisons across model organisms.