Associate Director, Research Software Development McGill Centre for Integrative Neuroscience McConnell Brain Imaging Center Montreal Neurological Instititute E-mail: samir@bic.mni.mcgill.ca

Samir Das serves as Associate Director, Research Software Development at the McGill Centre for Integrative Neuroscience (MCIN). With over 20 years of experience at the Neuro, he has focused on building infrastructure to support researchers in data acquisition, curation, and processing, while pioneering new techniques and workflows for data dissemination and sharing. He leads the LORIS initiative, an open-source platform facilitating the sharing of diverse research datasets, and oversees the design and development of C-BIG, the Neuro’s Open Science repository. Dedicated to advancing Open Science, Samir actively contributes to numerous Open Science projects and working groups.

Projects

• NIH MRI Study of Normal Brain Development (NIHPD, Evans et al. 2006): An early example of multi-site, multi-modal data collection and sharing.
• Infant Brain Imaging Study - Autism study that evolved to a data sharing network.
• CCNA (Mohades et al., 2018): National Neuroinformatics Framework for Canadian Consortium on Neurodegeneration in Aging (CCNA).
• COP-N, QPN (Gan-Or et al. 2020) - Canadian Parkinson’s open sharing network.
• CAPTURE-ALS (Picher-Martel et al., 2023) - Pan-Canadian study for ALS research with open sharing/consent built into its design.
• PreventAD (Tremblay et al. 2021): Longitudinal open science cohort of pre-symptomatic Alzheimer’s disease.
• The Cuban Human Brain Mapping Project (Valdes-Sosa et al., 2021) - A young and middle age population-based EEG, MRI, and cognition dataset.
• Global Brain Consortium (GBC): An international network to disseminate freely EEG tools and data throughout Low- and Middle-Income Countries
• HEALthy Brain and Child Development Study (HBCD) - A large-scale research initiative focused on understanding how early-life experiences, including prenatal and postnatal factors, influence brain development and overall health in children.

Open Science platforms:

• LORIS - a web-based data and project management software for neuroimaging research studies.
• Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform (CONP): A national network for sharing tools and data for brain research. Samir has worked on the design and implementation of this project since its inception.
• Clinical Biospecimen Imaging Genetics Repository (C-BIG, Das et al., 2022): A multi-modal MNI biorepository that provides biospecimen samples.
• CBRAIN (Sherif et al. 2014) - a web-based, distributed computing platform for collaborative neuroimaging research.
• NeuroHub - Healthy Brains for Healthy Lives platform for sharing/processing.

Open Science Committees and Groups:

• INCF (Abrams et al., 2022) - International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility, Chair of the Standards and Best Practices Committee
• Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform - technical steering committee: A national network for sharing tools and data for brain research
• BIDS - Brain Imaging Data Structure (Gorgolewski et al., 2016)
• COBIDAS (Nichols et al.) - Committee On Best Practices In Data And Sharing
• Brainhack (Gau et al., 2021) - Developing a culture of open, inclusive, community-driven neuroscience. Founding member of Brainhack community.