[WTI-trainee] 5.15 | Grand Challenge 1: Open Lab Meeting: Progress toward foundation models of the brain

[Remole, Kelley]

The Grand Challenge 1 team invites the WTI community to an open lab meeting on foundation models of the brain.

As you may already know, Grand Challenge 1 is one of the three Grand Challenges in Cognition<https://wti.yale.edu/initiatives/grand-challenges> in which the Wu Tsai Institute has stimulated interdisciplinary, multi-lab research teams to develop and execute ambitious projects too large and complex for any single lab. Across a multi-year process of ideation, team formation, and research, the Grand Challenge 1 team has started sourcing brain and behavior data, piloting data pipelines and building initial models.

Join the team’s upcoming “Open Lab Meeting” to learn about their approaches, progress, and future challenges. If you can’t make it but want to hear about ongoing developments, you can indicate as such in the form.

Grand Challenge 1: Open Lab Meeting
“Progress toward foundation models of the brain”

Friday, May 15, 2026
11:30 am - 1:00 pm
100 College Street, Workshop 1116
RSVP here<https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeKmCrIei0iAonZ1XBtEFFmTC3nCT-uEmEVCFGSZGBSDRW4gw/viewform>

Your RSVP helps us ensure the proper lunch order.
Doors open at 11:15 am for lunch. First come, first served.

Background and team composition

Challenge 1 is designing and building computational models to capture information across species and from data collected at different spatial and temporal scales. The resulting models can be fine-tuned to understand cognitive principles, interpret and translate data, and generate testable hypotheses.

Three integrated teams work on the Challenge:

The Modeling Team, led by Smita Krishnaswamy (Computer Science/Genetics), Shreya Saxena (Biomedical Engineering), and David van Dijk (Internal Medicine), is pursuing two directions: adapting existing large language models for multi-modal behavioral and neural data, and building entirely new architectures optimized for our objectives.

The Informatics Team, led by Robert McDougal (Public Health), Xenios Papademitris, and Hua Xu (both in Biomedical Informatics and Data Science), is creating a software platform to share and retrieve AI-ready neuroscience data for model building.

The Data Team, led by Steve Chang (Psychology), Aaron Kuan (Neuroscience), and Eve Lake (Radiology and Biomedical Imaging), is cataloging and sourcing neuroscience datasets at Yale and in public repositories for use as cornerstone training data.




Kelley Remole, PhD, MS
Managing Director
Wu Tsai Institute, Yale University
kelley.remole at yale.edu
c: 917-254-2992
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