About
What NeuroTrailblazers is, who it is for, how it fits the HI-MC project and the NIH BRAIN CONNECTS program, and how to reach us.
Mapping connections. Making connections.
NeuroTrailblazers is an open curriculum and mentorship initiative for nanoscale connectomics — the effort to map brains at the resolution of individual synaptic connections. The site is the curriculum: the pages, data, decks and worksheets are public, and anyone may teach from them.
The double meaning in the line is the point. The field maps connections between neurons; the program makes connections between people.
Who it is for
Four audiences, in the same site, deliberately:
- Trailblazing researchers — people doing the work now, who need a reference layer they can trust and open problems scoped to a team.
- The scientific community — neighbouring fields arriving with their own methods, who need the vocabulary and the boundaries of what connectomics currently supports.
- The public — anyone curious about how a brain gets mapped, served by The Neuronauts Expedition and its Junior Lab for younger readers.
- Students — from first-year undergraduates to graduate students crossing into the field, who need an ordered path, graded artifacts and an honest account of what they cannot yet claim.
The learner personas put faces to the last of those, and the tracks say which path suits which reader.
What is here
- The technical course — the canonical units, from why anyone maps a brain through EM preparation, volume reconstruction, ultrastructure, proofreading and analysis. Each unit has worked examples, self-checks with answers, and a graded lab.
- 25 curriculum modules — the same material shaped for tutorial delivery: a capability target, a concept set with misconception guardrails, a studio activity and a rubric.
- The content library — the long-form reference layer behind the units: neuroanatomy, imaging, cell types, proofreading, infrastructure and case studies.
- Tracks and modes of use — what you are learning, and whether you are working alone, running a hosted session, or training inside a lab.
- Journal club — a 2,000-paper corpus with discussion prompts, tiered so a reading group can start at 500.
- Teaching material — facilitator guide, session kits, decks and worksheets for whoever is running the room.
If you have not used the site before, Start Here is the shortest route in.
Where this sits in BRAIN CONNECTS
NeuroTrailblazers is developed inside the HI-MC (MouseConnects) project, part of the NIH BRAIN Initiative’s BRAIN CONNECTS program. It is not a data coordinating center:
IC3 and APEX organize and expose the science. NeuroTrailblazers organizes the learning.
| Project | Award | Role |
|---|---|---|
| HI-MC — A Center for High-throughput Integrative Mouse Connectomics | UM1NS132250 |
The project this site belongs to. Reconstructing mouse hippocampal formation at synaptic resolution; NINDS, 2023–2028, PI Jeff W. Lichtman, Harvard University |
| IC3 — Integrative Connectomics Coordination Center | U24NS139927 |
Common pipelines, the CONNECTS Knowledge Base, cross-modal integration, common coordinate frameworks |
| APEX — Axonal Projectome EXchange | U24NS140384 |
Primate projectome data, multimodal axonal imaging, standards and benchmarking |
IC3 and APEX are the two coordination centers this program routes learners toward.
Where those centers, the Allen Institute or a CONNECTS project already publish an authoritative resource, this site links to it and scaffolds the reasoning around it rather than recreating it. The full map of who does what is on How NeuroTrailblazers fits BRAIN CONNECTS.
Nothing on this site is an official statement of the NIH, the BRAIN Initiative, IC3 or APEX.
Who runs it
NeuroTrailblazers is part of HI-MC (UM1NS132250), the Center for High-throughput
Integrative Mouse Connectomics — the BRAIN CONNECTS project also known as
MouseConnects, which is reconstructing
mouse hippocampal formation at synaptic resolution. HI-MC generates the science;
NeuroTrailblazers is its training and outreach arm, and the curriculum is built so that
what a learner practises here is what the project actually does.
Contact: Will Gray-Roncal, Johns Hopkins University — wgr@jhu.edu.
Will Gray-Roncal also teaches the connectomics block (lectures 7–9) of EN.585.781 Frontiers in Neuroengineering, whose decks are published here.
Contributors
- Will Gray-Roncal
- Sydney Floryanzia
- Your name here.
That last line is not a joke. This curriculum is written in the open under CC BY 4.0, and the fastest way onto the list is to fix something that is wrong. A corrected number, a figure caption that contradicts its figure, a worked example that would not survive a reviewer — all of it counts, and none of it requires being a connectomics researcher. Start at CONTRIBUTING.md, or just open an issue.
Contact
Email wgr@jhu.edu for questions about using the curriculum, running a session, partnering, or anything the site does not answer.
Found an error?
Please tell us — the material is full of numbers, and numbers drift.
- Something is wrong on a page: open an issue and name the page and the line. Corrections are welcome from anyone; you do not need to be a connectomics researcher to report that a figure caption contradicts the text.
- You would rather not use GitHub: email wgr@jhu.edu instead.
- You want to fix it yourself: see CONTRIBUTING.md for the content standard and the validators to run first.
Reuse
Site content is licensed CC BY 4.0; the code is MIT. Third-party figures and electron micrographs carry their own terms. See the licence page for what that means in practice.
Cite this site
A machine-readable citation lives in
CITATION.cff
at the repository root; GitHub will render a formatted citation from it. In text:
Gray-Roncal, W. and the NeuroTrailblazers Team. NeuroTrailblazers: an open curriculum for nanoscale connectomics. https://neurotrailblazers.org/
If you are citing one page rather than the site, add the page title and the date you read it — pages here are revised.