Five years of funding is requested from the Human Brain Project for the annual meeting of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM). The mission of the OHBM is to promote the field of structural and functional brain mapping. In particular, OHBM emphasizes non-invasive, image-based investigation of the functional organization of the human brain. The principal activity of the OBHM is to organize an annual, international meeting. Past meetings have been highly successful. These were held in: Paris, France, 1995; Boston, MA 1996; Copenhagen, Denmark, 1997; Montreal, Canada, 1998; Dusseldorf, Germany, 1999. Upcoming meetings are planned for: San Antonio, TX, 2000; Brighton, England 2001; and, Sendai, Japan, 2002. The general plan is to have the meeting alternate between the US and a non-US site. For meetings inside the US, funding from the HBP will be used for student stipends. Abstracts submitted with a student as first author will be rank ordered, using the abstract-review scores. The top 100 students will be offered $500 stipends, to partially defray the costs of attending the meeting. For meetings outside the US, funding from the HBP will be used to pay cost for US speakers to present as invited speakers, both as Keynote speakers in the Scientific Program and as presentors in the Educational Program. This meeting has relevance for the Human Brain Project of the NIMH in the following ways. First, virtually every presentation relates to the function and structure of the human brain, in both health and disease. Second, one sixth of the scientific program (two of twelve themes) is devoted to the latest methods for image acquisition, analysis and metanalysis, i.e., neuroinformatics. Third, the entire educational program is devoted exclusively to the methods used to study the brain, with a strong emphasis on image analysis and other aspects of neuroinformatics.
