‘Show Us Your BRAINS’ Winners Named

Winners of the 2023 Show Us Your BRAINS! Photo and Video Contest were announced June 12 by NIH BRAIN Initiative Director Dr. John Ngai. The popular annual contest showcases artistic, eye-catching images and videos of the brain—many using technologies that were developed with initiative support.

Winning photos are:

First Place: “Dark Commute at 4 a.m.” by Silas Busch, University of Chicago. A confocal image of sparse GCaMP6f-expressing Purkinje cells in mouse cerebellum resembles the industrious contours of pre-dawn commuters.

Second Place: “Premotor Neurons Controlling the Fruit Fly Leg” by Andrew Cook, Jasper Phelps, Anthony Azevedo, Ellen Lesser, Leila Elabbady, Brandon Pratt, Wei-Chung Allen Lee and John Tuthill, University of Washington and Harvard Medical School. Reconstruction of premotor neurons from a serial-section electron microscopy dataset of the Drosophila female adult nerve cord.

Third Place: “Memory Lanes” by Tyler Ard, University of Southern California Stevens Neuroimaging and Informatics Institute. A rendering of MRI data—combining cortical surface and hippocampal segmentations from a T1 weighted scan and diffusion tractography.

Winning videos are:

First Place: “Simian symphony: ripple assembles during rest” by Kari Hoffman, Tyler Sloan and Saman Abbaspoor, Vanderbilt University. Related CA1 unit ensembles from macaque wireless Deep Array recordings, sonified by unit and visualized by layer and functional cell type.

Second Place: “Functional Ultrasound Localization Microscopy” by Alexandre Dizeux, Physics for Medicine Paris. Functional ultrasound localization microscopy reveals whole brain vascular changes during neuronal activation up to the micron scale.

Third Place: “Synaptic Balance” by scalable minds (Germany). Reconstruction of inhibitory and excitatory neurons in human cortex from SBEM.

To view all the images and videos, visit: https://go.nih.gov/0VV11NZ.