Please share with neuro/psych graduate students and postdoctoral researchers
The BRIDGE project (based at the University of Texas Austin), is tasked to develop international data governance frameworks (IDGFs) to facilitate the cross-border sharing of brain and mental health data, addressing the unique challenges posed by varying legal, ethical, and technical landscapes. It is well known that data accessibility, awareness, and training resources are far more prevalent in high-resource settings, leaving low- and middle-income countries at a disadvantage. This imbalance significantly hampers the global equity and inclusiveness of neuroscience research, particularly in mental health. To effectively address and minimize this disparity, BRIDGE is working to identify and thoroughly understand the barriers that exist at each stage of the research process across high-, middle-, and low-resource settings.
Volunteers will be provided a list of 2-4 (approx. 2) brain imaging datasets from different parts of the world and asked to carry out the steps necessary to access, organize (e.g., download), and process each dataset. The volunteers will be asked to record the steps taken throughout the process, such as applying for access (including requests, email exchanges, documents needed, time that it took to implement each step, etc.), downloading and de-identifying data, preprocessing and analyzing data. The overall goal of this study is to understand the practical challenges to accessing and processing data from other countries, and to report and clarify the challenges. These may, for example be related to technological barriers (lack of computers, storage, ability to process, etc), training barriers (knowledge needed to process the data is limited), legal (the volunteers are not allowed to clear their access given the policies of the data providers or of the volunteer institution or country), etc. This study is expected to take place over the course of 6 months beginning in Spring 2025. BRIDGE personnel will mentor and guide the volunteers throughout the steps but in most cases the personnel will not help overcome barriers or problems because these barriers will be recorded and treated as the data and outcomes of the work. None of these datasets have explicit costs required to gain access. Potential volunteers must have some prior experience in handling and processing human brain imaging data. Volunteers will be offered co-authorship on any subsequent manuscripts produced from their efforts.
Sign up here: Pathfinders Volunteers