September was a milestone month for Neuromatch, with the Core Team gathering in Portugal for our annual staff retreat to refine organisational and programmatic priorities. We secured two major new grants (our first NIH award and a $310k pilot from Longview Philanthropy) and welcomed new partnerships with Protocol Labs and the Champalimaud Foundation.
- In September, the Neuromatch Core Team met in person for four days in Ericeira, Portugal. This annual retreat was an important opportunity for team building and for refining our organisational and programmatic strategic priorities (which we will be sharing with the community for input shortly). As a fully remote organisation, the retreat also provided invaluable time for the team to connect in person and strengthen collaboration – and we even tried some surfing lessons together!
- Neuromatch will be welcoming its second soft-money PI, Hilmar Lapp, in October. Hilmar is a well-respected leader in open science infrastructure and data science, with extensive experience building collaborative research platforms. He will be joining Neuromatch with two NSF awards that are in the process of being transferred from Duke and Ohio State. Via overheads, these awards are expected to bring in approximately $30–35k to Neuromatch in the first year. Over the coming months, we will be working to develop a more defined strategy for our soft-money PI program to ensure it aligns with our broader organisational mission and programs.
- We’re developing a fiscal sponsorship agreement with the Champalimaud Foundation, under which Neuromatch would take a 10% administrative fee on US donations to Champalimaud. This is a new fundraising model for Neuromatch, designed to diversify revenue streams. Bradley visited in September and discussions highlighted strong synergies with their Computational Neuroscience and NeuroAI courses and their growing NeuroAI research program. There’s much to explore and Champalimaud are keen to strengthen this partnership with Neuromatch.
- Neuromatch will be attending Neuroscience 2025 in San Diego (15–19 November) — we’ll have a and will be hosting a (details to be shared closer to the date). If you’d like to represent Neuromatch at the booth, we’d love you to join us! Please reach out to Muriah, Courtney, or Bradley directly if you are interested.
- A key strategic priority moving forward is to extend our global career development pipeline beyond the Academies and Impact Scholars Program, such as predoctoral and postdoctoral fellowship models. We’ll soon invite community input and expressions of interest to join a working group shaping this next phase.
- Our Core Staff meets every Tuesday (13:00–13:45 UTC). On the last Tuesday of each month, we have opened this meeting to volunteers and Board members. Anyone in the community is welcome to join and propose agenda items. Details and agenda thread are posted on Slack, please drop any agenda items in the Slack post ahead of the meetings.
- The 2025 Academies received 3,141 student applications from 108 countries, successfully enrolling from Representation remained strong, with 56% from LMICs and 44% from HICs, alongside strong gender balance and diversity across career stages and regions.
- TA recruitment remained competitive, with 669 applicants and from (54% LMIC, 46% HIC).
- Across courses, , with over 75% of students rating their experience as Very Good or Excellent in all tracks.
- The evaluation has highlighted several areas for improvement — particularly in the , where content and audience alignment will undergo a major review to ensure the course evolves with the rapidly changing field. Additionally, is planned to modernise infrastructure and streamline content updates.
- Course-specific de-briefing meetings with course leadership teams are currently underway (NeuroAI and DL complete), with upcoming course-specific to share insights and gather feedback across all courses.
- We are planning a series of for late January 2026 to engage prospective students. The event will showcase what makes the Academy experience unique through presentations from alumni, ambassadors, TAs, course creators, and leadership, followed by a panel discussion and Q&A. You can find more details and information on how to get involved in the channel.
- Applications closed on 2 September with 74 high-quality team submissions. Following a highly competitive and inclusive review process, have been accepted — including 11 in Computational Neuroscience and 3 each in Deep Learning, NeuroAI, and Climate Science. The program launches in November, with mentor recruitment now underway.
- A key new feature in 2025 is the introduction of partner projects, research opportunities proposed and shared by external organisations, giving scholars access to unique, high-impact datasets. Among those accepted this year:
- A brain-wide map dataset including 699 Neuropixels probe insertions across 281 brain regions during a standardized visual decision-making task, with accompanying behavioral and pose data.
- A project exploring how low-dimensional manifolds in EMG signals and gesture sequences can be leveraged to improve EMG-to-pose models.
- Two large-scale Parkinson’s disease resources. Fox Insight, an online longitudinal study of motor, non-motor, and quality-of-life data, and PPMI, a multimodal longitudinal study with clinical, genetic, molecular, imaging, and digital measures.
- We onboarded 40 new volunteers to support the review and selection process. A huge thank-you to everyone for their time, rigour, and commitment to an inclusive and comprehensive review. We couldn’t have done it without you.
As part of our 4-month MEXA Research Accelerator with Wellcome supporting 40 international teams in strengthening proposals for an upcoming generative AI in mental health research funding call, we hosted two workshops in September: - Explored authentic engagement of people with lived experience in research, equipping teams with practical tools to embed these perspectives in their proposals.
- Provided hands-on practice with project management tools and collaborative code and data management.
- As of 31 August 2025, Neuromatch Inc. had in the bank. Our current financial projections indicate that, without accounting for any pending or future fundraising, Neuromatch will exhaust available and committed funds in . This represents a .
- We're delighted to share that Neuromatch has been awarded a NIH BRAIN Initiative grantto integrate NIH BRAIN data into our Computational Neuroscience Course! This award provides for the CN course. This is a tremendous achievement for Neuroamtch and our very first NIH grant!
- We’re delighted to share that our proposal to Longview Philanthropy has been . This funding will enable us to establish a Digital Sentience Scholars Program, in partnership with PRISM and the Institute of Neuroethics (IoNx). The pilot will support the first cohort of scholars exploring the intersection of artificial and natural intelligence, neuroethics, and digital sentience. We’ll now work with Longview and our partners to finalize the grant agreement and launch timeline (with the pilot serving as a proof-of-concept for the originally proposed two-year, $1.2M program).
- We are finalizing a from Protocol Labs to support Neuromatch’s NeuroAI and Impact Scholars programs. This funding will support our Computational Neuroscience and NeuroAI courses, and Impact Scholars Program, supporting research projects at the intersection of neuroscience and AI. Huge thanks to Sean Escola (co-founder of Neuromatch) for his help in securing this partnership. We are excited to see where this collaboration with Protocol Labs will go, particularly as we continue to expand our career development pipeline and build stronger bridges between academia and industry.
- Our proposal to the Heising-Simons Foundation’s open call for Science Events and Gatherings to support Climatematch Academy in 2026 ($80k, 1 year) was unsuccessful. The scheme received over 200 applications, with only $400,000 total available to fund awards, so competition was extremely high. While this is of course disappointing, we are proud of the strength of the proposal we submitted and are very grateful to those who helped shape it!
- Following our shortlisting last year, we were invited to resubmit and have now submitted an updated application with strong supporter letters; awardees will be announced November 2025.
- We’re exploring a potential Neuromatch application to the NSF Training-based Workforce Development for Advanced Cyberinfrastructure prorgram (deadline: 15 January 2026). We previously applied and received helpful feedback, and we’re now considering a refreshed approach. Let me know if you’d like to join a working group to help scope this further, and please share any ideas or concepts we could develop for the proposal.