When the São Paulo Research Foundation established the structure of the Research, Innovation and Dissemination Centers it stated clearly that the most important feature of RIDCs was the multiplicity of their missions, a cornerstone for attaining the status of “a world class research center.” Each RIDC must have a specific, high-impact research focus, and this research focus must be necessarily integrated with technology-transfer and scientific dissemination explicit missions. FAPESP's RIDC for Neuromathematics (NeuroMat), that was established in 2013 and is coordinated by mathematician Antonio Galves, reports its third year of activities by emphasizing how the major scientific challenge of building a conceptual framework for neuroscience data informs technology transfer and scientific dissemination.
FAPESP’s Research, Innovation and Dissemination Center for Neuromathematics (RIDC NeuroMat) has launched in September a network to promote the collaboration of patients, families and professionals health to face clinical and research challenges associated with Parkinson’s disease. This initiative is called Amparo in Portuguese and is coordinated by the NeuroMat investigator Maria Elisa Pimentel Piemonte, a physical therapist and professor at the University of Sao Paulo. She is the founder and a collaborator of the service of physiotherapy of the Brazilian Parkinson Association and the chair of the Allied Health Professionals and of the pan-american chapter of the do braço pan-americano da Movement Disorder Society of the Movement Disorder Society.
by Antonio Galves*
The Neuroscience Experiments System (NES) is an open-source tool to assist in the organizational control and management of clinical and experimental neurophysiological data gathered in use in laboratories, that the technology-transfer team at FAPESP’s NeuroMat has developed since 2014. A scientific challenge that the development of this tool addresses is that neuroscience experiments generate heterogeneous data formats and complex metadata, such as provenance information, and NES —currently available on a 0.12 version — intends to provide a unified repository for data and metadata from different natures (i.e., clinical, imaging, behavioral). Furthermore, NES can manage electrophysiological data from EEG and EMG as well as performing the integration of this data with electronic questionnaires filled by each participant in the context of an experimental protocol.
by Fernando da Paixão
