Brainhack Rome 2025: connecting the dots between structure and function

Brainhack events provide a bottom-up approach to tackle challenges in neuroscience. In 2025, the Enrico Fermi Research Center in Rome hosted its first Brainhack, with the goal of fostering interdisciplinary collaborations bringing together the physics and neuroscience perspectives on the study of brain structure and function. Structured in four days, it gave the chance to the participants to propose their own idea and shape a project based on it, leading to six research avenues: the combination of X-ray imaging and diffusion MRI algorithms to pioneer ultra-high-resolution tractography; multivariate approaches to study the shared factors between brain metabolism and microstructure estimated from MRI data; development of transfer entropy analysis-based tools for effective connectivity estimation in fMRI data; identification of brain states through Markov models; deep learning approaches to predict task EEG time courses; multi-scale network models to study functional and cerebrovascular data. Each project led to promising results and marked the beginning of new collaborations.