2026 BRAIN INITIATIVE PHOTO & VIDEO CONTEST

2026 Contest Winners

First Place

AAV9-mediated GFP expression in the mouse olfactory bulb

by Abigail Nimmo, The Ohio State University

AAV9-GFP was injected into the olfactory bulb of a 7-week-old C57BL/6 mouse to assess transduction efficiency. Brain sections were sectioned at 30 uM. Sections were stained by immunofluorescent-immunohistochemistry (IHC-IF) to visualize transgene expression (GFP, green), neurons (NeuN, red), and nuclei (DAPI, blue). Image acquired at 10x magnification on a Zeiss Axioscan 7 slide scanner.

Second Place

The Little Neuron That Could

By Omar Ahmed, Ph.D., University of Michigan

The retrosplenial cortex is a brain region important for spatial orientation, fear processing, and imagining oneself in the future. The small neuron shown in the middle is unique to this brain region and can fire at high rates. For this reason, the student who identified this neuron liked to call it "the little neuron that could." This neuron receives inputs from head direction cells in the thalamus (shown in blue), unlike its neighboring, more standard neurons (shown above and below it). Thus, this neuron is uniquely positioned to compute spatial orientation information.

Third Place

1000 largest neurons in the Drosophila Connectome

by Tyler Sloan, Ph.D., Quorumetrix Studio

This visualization captures the 1,000 largest neurons in the fruit fly central nervous system, offering a comprehensive view by sampling neurons across all functional regions.

First Place

A Neural Signature of Affective Pain

by Anusha Allawala, Ph.D., University of California, San Francisco

Intracranial EEG recordings reveal changes in the aperiodic exponent across cortical and subcortical networks tracking affective pain symptoms in a patient with refractory chronic pain. Encoding is distributed across both cortical and subcortical regions but lateralized to the right hemisphere, including the right anterior and posterior insula and right midcingulate cortex.

Second Place

Neural enlightenment: restoring cognition through thalamic DBS

by Matthew Hook, University of Florida

Ten years ago, the first traumatic brain injury (TBI) patient was implanted with deep brain stimulation (DBS) in thalamus to treat executive function impairment. When asked if she was ready for stimulation, she responded with “light me up!” To date, executive function has been successfully restored in five TBI patients using thalamic DBS. This video demonstrates the modeling of thalamic fibers stimulated during effective therapy in these patients.

Third Place

Multimodal alignments of functional activity, transcriptomics, and projectomics of the same cell

by Lun Wang, Ph.D., Stanford University

Example TRU-FACT (Total Registration Under Functional Activity, Connectivity, and Transcriptomics) alignments of in vivo neural Ca2+ activity and spatial transcriptomic data, using conventional, mesoscope, GRIN microlens-based, or miniature two-photon microscopy in awake mice, together with either HCR-FISH or MERFISH. For multiscale studies of structure-function relationships, TRU-FACT enables routine and scalable multimodal investigations of the same cells by providing a broadly applicable experimental and computational pipeline for image alignment and cell registration.