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Find exciting projects that you would like to contribute to.
Brainhack Montreal Fall 2026
Montreal, QC, Canada
October 2 (tutorials) & 5-7 (hackathon) 2026
Supported by
Find exciting projects that you would like to contribute to.
Show your research to other neuroscience researchers.
Learn how to apply the latest computational tools to your data.
Meet researchers from a variety of backgrounds.
Brainhack Montreal Fall 2026 is Montreal's local hub for Brainhack Global 2026, a decentralized event series that brings together neuroscience researchers across disciplines and career stages. Join us for four days of tutorials, collaborative hands-on projects, and networking events designed for the Montreal community.
During open hacking, you can propose a new idea or bring an existing project that could benefit from feedback, contributions, or hands-on help. Everyone is welcome to collaborate, share knowledge, and put open science into practice.
Get involved: learn how to submit a project or browse submitted projects.
Join the Brainhack Montreal Discord for event updates and to share your ideas.
October 2 · Tutorial day
Choose a session and come ready to learn, share, and build with the Brainhack Montréal community. Session details and speaker information will be updated as they are confirmed.
10:00–17:30 · Track 1 (full day)
This workshop introduces the ideas and tools you need to manage a team of up to a dozen people working together to build research software. Each session ends with something you can take home and use the following week.
Speaker
Dr. Greg Wilson
Dr. Greg Wilson is a programmer, author, and educator based in Toronto. He co-founded and was the first Executive Director of Software Carpentry, and has authored or edited over a dozen books. Greg is a member of the Python Software Foundation and a recipient of ACM SIGSOFT's Influential Educator of the Year award.
10:00–12:00 · Track 2
This workshop teaches the basics of version control using the local software Git and the collaborative online platform GitHub. It is meant for beginners and will provide you with the necessary theoretical knowledge and practical skills to get started with these two important software tools.
Speaker
Dr. Julia-Katharina Pfarr
Julia is a PostDoc at McGill working on methods for clinical questionnaire harmonization. She has given the introductory workshop to Git and GitHub at least a dozen times.
13:00–15:00 · Track 2
This tutorial introduces foundation models for neural data, with examples from my own work applying them to clinical data. In the hands-on part, participants decode M/EEG signals with a classical pipeline (MNE-Python + scikit-learn) and compare it to a foundation-model approach on the same data.
Speaker
Hamza Abdelhedi
Hamza Abdelhedi is a PhD student in Biomedical Engineering at Université de Montréal (Mila & CoCo Lab), working at the intersection of neuroscience and AI, on decision making and on foundation models for M/EEG and clinical data.
15:30–17:30 · Track 2
This tutorial provides an introduction to normative modelling and brain charting, and teaches you how to train and visualise your own normative models. The tutorials will be run as online Jupyter notebooks or on the GPU machines. No background knowledge in either Python or Normative models required.
Speaker
Dr. Johanna Bayer
Johanna is a PostDoc at McGill, Canada and works on normative modelling development and application, statistical data harmonisation and federated learning. She is also the Chair of the 2027 OHBM Open Science SIG and a Fellow of the Repronim Center for Reproducible Neuroimaging and the Software Sustainability Institute 2026.
Lead an idea of your own or find a team to join during open hacking.
Call for projects
Turn a technical roadblock, early-stage idea, or ongoing open-science project into a collaborative Brainhack project. Projects of every size are welcome, and first-time project leaders are encouraged to apply.
Hackathon hardware
Thanks to the generous support of Dell Technologies and NVIDIA, attendees will have access to 20 compact AI workstations during the hackathon.
Leaders: Julia-Katharina Pfarr, juliakatharina.pfarr@gmail.com, GitHub: julia-pfarr, Discord: juliakatharinapfarr
In the ENIGMA-Parkinson's Disease working group, we have developed a protocol to retrospectively harmonize over 60 different neuropsychiatric questionnaires using a combination of expert consensus and semantic textual similarity using sentence embedding models. The fine-tuned embedding model and the item-to-dimension mappings will be released to the communi…
View / join on GitHub
