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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 GitHubLeaders: Brent McPherson
The goal of the project is to use the recently proposed WikiSkill framework (https://arxiv.org/html/2608.27454v1) to test and evaluate skills. WikiSkill evaluates skills by pulling together session history and logs to parse how effectively a skill performed. The goal is to identify if the user needed to redirect or override decisions the skill made. With en…
View / join on GitHubLeaders: Boting Li liboting940523@gmail.com Discord: boting_90337
Brain organoids are mm-sized pieces of human brain tissue grown from stem cells, which develop many of the cell types of the fetal cortex in a dish. The longer they are kept in culture, the older they become biologically: organoids of a few weeks resemble first-trimester fetal cortex, and organoids kept for over a year start to show postnatal-like features.…
View / join on GitHubLeaders: Roy Seo (post-doc, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health / Krembil Centre NeuroInformatics) Email: seoroy15@gmail.com Discord: royjoysoy
Untrained CNNs use random weights. They are never trained. Yet they can still extract useful features from data, including EEG. We want to understand them better. Our main question is simple: how much do untrained CNNs vary? They can vary in two ways: Different random weights (different seeds). Small rounding errors in computer arithmetic. To measure the se…
View / join on GitHubLeaders: Anthony Juliano: Anthony.Juliano@uvm.edu
-What will the project do: Allow the neuroimaging community at-large to view what data (at all levels) is available in the ENIGMA Addiction's WG in order to put in project proposals for papers and grant submissions. -Who is it for: Everyone. Anyone with the appropriate knowledge set (i.e. a PI) or background (i.e. coder) who is interested in completing a sc…
View / join on GitHubLeaders: Nikhil Bhagwat
🎯 Goals Create an interactive web app to visualize neuroimaging data - raw and processed! Support multiple image types: 3D MRI (NIfTI), 2D image montages, and IQM metrics Enable structured quality control ratings through a clean, intuitive interface
View / join on GitHubLeaders: Hadrien Padilla, Siddhesh Salfale, Ninad Aithal, Charlotte Livingston, Axel Cera
TRUST-MRI is a trust-aware, multimodal medical imaging framework designed to improve MRI reconstruction, missing-modality imputation, and automated annotation. The framework integrates complementary MRI sequences, such as T1-weighted, T2-weighted, FLAIR, and diffusion imaging when available, to recover missing information and generate segmentation masks whi…
View / join on GitHub
