​Led by Henri Markram, Director of the Blue Brain Project at Ecole Polytechnique de Lausanne (EPFL), the Flagship Human Brain Project (HBP) is an international collaboration dedicated to the modeling of the human brain and gathers neuroscience specialists, physicians, physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists and ethicists.

The models developed in this framework will open new perspectives to better understand the brain and neurological diseases. The project will benefit from financial support from the European Union (EU) over ten years and will build six new platforms for the study of the brain. Bringing together more than 80 countries and international research institutions, the Human Brain Project (HBP) is provided for a period of ten years (2013-2023). In France, the project involves the participation of CEA (including CEA-I2BM), INSERM, CNRS, INRIA, but also of the Pasteur Institute, the College de France, the Centre Hospitalier universitaire Vaudois (CHUV), and Victor Segalen Bordeaux II University.

The European Commission has officially announced the selection of the Human Brain Project (HBP) as one of its two FET Flagship projects. The new project will federate European efforts to address one of the greatest challenges of modern science: understanding the human brain.

The goal of the Human Brain Project is to pull together all our existing knowledge about the human brain and to reconstruct the brain, piece by piece, in supercomputer-based models and simulations. The models offer the prospect of a new understanding of the human brain and its diseases and of completely new computing and robotic technologies. On January 28, the European Commission supported this vision, announcing that it has selected the HBP as one of two projects to be funded through the new FET Flagship Program.