The National Science Foundation Office of Multidisciplinary Activities awarded the University of California, San Diego $799,991 on September 1, 2026, to build a unified, U.S.-based infrastructure for human electroencephalography (EEG) data. The project runs through August 31, 2031, and is supported under the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences program (CFDA 47.075).
The project consolidates fragmented international EEG datasets collected across cognitive science experiments into a single, standardized repository. More than two thousand datasets currently exist in separate collections formatted with the Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) standard, but fewer than 15 percent carry semantic labels enabling searches by experimental design, stimulus type, or cognitive process. The infrastructure will integrate EEG recordings with accompanying cognitive behavioral measures, stimulus events, response times, and eye tracking data, organizing them in a common language and labeling system. By centralizing and standardizing these datasets, the project enables researchers to combine studies for larger-scale analysis, supports the application of artificial intelligence to brain data to identify patterns difficult to detect in individual studies, facilitates knowledge sharing and data reuse across the scientific community, and supports workforce development through community events and competitions.