Donders Challenges

Psychiatric disorders co-occur often with autoimmune diseases such as  rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, and inflammatory bowel disease. This is reflected in shared genetic risk factors for psychiatric and autoimmune disorders, suggesting similar underlying mechanisms in biology and behavior.

In this Donders Challenge, we combine expertise across neuroscience, psychiatry, genetics, and endopcrynology, to better understand such shared mechanisms. Specifically, the goal of this Challenge is to formulate hypotheses on the most likely and most prevalent mechanisms underlying this pattern. A better understanding of this can ultimately give clues to improve treatment.

What shall I order for lunch? Do I want children or not? We are faced with decisions all the time, small and big. Making the best choice can be difficult. People are often unaware of internal and external factors that influence their choices.
This is thoroughly studied in the field of decision making. To make this knowledge accessible, we will create the Donders Decision App, a free smartphone app with tips and tools to help people improve their decision-making.

Do we use only a small percentage of our brain ? How long do we suffer from a trauma? What's the difference between the left and the right part of the brain?
Normal questions from normal people.

With the Brainhelpdesk we're developing a platform where people can ask us what they want. We look for the expert and formulate an answer, in normal language.

In neuroscience animals are used to learn about the human brain. However, animal research is often done in different traditions by separate groups of researchers. This leads to confusion about terminology and the translational value. It has even been argued that this is a reason why clinical trials fail. 
We aim to build multi-model, multi-species maps of the brain and to create formal translational mappings between them. This should make it possible to describe them all within a common abstract space.