Center for Strategic Data Initiatives

The Child Mind Institute is a leading force in open neuroscience — the movement to make scientific data, tools, and knowledge accessible to all researchers. While it is common for academic medical centers and research institutions to withhold their data until papers have been published, we freely share massive amounts of data to speed the pace of discovery.

Our research team has developed a methodological and analytic processes to leverage this data for understanding, diagnosing, and treating mental health disorders. We also employ this data science expertise to uncover valuable insights to inform product design and assess that our interventions are working as intended.

Our data science work started with the Healthy Brain Network (HBN), a  community based research program established in 2015. By offering no-cost mental health and learning evaluations by licensed clinicians, we’ve blended research and service to build a vast, online open science database. Researchers are collecting a one-of-a-kind dataset from 10,000 participants ages 5–21 that tracks psychiatric, behavioral, cognitive, and lifestyle phenotypes, as well as multimodal brain imaging, electroencephalography, biometrics, genetics and more.

Our three resource teams, or “cores,” are focused on harmonizing methods, accelerating tool development and implementation, and facilitating reliable and reproducible data processing and analysis. These cores support a product development process built on scientific research and open science principle.

The Multi-modal Brain/Body Imaging (MoBI) core expedites the translation of data into knowledge. By building extensible software pipelines and identifying state-of-the-art solutions for multi-modal data collection, thus making our datasets richer, the MoBI core ensures high-quality data across various research protocols.  


The Data Assessment, Refinement, and Testing (DART) core carefully evaluates and adapts new study protocols to ensure high-fidelity data collection, crucial for reliable and reproducible research results. The DART core collaborates closely with both the HBN team and the MoBI core, playing a pivotal role in assessing the fidelity and validity of our digital tools in clinical research.


The Data Informatics for Sharing Knowledge (DISK) core provides a secure framework for accessing and sharing data. Data collected in research is most useful if it is readily available in a way that is queryable across modalities, studies, and participants. By building uniformly formatted databases and developing interfaces for data access, the DISK core enables scientists to accelerate breakthroughs. This core ensures compliance with data-sharing initiatives and facilitates collaborations both internally and externally.