✅ The UK Government has today granted access to half a million UK Biobank participants' coded GP data for health research. This change will dramatically increase the power of UK Biobank's dataset to advance the diagnosis, treatment and management of conditions handled by GPs.

Save the date! FSL Course 2026 is provisionally planned in-person​ for June 22nd - 26th in Bordeaux, France. More details and the registration link will be posted on the FSL Course website soon. open.oxcin.ox.ac.uk/pages/fslcou...

three owl species that we saw near Chambal, India

One lovely day in the middle of a cold, grey, wet week. Pond is semi-frozen, sun is shining on the pollarded willows who are growing back red. A few bullrushes are starting to go to seed.

My new gig is PI of the CANN group at Trinity College Dublin and University of Oxford (50/50). Funded by the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship, we'll be recruiting postdocs, PhDs and an RA in Dublin and Oxford soon. So exciting! @oxcin.bsky.social @tcddublin.bsky.social @ox.ac.uk @tcdscss.bsky.social

Hey Siri, can you remove the scaffolding. But seriously, even with bits of scaffolding, this is the most beautiful building I've seen.

Just got back from India - amazing wonderful country. Some pictures from the "Baby Taj" in Agra.

Preprint on PANDORA by Aslan Abivardi: A massive archive of UK Biobank brain imaging from 82K subjects. For each of 98 sub-modalities (e.g., FA from dMRI), the images are collated into a convenient subjectsXvoxels HDF5 file. pages.fmrib.ox.ac.uk/pandora/web/ www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...

For people using the @ukbiobank.bsky.social UKB RAP cloud system for brain imaging analyses: In order to make RAP much easier to use, we have created a Docker which is easy to install and gives you a graphical desktop, FSLeyes and the HCP wb_view. docs.google.com/document/d/1...

(with apologies to non-UK folks) - we just discovered this *amazing* cheese - semi-hard, with a taste that is a confusingly incredible combination of being both subtle and yet rich and complex. parkfarm.co.uk/products/mer...

I often think about the fact that all the universities in 🇨🇦 together did not produce 11 Nobel Prizes in that period (or since). Not from a lack of brilliance, but from a lack of steady funding and the insistence on significant teaching loads and mind-numbing committee memberships for all faculty.

Latest processing of UK Biobank brain imaging data - now with 82,000 usable first-scan datasets. Correlating brain IDPs with 13,000 non-imaging variables gives a rich manhattan-stye plot. 324,000 Bonferroni-significant associations.

Many UK universities likely to walk away from journal agreements after publishers put forward proposals with “year-on-year price rises” rather than cheaper deals demanded by national negotiators, @davidprosser.bsky.social tells @jgro-the.bsky.social www.timeshighereducation.com/news/busines...

Where is the money going? In the case of for-profit publishers it's very clear: Your open access fees fund corporate profit margins. Profit margins for large academic publishers can far exceed those of household names like Amazon and Apple. chart source: bit.ly/4leULKi #scipub #academicsky

Congratulations to Holly Schofield and @curlyryes.bsky.social for being chosen from over 350 papers that were published by @imagingneurosci.bsky.social in 2024. Holly accepted the award at OHBM in Brisbane and Ryan celebrated the win from Dublin! www.nottingham.ac.uk/news/scienti...

It's Pride Month. On the weekend, we were delighted to have a Pride breakfast celebrating lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer members of the University of Oxford. And then proceeded to join the Oxford Pride parade. The weather was wet -- but that didn't dampen spirits

🧪 Scientists are pushing back against the gutting of US research funding. Now scientists outside of the NIH and members of the public can sign on in support of the Bethesda declaration: www.standupforscience.net/bethesda-dec... More about the Bethesda declaration: apnews.com/article/nih-...

I guess the main difference between social media and the BBC is that you won't see "popcorn" on any BBC pages today?

Indeed - and Oxford Labour just as bad, concreting over every bit of green they can, destroying the countryside for future generations. @cllrsbrown.bsky.social @maryoxford.bsky.social @annarailton.bsky.social

🏳️‍🌈Happy Pride Month from OxCIN! 🏳️‍🌈 If you're in Oxford, come and say hi at our inclusive research-themed stall at the Pride festival in South Park this Saturday!

Happy to see my first first-author paper in Imaging Neuroscience (along with @fmrib-karla.bsky.social and @nichols.bsky.social): Characterising ongoing brain aging and baseline effects from cross-sectional data doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

sunny spring day yesterday - time for some macro pics in the garden

Not *always* so cute!

First trip to The Mainland

Geese exploring Beckmann Island

Gosling Birth Day! Best part of May.

Registration Open! FSL Course 2025 will be held fully online, 15th – 26th September. Details & registration info here: open.win.ox.ac.uk/pages/fslcou... The course covers lectures & hands-on practicals on structural, functional, diffusion and resting state brain image analysis.

Thanks @bradpostle.bsky.social & @wmatchin.bsky.social for organizing this, for giving me the opportunity to present on behalf of @imagingneurosci.bsky.social, and for this excellent write-up of the session 🙏🏻 Next up: #ISMRM2025 🏝 diffusion study group, where I'll make a cameo to talk about this!

We're excited to announce that WIN is now the Oxford University Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging: OxCIN! Our mission: developing and deploying neuroimaging and related technology to solve big challenges in basic neuroscience and brain health. oxcin.ox.ac.uk/about/vision

As well as a new name, OxCIN also has a brand new Director: Karla Miller! @fmrib-karla.bsky.social We are grateful for 10 years of superb leadership by Heidi Johansen-Berg @heidijoberg.bsky.social and excited to see the new ideas Karla will bring. More about Karla: oxcin.ox.ac.uk/people/karla...

And Early Purple Orchids also near Oxford - who knew some orchids come out so early!

University Arboretum on a sunny weekend. Best bluebell woods :-)

There is ONE WEEK left to vote in the OHBM Council Election. 🔗 in comments! #OHBMCouncil #Elections #VoteToday

Does anyone with a Siemens Trio have the gradient distortion correction .coef file they'd be willing to send us? Thanks!

Incredibly flexible simulator brought to you by the talented @michielcottaar.bsky.social. Can feed arbitrary sequences (e.g. with pulseq) and model lots of microstructure features (diffusion, permeability, susceptibility, MT). Allows multimodal simulations. Fully documented and open. :)

I'm a day late with this because #CNS2025 ended yesterday, but the MIT Press has launched the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science that covers many CS topics with peer reviewed articles from experts. @cogneuronews.bsky.social @mitpress.bsky.social @jocn.bsky.social oecs.mit.edu

Excited to represent the Imaging Neuroscience editorial team in this! If you're at #CNS2025 this Sunday, join us for the symposium on new directions in scientific communication! 💚🧠📃

Excited to announce the 500th paper published by Imaging Neuroscience ! @imagingneurosci.bsky.social @mitpress.bsky.social We've come a long way in a short time and are hugely grateful to the neuroimaging community for your support. Hope to see lots of you at OHBM @ohbmofficial.bsky.social

First goose visit of the year to our garden - unusually, they've stuck it out the whole day. Will these lovelies gift us the 2025 goslings..?

Lovely sunny early Sunday morning walk over at Otmoor. Barn Owl !

squirrel enjoying the snowdrops

A new FSLeyes is out, with improved support for tractograms - it is now possible to display 3D tractograms in 2D (ortho and lightbox) views. Details at open.win.ox.ac.uk/pages/fsl/fs.... Thanks to dipy and mrtrix3 for some example data sets. Also, hello bluesky!

I stand with the trans community. Pass it along.

And ... the HBM APC has now gone back up, to $3520. That's too high. Easy to theorise what happened there.

New work here at @ukdri.ac.uk Imperial College with Prof Paul Matthews, assessing post-COVID changes in amyloid-related plasma biomarkers rdcu.be/d72Bq

Chimps up close in Uganda

Preprint on brain aging. From single timepoint data, estimate if delta reflects subject-varying aging rates vs baseline variations. For common analyses, baseline effects tend to dominate, whereas multiple aging modes show a range of results. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Ugandan birds in Murchison, Nile and Kibale.