About
Global Brain Governance publishes open tools for sharing brain data across borders. It is run by the Pestilli Laboratory at The University of Texas at Austin with the BRIDGE community, and funded by Wellcome.
What we are trying to do
We want any neuroscientist to be able to share brain data across borders without months of bespoke legal work, and we want the protections promised to participants to hold wherever their data go: through transfer, into derived datasets, and into the models trained on them.
Our means are practical. We map how the law of each country treats brain data. We turn that map into tools that a collaboration can use before data move, and into a modular agreement that institutions can sign. We publish all of it under an open licence, and we revise it with the people who use it.
Where things stand
As of October 2026: the law of 93 countries in Africa, Europe, and Latin America and the Caribbean has been mapped and is published as the legal landscape inside the Toolkit. The Neurodata Governance Toolkit, four decision tools and a modular transfer and access agreement, is released as version 1.0 and is under peer review together with the legal analysis. Next come trials of the toolkit on live collaborations, the extension of the map to further regions, and an assistant that guides a collaboration through the toolkit. We will report here as each happens.
How we work
Map the law
Legal scholars in each region read and code how their jurisdictions recognise brain data, which legal bases allow its use, how transfer abroad works, what oversight and remedies exist, and what contracts have to carry. Every pathway between two countries is then rated for the conditions it imposes in practice.
Build tools
The map becomes decision tools, a modular agreement and worked examples that a collaboration and its legal, ethics and repository offices can use.
Test and revise
The tools are tried on real collaborations and revised with the people who used them. Legal content carries the date to which it was checked and is reviewed by a scholar from its region before release.
Two ideas underlie the tools. Functional exposure is what a piece of brain data can reveal or enable, whatever its format or legal label. Continuity of protection is the principle that the obligations attached to data should follow them wherever research takes them.
People and partners
Leadership
Investigators and partner institutions
Legal scholars
The law of each country is read and coded by lawyers and legal scholars working in Brazil, the United States, South Africa, the United Kingdom, Kenya, Nigeria, Italy, Poland and Switzerland: Marietjie Botes, Artur Mendes, Bart Huffman, Madison Fleischaker, Ciara Staunton, Beverley Townsend, Paul Ogendi, Lukman Abdulrauf, Andrea Parziale and Gabriela Skoczylas-Kizak.
BRIDGE
BRIDGE, the Brain Research International Data Governance and Exchange project, is the community behind this work: regional ambassadors for ethics, law, technology and lived experience, an advisory board, and the workshops in Rio de Janeiro (2024), Marrakesh (2025) and Johannesburg (2025) where the tools were shaped. BRIDGE is funded by Wellcome and powered by INCF; its team and programme are at bridge.incf.org.
Funding
The legal analysis, the toolkit and this site are funded by Wellcome through BRIDGE (grant 226486/Z/22/Z, Principal Investigator Franco Pestilli). The views expressed are those of the authors and not of the funder.
Licence and citation
Unless stated otherwise, the content of this site, including the toolkit, the agreement, the examples and the figures, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0). You may copy, adapt and redistribute it for any purpose, including commercial use, provided you credit the source and indicate changes. Code in the repository is under the MIT licence unless a file says otherwise. The site name and design are © Pestilli Laboratory, The University of Texas at Austin.
Please cite the tool you use and the publication behind it.
Logo and media
Logo files, colours and usage terms are on the Media page.
Disclaimer
Nothing on this site is legal advice. The tools structure questions and record answers; whether a particular transfer, access or use is lawful is decided by the applicable law and by the institutions and authorities responsible for it. Legal content is dated and may be out of date. Please report errors on GitHub.
Contact
Franco Pestilli, Pestilli Laboratory, Department of Psychology, The University of Texas at Austin: pestilli@utexas.edu. For BRIDGE community matters, use the contact form at bridge.incf.org.