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Building scalable neuroimaging programs across diverse human environments

Nature Neuroscience (2026)Cite this article

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Across the globe, human environments and experiences are diverse and undergoing rapid transformation. With the growing prevalence of neurological and mental health challenges, there is now an urgent imperative to understand the impacts of this diversity and change on the brain. This will require large-scale and long-term global studies of neural activity coupled with measures of lifestyle and life experience, environmental exposures, and mental and cognitive outcomes across diverse populations that lend themselves to untangling multivariate effects. We describe our experience developing large-scale EEG neuroimaging data acquisition programs in India and Tanzania and highlight key considerations for ensuring that such programs are ethically sound, cost-effective, scalable, adaptable and capable of producing high-quality data.

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Fig. 1: Photographs of EEG and survey data collection.

Data availability

The full dataset described in this paper is freely available for not-for-profit research purposes. An application for access can be requested by emailing data@sapienlabs.org. For the purpose of rapid evaluation by the academic community, a subset of anonymized EEG records with limited metadata and survey elements are available on OpenNeuro at https://openneuro.org/datasets/ds007358.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by funding from Sapien Labs, USA and the Sapien Labs Foundation, India.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sapien Labs Centre for Human Brain and Mind, Krea University, Chenai, India

    Tara C. Thiagarajan, Shailender Swaminathan & Dhanya Parameshwaran

  2. Sapien Labs, Arlington, VA, USA

    Tara C. Thiagarajan, Jennifer Jane Newson & Narayan Puthanmadam Subramaniyam

  3. Sapien Labs Centre for Human Brain and Mind (CEREBRAM), Nelson Mandela African Institute of Science and Technology (NMAIST), Arusha, Tanzania

    Sr John-Mary Vianney

  4. Nelson Mandela African Institute of Science and Technology (NMAIST), Arusha, Tanzania

    Sr John-Mary Vianney

  5. Institute for Financial Management and Research (IFMR), Krea University, Chennai, India

    Shailender Swaminathan

Authors
  1. Tara C. Thiagarajan
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  2. Sr John-Mary Vianney
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  3. Shailender Swaminathan
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  4. Jennifer Jane Newson
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  5. Dhanya Parameshwaran
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  6. Narayan Puthanmadam Subramaniyam
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Contributions

T.C.T. conceived the program. Sr J.-M.V. and S.S. lead the programs in Tanzania and India, respectively. D.P., J.J.N. and N.P.S. provide support with training, data acquisition and analysis. T.C.T. and J.J.N. wrote the paper with input from Sr J.-M.V., S.S., D.P. and N.P.S.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Tara C. Thiagarajan.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Neuroscience thanks the anonymous reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Thiagarajan, T.C., Vianney, S.JM., Swaminathan, S. et al. Building scalable neuroimaging programs across diverse human environments. Nat Neurosci (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-026-02215-1

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