Jane Roskams

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Jane Roskams is a neuroscientist who works at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and has a joint appointment in Neurosurgery at the University of Washington. She helps study the brain, focusing on how brain cells grow, develop, and repair after injury, and she plays a leading role in big data and open science in neuroscience.

Born on the Isle of Man, Roskams studied biochemistry at University College Swansea and earned a PhD in neuroscience from Penn State in 1991. She did postdoctoral work at the National Institutes of Health and Johns Hopkins University before joining UBC. She has held roles across UBC and UW and led a lab on neural regeneration and brain repair, stepping back in 2015–16 to become Executive Director of the Allen Institute for Brain Science and to promote open science and data sharing.

Today, Roskams directs analytics and training for the Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform (CONP) and co-leads Mozak, an NIH- and NSF-funded online game that lets people help analyze brain data. She works to establish best practices for sharing large brain data sets and to test brain analytics tools. She is helping develop a Global Training Space in brain data science with the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF) at Karolinska Institute in Sweden, and advises BrainMind, XPrize, and Level42.ai, among others.

Her research includes regenerative and epigenetic processes in the brain, how neural stem cells and glia contribute to brain development and repair, and building maps of brain gene expression. In 2008 she helped create an annotated gene expression map of the spinal cord with the Allen Institute, which is still used by researchers today. Her work has received funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation. She has been recognized for mentoring and for promoting diversity in science, and she has influenced science policy, including work related to the 21st Century Cures Act.

Roskams has driven big data projects and global collaboration in neuroscience and helped start Cascadia Data Innovations to improve health data collaboration in Seattle and Vancouver. She remains a leading voice in open data sharing and in using technology to advance brain science.