We are supporting Neuromatch to develop as an organisation particularly around its flagship activity, Neuromatch Academy, a fully online three-week global summer school for computational neuroscience aimed at early career researchers.

COVID-related lockdowns created an enormous gap in the training prospects of the early career scientists. Neuromatch Academy (NMA) pioneered offering a fully online three-week global summer school for computational neuroscience aimed at undergraduates, graduates and post-docs interested in the topic. NMA is a series of plenary lectures from top researchers in the field along with instructional videos from faculty mentors, which were complemented with extensive teaching assistance and tutoring in small groups in their own time zone and often in their first language.

Gatsby supported the inaugural and second editions of NMA in 2020 and 2021. NMA 2020 consisted of a virtual army of 200 volunteers, 250 faculty mentors, 200 Teaching Assistants, and 1700 students from across 65 countries. NMA 2021 expanded the core NMA to 3300 students from more than 60 countries, as well as added NMA-DL, a new three-week immersive deep learning course.

NMA has the potential to become a key training programme for early career researchers and is particularly meaningful because, thanks to its online nature, it enables participation for community members who traditionally do not have the financial capacity or institutional support to attend in-person summer schools.

Given the successes to date, we have provided further support for four years to allow NMA to continue to expand its offering, to reach greater sustainability, and to continue to innovate to benefit neuroscience and other scientific fields.