About Brainfood

Brainfood is a peer mentoring group for early-career researchers in Zurich working with human neuroimaging data (e.g. EEG, MEG, fMRI, eye-tracking). The idea is simple: there’s a lot of local expertise, but people often don’t know each other. Or they don’t have a space to exchange methods, troubleshoot, or get feedback.

Brainfood tries to fill this gap!

The format is intentionally informal and driven by the needs of the group. Instead of fixed teaching, sessions revolve around what people are currently working on or struggling with. Whether that’s preprocessing pipelines, analysis decisions, or broader questions about study design.

In practice, this takes a few different forms. The “Food for Thought” lunch seminars are regular meetings in which we are discussing general topics relevant to early-career researchers, such as soft skills, paper writing and career opportunities.

In addition, Brainfood organises hands-on workshops and invited talks to introduce specific methods, toolboxes, or analysis approaches that people can directly apply to their own data.

Out of demand from the Brainfood community we have also set up dedicated troubleshooting sessions, where people bring concrete technical issues and work through them together.

Overall, Brainfood is meant as a practical, local support structure: a place to ask questions you wouldn’t put into a formal talk, get feedback from people who actually work with similar data, and build connections across labs.

Participation is open, and the program evolves based on what people want to learn or discuss. If this sounds like something you might want to join, consider subscribinig to our mailinglist. We're always open for suggestions about topics or speakers. If you have any ideas, feel free to contact us!