What can happen when Oxford scientists team up with Paris mathematicians and AI experts? Dr David A. Menassa shares how the Springboard programme for UK–France research collaborations is uncovering hidden patterns in the human brain - from development to disease - and why crossing borders is key to scientific discovery.
Can you tell us a bit about your collaborative project and its objectives?
The project is a collaboration between the University of Oxford (UK), the École Normale Supérieure and the Institut Pasteur (Paris). It is cross-disciplinary combining applied mathematics, machine learning, human neuropathology and spatial statistics. The objectives are to develop new tools that combine machine learning and statistics to deploy on complex human datasets. This helps us to identify how cells are organised, extract metrics of biological relevance, and classify diseases based on their neuropathological patterns. Without these tools, important information can remain hidden as the human eye is not very good at multidimensional analyses without help. The project began on human developmental datasets but is rapidly expanding to include analyses on paediatric tumour tissues and tissues from individuals with movement disorders, dementias and neurodevelopmental disorders. Some of the key findings of the work include elucidating the morphological diversity of brain cells during human brain development, visualising their complex distribution and identifying how COVID-19 affects cellular organisation during pregnancy.
What have been the most significant outcomes of the collaboration so far and how did the collaboration benefit the research and the researchers involved, including the early-career ones?
This has resulted in multiple significant outcomes
- An open-source tool called DeepCellMap available to the academic community to adapt to their own scientific questions. The development of this algorithm was published in Nature Communications in February 2025.
- A successful one-day workshop on ‘Advances in Quantitative Neuroscience’ in Oxford for cross-institutional collaboration with intramural and extramural speakers from various disciplines including neuroscience, applied mathematics, statistics and machine learning (March 2025).
- Nobel Assembly invitation to Dr David A Menassa to talk about novel tools to study human microglia as part of a Nobel Forum workshop on ‘Frontiers in Medicine’ at the Karolinska Institute (May 2026).
- An exhibition on the interplay between the development of the human brain and artificial intelligence at Churchill College, University of Cambridge (2026) organised by Professor David Holcman (ENS collaborator) and involving Dr David A Menassa, Professor Thibault Lagache and Mr Théo Pérochon.
For early career researchers
- A strong lead authorship for early career researcher, Mr Théo Pérochon (France), in Nature Communications.
- Intellectual exchange opportunities for junior researchers Miss Nita Alpin (Oxford) and Dr Robin Von Bonsdorff (Oxford) who presented their work at Pasteur and are actively collaborating with Dr Thibault Lagache on their respective projects.
- Visibility in the scientific community for all junior researchers who presented their work via various platforms: posters or oral presentations at the workshop in March 2025 or blogs.
For all researchers
From this Springboard award programme, the team of joint senior authors with complementary expertise is collaborating on multiple additional projects about the neuropathology of disease. Furthermore, the sponsored workshop in March 2025 led to further cross-disciplinary collaborative projects across various institutions in the UK, France and Spain.
What do you think are the main benefits of fostering cross-border research collaborations like this one?
The main benefit of cross-border research collaborations like this one is that we share expertise and resources which can boost scalability, innovation and translational impacts. Additionally, it allows diversity to flourish and helps create stronger networks between research intensive institutions.
What differences and similarities do you see in how we do research in both countries?
Both the UK and France have a strong tradition in maintaining research excellence in biomedical science and emphasise the value of international collaboration. One of the key differences is that France offers long-term core support for research under nationalised research funding whilst the UK favours project or grant focused funding which is investigator led. The UK model is competitive and flexible whilst the French model is administratively heavy but more centralised.
What will be the next steps in your research collaboration with France?
The next steps of the collaboration include additional papers: a review on novel tools in neuropathology and experimental projects on combining machine learning with spatial statistics to study paediatric tumours and dementias. This is in addition to multiple opportunities to highlight the work together (The Nobel Microglia workshop in May 2026 and the themed exhibition in Cambridge in 2026).