Joshua de Leeuw, Associate Professor of Cognitive Science, has received grant funding from the National Institutes of Health in collaboration with his colleague from MIT for the project “Psych-DS: A FAIR data standard for behavioral datasets.” This three-year project is an important step forward for scientific efforts that rely on behavioral data. In addition to the benefits for reproducibility and discoverability of data and analyses, the standardized representation of behavioral data into machine-readable formats is a critical first step for the development of new scientific tools that can accelerate the pace of neuroscience and biomedical research.

As lead developer of the widely used jsPsych experiment software and a researcher with experience in large-scale collaborative science, Josh brings to bear a deep understanding of the necessity of creating data standards that are both useable by scientists from a wide range of disciplines and technical backgrounds, and sufficiently precise and expressive enough to allow freestanding psychological measures and other behavioral task output data to be integrated with neuroimaging data—particularly in the context of initiatives such as BRAIN. Josh’s contributions to the project will include providing feedback on the structure and implementation of the Psych-DS standard and validation tools and overseeing the adoption of the standard in jsPsych.