Registration (e-COST invitation required)

Taking part, in person or online, requires an e-COST invitation, which you receive from the organisers and must accept. Places in the room were allocated through a two-phase registration: a pre-registration round in July, whose answers also set the dates, and an open registration in August for the remaining funded seats. Both are closed, and a waiting list built under the published rule fills any place that comes free. A third registration window, for online participation only, is open until 13 September. The form also asks whether you could come to Madrid, in case a place in the room comes free and nobody on the waiting list takes it.

Online registration open

Closes 13 September 2026, 23:59 CEST

Register

Registration closed

Closed 21 August 2026, 23:59 CEST

The August round for the funded places is closed and those places are assigned. See the countries represented and how places are allocated.

Registration closed

Pre-registration round closed

Pre-registration closed 25 July · availability confirmations closed 6 August

Thanks to everyone who responded: your answers chose these dates, and places were assigned from that round on 8 August. Both registration rounds are now closed.

Trainers and organisers

Dr. Oscar Esteban Trainer Organiser

oscar.esteban@hes-so.ch

HES-SO Valais-Wallis, Switzerland

Dr. Guiomar Niso Organiser

guiomar.niso@cajal.csic.es

Cajal Institute CSIC, Madrid, Spain

Dr. Yasser Alemán-Gómez Trainer

Lausanne University Hospital and University of Lausanne, Switzerland

Mélanie Garcia Trainer

Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA

Lea Waller Trainer

CRIUGM & Université de Montréal, Montréal, Canada

Daniel Martín Díez Assistant

Programme at a glance

The Training School is hybrid: the three days can be followed in the room in Madrid or online. See the programme for what each mode involves.

Day 1 · Wednesday 30 September Day 2 · Thursday 1 October Day 3 · Friday 2 October
09:00 Start
Welcome
INDoS and Working Group 3
Introductions
Neurodesk (to be confirmed)
EEG/MEG preprocessing
EEG/MEG hands-on in Neurodesk
fMRI preprocessing with fMRIPrep
Execution forensics
Coffee
Standardized preprocessing
BIDS across modalities
BIDSvue hands-on
Containers
PET (to be confirmed)
Structural MRI
Structural MRI hands-on
QA/QC hands-on
Introduction to the afternoon's personal projects
13:00 – 14:00 Lunch
Environment bring-up and containers
How to read and review a neuroimaging paper
Diffusion MRI
Diffusion hands-on
Project pitches, roulette style
Project work
15:45 – 16:00 Coffee
Journal Club
Day wrap and preview of Thursday
Diffusion hands-on (continued)
Day wrap, and what to bring to Friday
Project work (continued)
Project results presentation
Concluding remarks
18:00 End of the day

Venue

In person: Room COLABORA, Espacio Converge, Campus Serrano del CSIC — C/ Serrano 113 posterior (entrance through the main CSIC Campus gate), 28006 Madrid, Spain.

Online: the platform and connection details are sent by email to online attendees before the event.

Programme

Three days, each with a morning block (09:00 – 13:00) and an afternoon block (14:00 – 18:00), with lunch in between. Every block opens with theory and continues with hands-on practice, and every session is labelled (Theory), (Practice) or (Plenary). Across the three days that is about 7 hours of theory and 12½ hours of hands-on work, plus plenaries and breaks. The practical sessions run in Neurodesk, a browser-based environment, so a laptop is all you need, in the room or at home.

Attending online. The theory sessions and plenaries are streamed live, the hands-on sessions run in Neurodesk so online attendees do the same exercises as the room, and Friday’s personal projects are open to online attendees too. The platform and connection details are sent by email before the event.

Sessions marked to be confirmed depend on an invited contribution and may move within their block; if the PET session does not confirm, its time goes to structural MRI.

Day 1 · Wednesday 30 September

Block 1 · 09:00 – 13:00 · Standards, data, environments

Time Session
09:00 – 09:20 (Plenary) Welcome
09:20 – 09:35 (Plenary) INDoS and Working Group 3
09:35 – 10:00 (Plenary) Introductions: 45 seconds each to say who you are, where you work, your research interests and your expectations for the Training School
10:00 – 10:30 (Theory) Neurodesk (to be confirmed)
10:30 – 10:45 Coffee
10:45 – 11:30 (Theory) Standardized preprocessing: why pipelines, why automation, the pipeline end to end with fMRIPrep as the reference model
11:30 – 12:00 (Theory) BIDS across modalities: structure, validation, the EEG/MEG extensions, BIDS Apps
12:00 – 12:30 (Practice) BIDSvue hands-on
12:30 – 13:00 (Theory) Containers

Block 2 · 14:00 – 18:00 · Environments, provenance, how to read a paper

Time Session
14:00 – 15:00 (Practice) Environment bring-up and containers
15:00 – 15:45 (Theory) How to read and review a neuroimaging paper: which parameters to look for, how to evaluate them, the Journal Club review guidelines
15:45 – 16:00 Coffee
16:00 – 17:45 (Practice) Journal Club
17:45 – 18:00 (Plenary) Day wrap and preview of Thursday
Evening Informal group dinner

Day 2 · Thursday 1 October

Block 3 · 09:00 – 13:00 · EEG/MEG and structural MRI

Time Session
09:00 – 09:55 (Theory) EEG/MEG preprocessing: the landscape of pipelines, their defaults, and what “an fMRIPrep for M/EEG” would take
09:55 – 10:50 (Practice) EEG/MEG hands-on in Neurodesk
10:50 – 11:05 Coffee
11:05 – 11:35 (Theory) PET: acquisition, preprocessing and PET-BIDS (to be confirmed)
11:35 – 12:05 (Theory) Structural MRI: FreeSurfer and VBM
12:05 – 13:00 (Practice) Structural MRI hands-on

Block 4 · 14:00 – 18:00 · Diffusion MRI

Time Session
14:00 – 15:00 (Theory) Diffusion MRI
15:00 – 15:45 (Practice) Diffusion hands-on
15:45 – 16:00 Coffee
16:00 – 17:45 (Practice) Diffusion hands-on (continued)
17:45 – 18:00 (Plenary) Day wrap, and what to bring to Friday

Day 3 · Friday 2 October

Block 5 · 09:00 – 13:00 · Functional MRI: did it work?

Time Session
09:00 – 10:15 (Theory) fMRI preprocessing with fMRIPrep
10:15 – 10:45 (Practice) Execution forensics
10:45 – 11:00 Coffee
11:00 – 12:40 (Practice) QA/QC hands-on
12:40 – 13:00 (Plenary) Introduction to the afternoon’s personal projects

Block 6 · 14:00 – 18:00 · Personal projects and closing

Time Session
14:00 – 14:20 (Plenary) Project pitches, roulette style
14:20 – 15:45 (Practice) Project work
15:45 – 16:00 Coffee
16:00 – 16:35 (Practice) Project work (continued)
16:35 – 17:25 (Practice) Project results presentation
17:25 – 18:00 (Plenary) Concluding remarks

Before the school

We will write to every participant, in person or online, with the details, but plan on three things:

  1. A laptop and a browser, with a Neurodesk account created and tested, so that the Wednesday bring-up is a check rather than a setup.
  2. One or more papers of your choice, picked from the Journal Club, read and annotated with its review template before the school. Your annotations are the material of Block 2’s review session. Nobody assigns papers: you are strongly encouraged to choose your own.
  3. Your own data ready, ideally in BIDS, or a stated intention to use the example dataset, for the personal projects on Friday.

Selection Process

The selection below concerns places in the room. Online attendance is not selected or ranked: online attendees receive an e-COST invitation marked as online attendance.

Timeline

when what
6 August 2026 Potential attendees’ availability confirmation closed ✓
8 August Selection ran; places assigned from the pre-registration round ✓
8 – 21 August Open registration for the remaining funded seats ✓
by 14 August e-COST invitations of the selected pre-registered attendees are issued ✓
21 August, 23:59 CEST Registration closes ✓
22 August The waiting list is rebuilt under the published rule; the open seats are offered from it
by 28 August Everyone who registered is notified, selected or not; second-wave e-COST invitations issued ✓
until 13 September Third registration window (register): online attendance, open to anyone
13 September, 23:59 CEST The window closes
from 14 September Online e-COST invitations issued. Places in the room that come free continue to go to the August waiting list
30 September – 2 October The Training School, in Madrid and online
3 October – 14 October Reimbursement requests must be filed

Who can take part

To have your costs reimbursed you need to be a registered INDoS member with an affiliation in a COST Member, Cooperating Member, or Near-Neighbour country, or a European RTD Organisation: see Reimbursement.

Not yet a member? Joining INDoS is free and takes a few minutes. If your affiliation falls outside those countries, you are welcome to join us self-funded, seats permitting, or online.

Online attendance needs INDoS membership in Working Group 3 and an e-COST invitation marked as online attendance, and has no affiliation condition. It is not reimbursed.

A place is not a reimbursement guarantee. Being selected records your intent to attend and is separate from e-COST. Reimbursement requires INDoS membership and an e-COST invitation that you accept. The local organiser issues these once the participant list is settled.

Country representation

The funded cohort was built to spread places across countries: every country’s first representative was seated before any country’s second, and no country holds more than two funded places. The result is 27 funded places across 22 countries, five of which hold two. Two more participants are in the room at their own cost, and around twenty attend online.

For this window, your country does not change the answer. The country rule decides the order of a funded allocation, and there is no funded allocation left to run: the funded places are taken, and the waiting list from the August round is what fills any that come free. Online attendance is open to everyone, wherever you are.

A funded trainee place requires an affiliation in a COST Full or Cooperating Member, a Near-Neighbour Country, or a European RTD Organisation (COST Annotated Rules, Article 6.4). Affiliations in Russia and Belarus are not eligible: COST has suspended cooperation with both until further notice. An affiliation outside all of the above cannot hold a funded trainee place, but is welcome online, and in the room at its own cost, seats permitting.

How places are allocated

The Training School has more people who want a place than it has places. The process comprises six rules that implement the following principles:

What this decides now. These rules produced the cohort and the waiting list, and that waiting list is what fills a place in the room when one comes free. They are not re-run for the current window: an in-person request made now joins the queue behind the people the rules have already ordered. Online attendance is outside all of it, and open.

  • Gender balance. The cohort is balanced between women and men, and those who do not declare a gender, or whom neither label represents, are seated without being assigned one.
  • Spread across countries comes first. A country with nobody in the cohort is served before a country that already holds two places, and no country holds more than two. A first candidate from an unrepresented country therefore ranks high, whenever they apply.
  • It is not first-come-first-served. Time of registration decides the order within a country, not between countries. Registering early does not put you ahead of somebody from a country we have yet to reach, and we would rather say so than let anyone assume otherwise.
  • Full attendance comes first. The training is cumulative — the first days set up the hands-on final day — so somebody who can attend all three days is offered a place first. If you can only make some of the days, still register and say so: you are placed high on the waiting list rather than turned away.
  • Self-funded places exist. A small number of places beyond the funded seats can be held by participants who waive reimbursement. They are allocated by the same ordering as the funded seats — waiving reimbursement does not buy priority, it only means the budget is not what limits you. The registration form asks.
  • Online attendance is not allocated. It is open: no cap, no ordering, no waiting list. The rules below decide who holds a place in the room, and nothing else.

Rule 1 — who enters the list

A pre-registration enters the list unless it is set aside for one of these reasons:

set aside reason
never completed the respondent did not reach the end of the form
consent not given the final commitment question was not answered I agree
withdrawn in the form, or by email
not available answered no in the confirmation round, or did not answer by 6 August. The dates were known this time
affiliation outside the COST area COST Annotated Rules, Article 6.4: trainees must be affiliated in a COST Full or Cooperating Member, a Near-Neighbour Country, or a European RTD Organisation. Others may be reimbursed as trainers only, never as trainees

Where one person pre-registered more than once, the entries are merged: their answers are taken from the most recent, their place in the queue from the earliest (correcting a pre-registration doesn’t cost the initial position).

Rule 2 — starting order

Everyone left is ordered by the time of their pre-registration.

Partial attendance. Registering for part of the school never moves anyone behind another country, but full attendance comes first: people who cannot attend all three days are placed at the head of the waiting list rather than seated directly, because the training is cumulative and a funded place is for the whole school.

Rule 3 — local filing time

The survey recorded one server clock, which favours applicants east of it: the same local hour of day produces an earlier recorded time. Every timestamp is restated in the applicant’s own local time before ordering, so that filing first thing in the morning counts equally in Lisbon and in Istanbul.

Rule 4 — gender interleaving

Read from the top. Position 1 should hold a woman, position 2 a man, position 3 a woman, and so on.

  1. If the person there already has the required gender, they stay.
  2. Otherwise the nearest person below with the required gender moves up into that position, and everyone in between shifts down by one.
  3. When such a move is needed, prefer a person from the same country as the applicant currently in that position; look to other countries only if that country cannot supply the required gender. Swapping within one country leaves the order of countries untouched.
  4. An applicant who recorded neither woman nor man, met before the required gender, takes the position without advancing the alternation. They are never assigned a gender.
  5. If nobody of the required gender remains below, stop; the rest keeps its order.
  6. An applicant who answered prefer not to say is not covered by point 4: they declared no identity for point 4 to respect, and leaving non-disclosure in the unassigned lane would make saying nothing strictly better than either answer. A declared identity outside the two categories, whether non-binary or described in the applicant’s own words, stays under point
    1. For the allocation only, and never on a badge or in communications, a non-disclosing applicant is counted in whichever category is most prevalent across all qualified registration records plus the already-seated cohort, counted when the ordering runs. Where two categories tie, the applicant is counted in the tied category that gives them the later position. Non-disclosure never helps and never hurts beyond that: the most prevalent category is simply the most-competed one.

Rule 5 — country slotting

Read from the top, counting how many times each country has appeared.

  1. The first applicant from each country keeps their position.
  2. Every later applicant from that country moves to the end of the section being processed, in the order encountered, so a country’s second stays ahead of its third, the third ahead of the fourth.

Every country’s first applicant therefore appears before any country’s second.

Rule 6 — iterative reslotting

Rule 5 applied once leaves the applicants it moved back sitting together, so a large national group forms one uninterrupted run. Rule 5 is applied repeatedly, each pass starting at the first position of the group the previous pass moved back.

Pass 1 gathers every country’s first applicant, pass 2 every country’s second, pass 3 every country’s third, and so on, so each national group is separated by the equally-ranked applicants of other countries. It stops when a pass moves nobody.

The algorithm: how these rules are applied

step rule
1 Rule 2 — starting order, by time of pre-registration
2 Rule 3 — local filing time
3 Rule 4 — gender interleaving
4 Rule 5 — country slotting
5 Rule 6 — iterative reslotting
6 Rule 4 — gender interleaving
7 Rules 5 and 6 — country reslotting
8 Rule 4 — gender interleaving, without the same-country preference of step 3

Waiting list

We invite from the top of the list, for as long as the funding lasts. Everyone below that point is on the waiting list, in list order.

A place vacated by a decline or a withdrawal goes to the first person on the waiting list who can hold it:

who declines who takes the place
a woman the first woman, or the first person who recorded neither, whoever stands higher on the list
a man the first man, or the first person who recorded neither, whoever stands higher on the list
someone who recorded neither the next person on the list, whoever they are

Someone who recorded neither can therefore take any place, and their own place is not held for another such person: their seat carries no gender, so nothing about the balance depends on who fills it. Tying them to each other would strand them on the waiting list whenever none was seated. The balance between women and men is otherwise preserved, and people are skipped only across the categories, never within the list they are on. If nobody on the waiting list can hold the place, that is reported rather than filled from another category.

Reimbursement (in-person participants)

Travel and subsistence are covered for eligible in-person participants, through the standard COST mechanism. Online attendance is not reimbursed: there is no travel claim and no daily allowance, because there is no travel. Reimbursement comprises a flat-rate daily allowance (per the COST daily-allowance table for the host country, covering accommodation, meals, and local transport) plus travel costs up to a total of €1,500. There is no registration fee.

The allowance is paid for each day of the event you attend, plus the day you travel in; the day you travel home is paid at 40%.

To be reimbursed you must be a registered INDoS member with an eligible affiliation; accept the e-COST invitation the local organiser issues; sign the attendance list at the event; and submit the Online Travel Reimbursement Request (OTRR) in e-COST within 12 days of the event (that is, 14 October 2026 at 23.59 CEST). Although COST allows 30 days for filing OTRRs, we cannot guarantee that your request will be processed in time if you submit after the 14 October deadline. See the COST Annotated Rules and the e-COST platform for details.