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Julia Guiomar Niso Galán

Dr. Guiomar Niso is a Tenured Scientist (Científica Titular) at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and Head of the Neuroimaging Group at the Cajal Neuroscience Center (CNC-CSIC), formerly Instituto Cajal. She is Vice President of the Young Academy of Spain.

She works in human electrophysiology and neuroimaging (MEG and EEG) to characterise healthy and diseased brain states, with a focus on ageing, Alzheimer’s disease and epilepsy. Her final goal is understanding brain dynamics to enhance clinical applications and ultimately improve people’s lives.

She holds an MSc in Telecommunications Engineering and a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University (2013–2016), an AXA postdoctoral fellow at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (2017–2019), a senior researcher at Indiana University (2021–2023) and a Ramón y Cajal researcher at Instituto Cajal (2023–2024).

Dr. Niso has led multiple open science initiatives: open data repositories (the Open MEG Archive, OMEGA), open software (Brainlife, Brainstorm, HERMES) and open standards (the Brain Imaging Data Structure, BIDS), to foster reproducibility and transparency in neuroscience. She chaired the first elected BIDS Steering Group (2019–2023) and serves on the steering committees of NiPreps and NeuroJSON. Since 2025 she has been Vice Chair of the EU COST Action INDoS (Improving Neuroimaging Data for Sharing) and Spain’s representative in the COST Action EEG101 (Fundamentals of Open & Rigorous EEG Science).

Her work has been recognised with the Medal for Young Researchers of the Royal Academy of Engineering of Spain (2023), the International Open Science Prize of The Neuro and the Irv and Helga Cooper Foundation awarded to the BIDS Steering Group (2023), the British Neuroscience Association Team Credibility Prize awarded to #EEGManyLabs (2023), the Young Ada Byron Award for Women Technologists (2022) and her election to the Young Academy of Spain (2022).