Brainspiration 2026

Brainspiration is a series of international, interdisciplinary meetings dedicated to brain-inspired materials, systems and concepts for information technology.

The 2026 edition took place in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, from 12 to 14 October at the Lindenberg Culture House, hosted by the Institute for Molecules and Materials of Radboud University.

The conference explored intelligent matter for information processing and sensing, neuromorphic and brain-inspired devices and architectures, information processing in natural and complex systems, computing in non-digital physical substrates, and analog in-memory computing.

The programme combined invited talks by leading experts from institutions such as MIT, ETH Zurich, the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, Forschungszentrum Jülich and Politecnico di Milano with poster sessions and a tutorial class for students and early-career scientists.

Addressing these topics requires expertise that no single discipline can offer. Brainspiration brings physicists, chemists, electrical engineers, materials scientists and machine learning researchers into the same room, creating an open space for discussion among peers.

Among the people shaping this edition was Wilfred van der Wiel, professor at the University of Twente and coordinator of HYBRAIN, who served on the organising committee together with colleagues from Radboud University, the University of Groningen, TU Eindhoven, Leiden University and Utrecht University.

His involvement reflects how closely the conference is tied to the work of HYBRAIN. Neuromorphic hardware, unconventional computing substrates and analog in-memory computing are at the heart of the project’s research on electronic-photonic architectures for brain-inspired computing.

Taking part in the organisation of Brainspiration allows HYBRAIN to increase its visibility in the Netherlands and across Europe, as it has done since Brainspiration 2022 and Brainspiration 2024.