Forrest Collman is an Associate Director of Informatics at the Allen Institute for Brain Science within the technology department. He received his undergraduate training in physics and computer science from Princeton University, where he did his senior thesis with John Hopfield on computational models of olfaction using synchrony. He then did a Ph.D., also at Princeton, but within the Molecular Biology department where he worked with David Tank, helping developing methods for two-photon microscopy in awake behaving mice, as well as the design and construction of a virtual reality behavioral environment for head-fixed mice. Before joining the Allen Institute, he worked with Stephen Smith, first as a postdoc at Stanford University and later as a Scientist at the Allen, where he worked on the development of conjugate IF/SEM array tomography and its application to neural plasticity.

Presently he is the co-lead (along with Nuno da Costa and Clay Reid) of the electron microscopy connectomics project at the Allen, where he helps manage the computational tools and infrastructure to support processing the petascale data collected by the team. His work has led to the development of the Connectome Annotation Versioning Engine, in collaboration with Sebastian Seung’s lab at Princeton, which supports the dynamic proofreading, annotation and analysis of large scale electron microscopy projects, including the MICrONs dataset, FlyWire, H01, FANC and BANC. As an Associate Director of Informatics he is also focused on helping develop a next generation of data products about connectivity in the brain that make the data accessible and useful for experimental and computational neuroscientists alike.