A personal project grows to scale science operations.

Beginnings

Dr. Dimitri Yatsenko, co-founder and CEO of DataJoint, was inspired to create DataJoint, and developed its early MATLAB prototype, in 2009 while in graduate school at Baylor College of Medicine, in the lab of Dr. Andreas Tolias. The lab was actively exploring new methods for managing the complex scientific data and computations for processing the lab's new types of neurophysiology experiments.

DataJoint - Dimitri Yatsenko, Founder/CEO

Dimitri Yatsenko, PhD - CEO

DataJoint's main innovation was to introduce formal support for computational dependencies into the relational database model made accessible from scientific programming languages. Relational databases had long been established as the most rigorous approach for managing and querying structured data. Integrating native support for computation as part of the model provided an elegant solution for implementing data pipelines with computational workflows in complex projects. This allowed simplifying data queries and making computations transparent and reproducible. For the first few months, DataJoint was Dimitri’s personal project, and he used it to analyze his own data, further optimizing the framework.

The early days

Over time, other members of the Tolias Lab began using DataJoint and testing it in diverse scenarios. After some time, Dr. Tolias began encouraging other students to use DataJoint across all projects. By 2011, Dimitri released DataJoint on Google Code in open source, as other labs began adopting it, too. The first peer-reviewed scientific studies using DataJoint came out in 2013 from the labs of Laura Busse and Steffen Katzner at the University of Tübingen, Germany. By 2015, two other contributors—Fabian Sinz and Edgar Y. Walker in the lab—released DataJoint as a full-fledged, open-source package for Python.

After his defense in 2014, Dimitri stayed in the Tolias Lab as the lab began work on AI research, including IARPA's MICrONS (Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks) where DataJoint was proving instrumental. In October of 2016, four members of the lab (Dimitri Yatsenko, Jacob Reimer, Edgar Y. Walker, and Andreas S. Tolias) founded Vathes LLC to work on a DARPA Phase I SBIR project to investigate the feasibility of commercializing DataJoint. Weeks after beginning its operation, the company began signing contracts with large-scale research projects such as the Mesoscale Activity Project (by BCM, Janelia Research Campus, Stanford, NYU), BrainCOGS at Princeton University, International Brain Lab, Moser Group at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, Team Dope Columbia University, and others.

A new vision

In 2020, Vathes was awarded a five-year $3.8 million R&D grant from the NIH to develop DataJoint Elements—a curated collection of standardized workflows covering all major modalities of neurophysiology experiments.

In January, 2021, Dimitri and company leadership pivoted their strategy toward commercial technology development for collaborative research, incorporating it as Vathes Inc dba DataJoint. The company began the transition to a product-led strategy. To support this work, in June, 2022, the company secured a $2.1 million 2-year Phase-II SBIR grant through the NIH to build an efficient cloud-based platform for streamlining neurophysiology experiments. The platform is now in its alpha release to select partners.

 

Today, DataJoint's dedicated team of scientists and engineers is advancing software and data science tools to support a new generation of neuroscience experiments. Our products have expanded to include web interfaces, scientific visualization, workflow automation, job orchestration, and integrations with other informatics resources. Our cloud-based DataJoint Works platform offers possibilities for experimentation, analysis, and collaboration with minimal setup requirements, allowing fast exploration of multiple analysis options. We invite you to begin to experiment with DataJoint in your lab to continue your journey in cutting-edge research.

Neuroscience Projects Director Thinh Nguyen, PhD, with Neuroscience Data Engineers Sid Hulyalkar and Tolga Dincer, PhD.