The Van Essen lab uses neuroimaging approaches combined with novel methods of computerized brain mapping and neuroinformatics to explore the functional organization, connectivity, development, and evolution of cerebral cortex in humans and nonhuman primates. The Human Connectome Project (HCP; http://www.humanconnectome.org/) involves a large-scale collaborative effort to chart long-distance connectivity and its variability in healthy adult humans. Our contribution to the HCP includes the development and application of analysis methods for characterizing brain connectivity, and the development of a user-friendly platform for data mining of the HCP datasets that will be made freely available to the neuroscience community.