Success Story | How UCSF Neuroscape Protects Global Research Integrity with Didit

What is UCSF Neuroscape?

Neuroscape is a translational neuroscience center at the University of California, San Francisco, housed within the Weill Institute for Neurosciences. Its Clinical Division, led by Dr. Joaquin A. Anguera, builds and deploys neuroscience-based videogames designed to assess and enhance cognitive abilities — used in real-world clinical research.

At the heart of that work is NEXUS, Neuroscape's online research platform. NEXUS is designed to deploy the aforementioned technologies, making participation in online research studies easy for anyone with a desktop, laptop or mobile device, with the overarching goal of driving the rapid translation of neuroscience into real-world solutions.

The Problem: Online Research Is Under Attack

Online research has become one of the most powerful tools modern neuroscience has. It removes the geographic bottleneck of in-clinic studies, makes trials cheaper and faster, and opens scientific participation to people who would otherwise never be reached.

But the same qualities that make online research scalable also make it a target:

• Bots at industrial scale. Automated agents now routinely farm paid research studies, generating junk data at a speed no research team can manually screen.
• Bad actors and duplicate enrollments. Participants create multiple accounts across studies to collect incentives.
• Consent and eligibility integrity. When a team can't confirm who is on the other end of the screen, every downstream result becomes harder to defend.

For a platform running at Neuroscape's scale — with multiple NIH-, foundation- and industry-funded studies aiming to enroll 5,000+ participants over the coming years, plus 50+ additional studies led by collaborators around the globe using the same technology — these threats are not hypothetical. They are a daily operational cost and a direct threat to scientific validity.

The Solution: Didit Identity Verification inside NEXUS

UCSF Neuroscape integrated Didit's identity verification into NEXUS so that every participant entering a study can be verified as a real, unique human before any research data is collected.

The integration is purpose-built for research workflows:

• Document verification. Participants onboard with a government ID that is checked against 14,000+ document types across 220+ countries — essential for a platform with international collaborators.
• Biometric liveness. Facial matching with liveness detection confirms the person holding the ID is the same person enrolling in the study, in real time.
• Embedded in the participant journey. Verification happens inside the NEXUS enrollment flow, after account creation and study-code entry, so researchers keep the experience smooth while eliminating a category of risk that used to consume hours of manual review.
• Zero per-verification friction for the budget. Didit's free core KYC plan means NEXUS can scale verification across thousands of participants and dozens of collaborator studies without turning research integrity into a line-item every PI has to justify.

Why Identity Verification Matters for Research Integrity

Online research used to rely on in-clinic foundations: screen the participant in person, verify their ID, enroll them. Online research has to recreate that trust layer at a distance, at scale, and without a human in the loop for every enrollment.

That is exactly the gap Didit was built to close. For UCSF Neuroscape, the integration means that:

• Study data starts with a verified, unique human, not a bot or a duplicate account.
• PIs and collaborators inherit the same trust layer without each team having to solve identity on their own.
• The team can move faster on launching new studies because the hardest part of online enrollment — "is this a real person?" — is already handled.

A Word from UCSF Neuroscape

"Running research at global scale means trusting that the person on the other side of the screen is who they say they are, and they are partnering with us to provide legitimate data. Didit gave us a fast, secure identity verification layer that plugs directly into NEXUS, so our team can spend less time fighting bots and bad actors and more time doing the science. It's one of the most meaningful applications of identity verification we've seen in research."

— Joaquin A. Anguera, PhD
Director of Clinical Division, UCSF Neuroscape
Associate Professor, Neurology and Psychiatry, UC San Francisco

Results

With Didit live inside NEXUS, UCSF Neuroscape now has:

• A verified front door for 5,000+ upcoming participants across its funded studies.
• A reusable trust layer for 50+ collaborator studies worldwide that run on NEXUS technology.
• Hours of manual screening removed from the research team's weekly load — time that now goes into the science instead of fraud triage.
• A defensible integrity story to share with funders, IRBs, and collaborators: every enrolled participant has been identity-verified in seconds.

This is what research-grade identity verification looks like: invisible to legitimate participants, unforgiving to bots and bad actors, and priced so scientific teams can actually afford to deploy it at scale.

Participate in an Online Trial

For those interested in seeing this in action, and eager to participate in one of these online trials, click the link below to learn more about the Tah-Da Study and how you can participate.

nexus.ucsf.edu →

Neuroscape is referenced here as a collaborator; nothing in this document should be read as an endorsement of Didit by UCSF or the University of California.