Knight Initiative News

Michael T. Nietzel

A $90 million gift from Penny and Phil Knight will extend the work of the Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience at Stanford’s Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute

In this research roundup, we look back on some of the ways Knight Initiative scientists have been pursuing ways to keep our minds sharp well into old age

We talk with neuroscientist Boris Heifets about the new federal push to accelerate research on psychedelic drugs for mental health treatment

The teams will tackle questions linked to Parkinson's pathology and mechanisms with an eye toward treatments

Dan Jurafsky, Art Owen, and Robert Sapolsky join the scholarly society, which works to promote science for the public good

We talk with psychiatrist Neir Eshel about why rewards are sweeter when we've had to work for them and what this teaches us about our brains' reward systems

Pregnancy complications such as miscarriage spike after age 35. Wu Tsai Neuro postdoc Blake Laham suspects neural signaling in the uterus is partly to blame

Studying brain scan data from individuals—not group averages—reveals key brain-function differences in children who struggle with goal-oriented tasks, Wu Tsai Neuro affiliate Vinod Menon and colleagues

The Wu Tsai Neuro affiliate, Pfeiffer and Herold Families Professor and professor, and chair of biochemistry in the School of Medicine studies the genetic and epigenetic control of chromosome organization, function, and inheritance

Three PhD candidates took top honors at this year’s event, translating years of research into presentations everyone in the room could understand.

Shingles vaccines appear to have a protective benefit, Knight Initiative researcher Pascal Geldsetzer has shown.

We talk with neurologist Kathleen Poston about early signs of Parkinson's outside the brain and how they might influence treatment and detection

Faculty Scholar Paul Nuyujukian spoke to NPR's Short Wave podcast about his work on brain-machine interfaces and neurological disease

An eye prosthesis 20 years in the making and supported by a Big Ideas in Neuroscience award restores sight in patients with a common age-related eye disease

Faculty Scholar Guosong Hong and colleagues developed a way to activate light-emitting nanoparticles with ultrasound, which could be used to manipulate cell signals or facilitate light-based medical treatments in the future

Researchers who videotaped every moment in the lives of 81 African turquoise killfish gleaned intriguing insights into the aging process that may also apply to humans

Stanford Medicine neurologists explain what is known—and still unknown—about the Alzheimer's gender gap

Faculty Scholar Guosong Hong says that light plays a key role in neuroscience and—and that’s why he’s working with a Big Ideas in Neuroscience team to make transparent brains

We talk with Wu Tsai Neuro Faculty Scholar Guosong Hong about how insights from glass frogs and our own eyes could help engineer transparent brains