Duke Institute for Brain Sciences Launches Seed Grants for Young Investigators
“After a four-year hiatus, the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences is excited to announce the return of our seed grant program,” began the announcement to the brain science community on September 19. With that, the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences (DIBS) restarted one of its most valued activities: direct funding of research.
The first step of its seed grant revival is to fund a round of Germinator awards to Ph.D. students and postdoctoral fellows.
As DIBS Director Marc Sommer explained, “We want to tap into the creativity of the up-and-coming stars on campus, the students and postdocs who are on the front lines of discovery. Often they have a brilliant idea for a project that involves techniques, concepts or collaborations that are totally new for their labs. They and their advisors may face a big problem: how to fund it? You can’t run a study just on enthusiasm. That’s where Germinators come into play.”
Begun in 2018, Germinators were offered until 2021. During that time the award provided funding for 16 interdisciplinary projects that spanned the fields of brain research from cellular mechanisms of disease to higher-level cognition and social behavior.
In this newest round of Germinator funding, DIBS received over 50 letters of intent from potential applicants, more than double the number of any previous year. Full proposals are due on November 21. At least four Germinators will be awarded at $25,000 each to fund one-year interdisciplinary projects (see details, along with a FAQ).
Impact of Previous Awards
To get a feel for the impact of Germinator awards on a trainee’s research and career, we caught up with several previous recipients.
Carina Fowler won a Germinator as a Ph.D. student in 2020 to study how the brains of young children are affected by environmental toxins. She said, “The Germinator Award helped me tremendously! It gave me the opportunity to put together a research team for the first time, make lasting connections with scholars from other disciplines that I would not have met otherwise, and develop expertise in a new and growing field.” She is continuing her studies on children’s health as a postdoctoral fellow at Washington University in St. Louis.
Allyssa Sinclair won the award as a Ph.D. student in 2019 and is now preparing to start an assistant professor position at Rice University. Her Germinator project on the brain mechanisms of learning from mistakes became a chapter of her dissertation, enabled multiple undergraduates to participate in her research, and helped lay the foundation for a Templeton Foundation grant with Rick Hoyle in Psychology & Neuroscience.
We heard similar stories from three Germinator awardees from 2021, the most recent year of funding.
For Hala El-Nahal, the funding expanded her work on primate vision by allowing her to acquire a high-density neural recording system. The data she collected with the cutting-edge equipment led directly to her first external funding, a three-year NIH training award. El-Nahal said, “The Germinator award was instrumental in allowing me to develop, complete and successfully defend my Ph.D. project.”
Allie Schrock used her award to study the role of brain hormones in aggression between lemurs, a primate model that can tell us a lot about human social interactions. She developed an innovative method for studying genetics in the animals, strengthened a key collaboration with a colleague outside of Duke, and leveraged her findings into an NSF doctoral grant.
“I’m very grateful to the Germinator award for funding the project,” commented Schrock. “It was fairly ‘risky’ and unconventional, so many external funding mechanisms may not have been eager to fund it. The money from DIBS has been instrumental in helping me expand into new and exciting research areas.”
Emilia Panzetta used her Germinator to study the role of the gut microbiome in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a debilitating motor disorder. This was a completely new direction for her and her mentor, and it helped to spur related lines of research that continue to be supported through philanthropy, medical foundations and a research agreement with a clinical-stage neuroscience company.
A Key Priority
“We are excited to restart the Germinator program in these times of uncertain funding, and grateful to the donors who have made it possible,” said DIBS Associate Director Nicole Schramm-Sapyta. “Adversity often focuses and hones creativity, and we at DIBS are proud to support that.”
DIBS Associate Director Len White said, “Germinator awards are a great opportunity for a young investigator to explore beyond the narrow scope of a research project situated in a single discipline. We hope investigators and their faculty mentors will be open to new interdisciplinary opportunities to collaborate across departments and schools at Duke to expand the scope and potential impact of their work.”
DIBS is a university-wide institute within the Office of Interdisciplinary Programs, led by Senior Vice Provost Edward Balleisen. “It’s great to see DIBS reviving a program that has catalyzed such ambitious interdisciplinary research by graduate students,” said Balleisen.
A major priority for DIBS is to expand its seed grant program through philanthropic gifts, both to sustain the Germinator awards and to revive its larger Incubator awards that fund interdisciplinary teams of Duke faculty. See more information about DIBS’s seed grant program, including a past Incubator and Germinator recipients.