Germinator Awards provide critical support for promising research

For young brain scientists eager to make their mark on the field, innovation is key. Turning visionary insights into new advances requires the courage to take a risk. But more practically, it requires funding that is getting harder to obtain. $25,000 can make all the difference in turning a great idea into a viable research project.

The Duke Institute for Brain Sciences (DIBS) recently awarded this level of support to six graduate students and postdoctoral fellows through its Germinator Award program. We set out to learn more about the awardees. What drives them to tackle brain research at the cutting edge?

The 2026 Germinator recipients each talked with Marc Sommer, the director of DIBS, about the importance of receiving the award for their current training and their long-term career trajectories. Their interviews have been edited for length and clarity.

“It’s been such a confidence boost”

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Andrea Jones is a postdoctoral associate in the lab of Tatiana Segura, professor of Biomedical Engineering. Her path to brain research, as is true for so many in the field, began with very different goals. “My background is not in the brain at all,” she said. “I did my Ph.D. in a lab that focuses on the female reproductive system. I learned so much about hormones and how dynamic they are.” Jones started reading about intersections between hormones and the brain, finding a small but intriguing body of work about the neuro-protective role of estrogen in stroke patients. Pursuing this hypothesis led her to Duke and inspired her Germinator project on the role of estrogen in promoting recovery after stroke.

Jones hopes her research will lead to new estrogen therapies after strokes occur, as well as potential mitigation of stroke risk. “After I know which cell types are mediating the protection and regeneration that happens when estrogen is present, I want to pick some of the best candidate drugs,” she said.

“I definitely wouldn’t be able to do this project without the grant, because the technology involved is cost prohibitive. It's been such a confidence boost, too,” she added, “because I'm bringing such a different background to thinking about stroke from this perspective. It's been encouraging that I've started to get some preliminary data and people are excited about this idea.”

“My first independent funding”

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Uros Topalovic, a postdoctoral scholar in Neurosurgery, is interested in helping people with epilepsy and related brain disorders use virtual reality to improve their performance on learning tasks. Born in Serbia, he trained in electrical and computer engineering both there and in the United States before his research shifted toward the design of brain implants and wearable neural interfaces. 

“At first, it was still hardcore engineering. Electronics, chips, and stuff like that. But I got interested in the brain as we tested the devices.” Topalovic met his Duke mentor, Nanthia Suthana, professor of Neurosurgery, Biomedical Engineering and Neurobiology, during a project to validate the technology in patients. 

The Germinator award will allow Topalovic to expand his technology to answer new questions about human learning and cognition. “The funding will provide resources for increased computational ability, like purchasing microchips and other infrastructure,” he said. His inventions aim to combine implanted devices, body sensors and virtual reality to detect and exploit optimal windows for learning, which is especially important for patients with brain disorders and injuries. Topalovic points out that the award from DIBS is the first independent funding he’s secured as a postdoc. He hopes this first step will lead to the pilot data needed to secure other funding opportunities as he pursues his career in neural engineering.

“Without this award, I wouldn't get this training”

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“Receiving this award is exciting because it’s an opportunity to learn techniques I otherwise wouldn’t be able to,” said Kyle McPherson, a Ph.D. candidate in the University Program in Genetics and Genomics who is working with Catherine Bowes Rickman, George and Geneva Boguslavsky Distinguished Professor of Eye Research in the Department of Ophthalmology. “Before coming to Duke, my background was in metabolism and infectious disease. One of my projects as a first-year Ph.D. student investigated the metabolism of macular degeneration, which can cause blindness. It was really great for me — it involved metabolism, which I wanted to work on, but also gene therapy that I had never done before, and it was important for developing medical treatments. I just really fell in love with it.”

For his Germinator project, McPherson will study “support cells” in donor eyes from people who may or may not have had age-related macular degeneration. These cells have been observed to change shape and lose functionality before the onset of vision loss. Drawing on techniques from ophthalmology, immunology and bioinformatics, McPherson aims to learn what causes these changes and how to turn that knowledge into therapies to prevent vision loss.

Like many young scientists, he is deciding whether an academic career or a career in industry will be the better path to fully realize his goals. The Germinator award bolsters his prospects for either option, he says. “It lets me develop skills in a completely new research area, setting me up with a stronger, more diverse training background wherever my career takes me.”

“If you can get a team of collaborators excited, then you can really do wonderful things”

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After earning an undergraduate degree in biochemistry, Edward Moseley gained 10 years of experience outside of academia. Starting with research on virology and vaccinology to improve treatments for HIV and Zika virus, he then took a detour toward computational analyses of psychosocial oncology and palliative care. Throughout this journey he developed a growing interest in the cognition and behavior of patients, which made him realize he wanted to study the brain. He returned to academia as a Ph.D. candidate in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, working in the lab of Bruce Donald, James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, where he’s combining his experience and interests to develop new chemical tools for advancing research in brain development, regeneration and disease.

“If you can get a team of collaborators excited, then you can really do wonderful things,” he said. “That's what I’m hoping to do with this Germinator award.”

Moseley observed that our brain is a tool we use a lot without understanding how it works — how it breaks and how it repairs itself. “I want to create tools to study the activity of neurons at the cellular level that'll allow us to understand how structures like the brain work by building from the cell upward,” he said. Moseley notes that the Germinator award is particularly important for catalyzing new collaborative teams. “All the great things I've done in my life have been a result of teamwork. Being awarded the grant creates a situation where my project is taken seriously. If the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences thinks this is an interesting idea, then it might be worth giving it a shot.”

“How can we help fix the brain?”

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Jillian Saunders is a Ph.D. candidate in Neurobiology in the lab of Cagla Eroglu, Duke Health Distinguished Professor of Cell Biology. Saunders knew she wanted to be a neuroscientist at a young age. “I've been interested in studying the brain since I was 13. I was in my high school freshman biology class, and we were learning about how neurons can't regenerate. And I was like, ‘well, that's stupid’.” This led to internet searches about regenerative medicine, biomedical engineering and brain research, and she was hooked. 

After earning her undergraduate and master’s degrees, Saunders attended a neuroscience conference that changed her life. “It was the first time I heard about psychedelics for science and therapy, and not just as drugs that people use in parties. Hearing about psychedelics from a plasticity perspective brought me back to my initial interest in how we can help fix the brain.” This led her to Duke and motivated her Germinator award project, to study the mechanisms by which psilocybin, or “magic mushrooms,” may be useful in treating depression.

“There’s still so much we don’t know about how psychedelics work and why they have the therapeutic effects they do,” Saunders said. “My hope with this research is that in 10 years, once we understand the mechanisms underlying psilocybin and other psychedelics in the lab setting, we might create compounds that act very selectively on the brain to produce an antidepressant effect.”

“As a new postdoc, it’s really exciting to have something that's yours right away”

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Julia Dziabis, a postdoctoral fellow mentored by Nicole Janet Scott-Hewitt, assistant professor of Cell Biology, trained in neuroscience as an undergraduate and earned her Ph.D. at Duke in the lab of Staci Bilbo, Haley Family Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience. There she became interested in the effects of immune system signals on brain development. Shifting to the Scott-Hewitt lab for her postdoc, Dziabis expanded her research program to include the effect of viruses on neurons, inspired by recent findings that Alzheimer’s disease and other disorders may be linked to viruses that lie dormant in neurons for many years after an initial infection.

For her Germinator project, Dziabis will study how condensates found inside neurons might play a role in sequestering viruses. She hypothesizes that the condensates might change within the neuron as a result of stress or infection, causing them to dissolve and release a reactivated virus.

“The field of manipulating and visualizing biomolecular condensates is very new,” she said. The funding she is receiving will allow her to build a new experimental model to test her hypotheses, using advanced techniques in microscopy, molecular biology and immunology. Without the Germinator award, Julia is certain her research would be off to a slower start.

“Now I can get preliminary data right at the beginning of my postdoc,” she said, an advantage that will help her write compelling grant proposals to secure additional funding for her research.

• Read more about the 2026 Germinator award recipients and their projects.
• DIBS seed grants, including the Germinator awards, are made possible by philanthropy from generous donors. Support our mission to empower exciting interdisciplinary research.