Donor-Funded Seed Grants Position Texas Brain Scientists for Major Dementia Research Push

At a luncheon in Dallas late last month, a philanthropic donor circle celebrated nearly two decades of quietly reshaping how early-stage neuroscience gets funded. The Friends of BrainHealth, a giving community affiliated with the Center for BrainHealth at The University of Texas at Dallas, marked its 2026 Scientist Selection Luncheon on September 28 at Dallas Country Club, where six winning research projects were recognized and a seventh was decided by a live audience vote. This year’s awards carry more weight than usual, because they are explicitly designed to prepare researchers to compete for multimillion-dollar state grants from the newly established Dementia Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, a funding body that could channel substantial public investment into brain health science over the coming decade.

The numbers behind the donor circle tell a story of patient, cumulative investment. Since its founding nearly 20 years ago, Friends of BrainHealth has raised $6 million and awarded 69 seedling grants, providing critical early support for scientists pursuing new approaches to understanding, protecting and strengthening brain health. Seed funding of this kind occupies a peculiar and often decisive niche in the research ecosystem: too small to attract federal grants on its own, yet large enough to let a scientist test a bold idea, generate preliminary data and build the evidence base required to win substantially larger awards. The 2026 cycle, which invested more than $466,000 in innovative research focused on brain health and dementia prevention, was structured with exactly that trajectory in mind.

A notable structural change this year expanded the funding beyond its traditional Emerging Scientists category to include a new Visionary Scientist tier, with three awards granted to seasoned principal investigators. The distinction matters scientifically as well as administratively. Emerging scientist grants typically support junior researchers or trainees testing a first independent idea, often under the mentorship of a senior faculty member. Visionary scientist awards, by contrast, allow established investigators to pursue higher-risk, higher-reward questions that might otherwise struggle to find backing before preliminary results exist. Together, the two categories span the full arc of a research program, from a trainee’s first pilot dataset to a senior scientist’s ambitious new direction.

The Visionary Scientist portfolio illustrates the breadth of contemporary dementia prevention research. Zhengsi Chang, PhD, and Ziwei Zhang, PhD, recipients of the Lyda Hill Philanthropies Visionary Scientist Award, will investigate biomarker dynamics underlying cognitive resilience across heterogeneous courses of Alzheimer’s disease. The question they are tackling is one of the most intriguing in the field: why some individuals whose brains show pathological hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease continue to think clearly, a phenomenon researchers call cognitive resilience. By tracking how biological markers change across different disease trajectories, the project aims to identify what distinguishes brains that resist decline from those that do not, knowledge that could reshape how resilience itself becomes a therapeutic target.

Fellow Visionary awardee Francesca Filbey, PhD, recipient of the Marlane Miller Visionary Scientist Award, will lead a longitudinal neuroimaging study examining brain resilience and metabolic health in the context of GLP-1-based therapy. The project taps into one of the most closely watched intersections in medicine today. GLP-1 receptor agonist drugs, originally developed for type 2 diabetes and later approved for weight management, have been associated in large observational studies with reduced risks of neurodegenerative disease, prompting intense scientific interest in how metabolic function and brain health are entwined. By using repeated neuroimaging over time, Filbey’s study is positioned to generate direct visual evidence of whether metabolic therapy is associated with measurable changes in brain structure or function, moving the field beyond correlational claims toward mechanistic understanding.

The third Visionary award, the Jennifer and Peter Roberts Visionary New Scientist Award, went to Dan Krawczyk, PhD, for a project investigating a light-guided training intervention designed to improve brain health and reduce dementia risk. The project reflects a broader shift in dementia science from purely pharmacological approaches toward interventions that actively train cognitive function. Non-invasive light-based guidance combined with structured training represents the kind of novel, testable idea that seed funding is designed to nurture: inexpensive to pilot, but capable of producing preliminary efficacy data that could justify far larger trials if early signals are promising.

The Emerging Scientist awards, meanwhile, target problems ranging from measurement science to caregiver support. Mary Glen, MBA, recipient of the Cindy and Charlie Feld Emerging Scientist Award and mentored by Sandra Bond Chapman, PhD, will work to establish the reliability and validity of the BrainHealth Index as a tool for monitoring the earliest changes in brain health. The project addresses a foundational challenge in prevention research: if the goal is to intervene before decline begins, scientists need measurement instruments sensitive enough to detect subtle change and stable enough to trust across repeated assessments. Demonstrating psychometric rigor for such an index is unglamorous work, but it is the kind of groundwork on which entire prevention programs depend.

Two further emerging projects extend the portfolio into risk profiling and caregiver well-being. Gayathri Maruthy, PhD, recipient of the Linda and Mitch Hart Emerging Scientist Award and mentored by Jeff Spence, PhD, will develop dementia risk and resilience profiles from eight comprehensive determinants, examined through both cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis. The multivariate approach reflects growing recognition that dementia risk is not a single number but a pattern, emerging from the interaction of vascular, metabolic, cognitive, lifestyle and psychosocial factors. Ashley Campos, MS, and Stephanie Rodriguez, MS, recipients of the Lindsay and Craig Wilson Emerging Scientist Award and mentored by Bart Rypma, PhD, will test a therapeutic mindfulness-based approach to improve well-being among dementia caregivers. The caregiver focus acknowledges a frequently overlooked dimension of the dementia crisis: the millions of family members whose own physical and mental health deteriorates under the sustained strain of caregiving, and for whom scalable, evidence-based support remains scarce.

The seventh award was decided in the room. Three finalists competed through a live audience vote in a format the organizers liken to a television pitch competition, with Christine Dugas, PhD, taking the Audience Choice Emerging Scientist Award for a project exploring the eye-brain connection in early detection of dementia risk. Mentored by Sandra Bond Chapman, PhD, Dugas will examine how retinal vascular health, measured with a simple, non-invasive retinal scan, relates to neuronal health and dementia risk factors, with change tracked using the BrainHealth Index. The project rides a genuine wave of scientific momentum. The retina is, in effect, an extension of the central nervous system that can be photographed through the pupil, and mounting evidence links retinal vessel changes to cerebrovascular and neurodegenerative disease. A cheap, quick, scan-based risk marker would be a transformative screening tool if validated, which is precisely the kind of high-leverage question early philanthropic dollars can help answer.

Behind the individual awards lies a deliberate strategic logic connecting private philanthropy to public scale. The Dementia Prevention and Research Institute of Texas represents a new statewide funding mechanism, and the 2026 Friends of BrainHealth awards are framed as a pathway for Center for BrainHealth researchers to strengthen the scientific foundation needed to pursue substantially larger state grants and expand promising work into broad-scale translational research. Andy Walsh, 2026 campaign co-chair, described the philosophy in a statement accompanying the announcement, saying that Friends of BrainHealth was founded on the belief that philanthropy can help turn promising ideas into meaningful discoveries, and emphasizing that donors act as active partners in advancing the science rather than passive check-writers. The model, in which a community of supporters funds pilot science, engages directly with researchers and helps build the foundation for discoveries intended to improve lives across Texas and beyond, offers a case study in how modest, well-aimed gifts can compound: nearly seventy grants and six million dollars later, the seedlings are being cultivated into applications for a state-level research enterprise.

Subject of Research: Philanthropic seed grants for brain health and dementia prevention research at the Center for BrainHealth

Article Title: Friends of BrainHealth invests in research poised for greater statewide impact

Article References: Friends of BrainHealth invests in research poised for greater statewide impact. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

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Keywords: Friends of BrainHealth, Center for BrainHealth, dementia prevention, Alzheimer's disease, seed funding, GLP-1 therapy, cognitive resilience, BrainHealth Index, retinal imaging, caregiver well-being, neuroimaging, DPRIT