The Pershing Square Foundation today announced the opening of applications for the 2027 MIND (Maximizing Innovation in Neuroscience Discovery) Prize. Since launching in 2023, the Prize has been awarded to 28 multidisciplinary investigators from institutions across the USA. The annual prize awards $250,000 per year for three years ($750,000 total) to at least six scientists looking to uncover a deeper understanding of the brain and cognition, with a lens on Alzheimer’s Disease and Dementias. The Prize is meant to enable the most talented early-to-mid-career investigators to pursue bold, creative projects that could have transformative impacts on the field of brain research.
“Now that we can silence genes and rouse the cell, the distance between mechanism and memory, between the cause and the patient we hope to protect, is the space in which the coming decade of discovery must live,” remarked Neri Oxman, PhD, Co-Trustee of The Pershing Square Foundation.
“The MIND Prize calls for a science that bridges these scales: one that fuses the molecular basis of disease with its lived, behavioral expression; that treats timing, delivery, and prevention as first-class problems; and that reads these ailments as network diseases of the whole brain rather than single-molecule enigmas. We believe in bold, yet well-informed bets made possible through interdisciplinary and trans-modal approaches, combining genetics with mobility, applied physics with neurodegeneration, memory with AI, and more.
“The Pershing Square Foundation remains humbled by the MIND Prize and its community, and inspired by the researchers, and by the patients across every age and stage, whose lives this work could and should transform. We are proud to stand behind their boldness, and to keep faith with the search for knowledge and for remedy,” continued Oxman.
Applicants must have between one and eight years of experience running their own laboratories by the award start date (May 2027), hold a PhD, MD, or MD-PhD (or degree equivalent), and be affiliated with a nonprofit research institution in the United States of America. Applicants may apply for the MIND Prize a total of three times. The deadline to submit a Letter of Intent is Monday, September 21, 2026, by 5:00pm ET. For more details on the MIND Prize, including the full eligibility criteria and a link to the application submission platform, please visit:
https://pershingsquarephilanthropies.org/initiatives/programs/mind-prize.
“Each year, the MIND Prize reminds us that the biggest breakthroughs in brain science often come from the questions no one else is willing to ask,” said Olivia Tournay Flatto, PhD, President of The Pershing Square Foundation. “We created this prize to give bold, unconventional thinkers the freedom to pursue ideas that don’t yet fit inside existing frameworks because that is where real progress in neuroscience begins. We remain grateful to our Scientific Advisory Board for helping us identify the researchers who are willing to take that risk, and we’re more energized than ever to see what this next cycle of applicants will bring.”
The highly competitive MIND Prize catalyzes novel and daring interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary work by facilitating collaborations across academic departments and institutions and amongst the academic, biomedical industry, philanthropic, and business communities. These breakthroughs in basic, fundamental research will help augment the toolkit for, and knowledge of, neurodegenerative and neurocognitive disorders. Projects may range from the invention of novel tools, techniques, and technologies for mapping and analyzing the brain, to bold approaches that demonstrate extraordinary therapeutic potential.
“Most neurodegeneration research asks how to rescue dying neurons in the brain. The MIND Prize gave us room to ask what keeps degeneration from starting, and to look somewhere unexpected,” said Marissa Scavuzzo, PhD, 2026 MIND Prize winner and Assistant Professor at Case Western Reserve School of Medicine. “In the brain inside your gut, glia respond to change with remarkable sensitivity and may register the earliest signs of decline, in some cases up to 20 years before the onset of cognitive symptoms. This funding let us start years sooner than a traditional grant would allow.”
“The MIND Prize grant, because it’s a mechanism that funds extremely innovative ideas, but at early stages in their development where the funding is really needed is the reason we’re able to pursue our interest in understanding the possible ramifications of oligodendrocyte precursor cell biology for neurodegeneration,” 2025 MIND Prize winner Lucas Cheadle, PhD, Associate Professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory remarked. “Without this funding, we probably wouldn’t be able to do any of these experiments.”
The MIND Prize is proud to rely on the guidance of a highly accomplished Scientific Advisory Board.
- Paola Arlotta, PhD, Golub Family Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, Harvard University
- Richard Axel, MD, Nobel Laureate; Co-director, Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, Columbia University; University Professor, Columbia University; Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
- Ed Boyden, PhD, Y. Eva Tan Professor in Neurotechnology, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT; MIT McGovern Institute for Brain Research; Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
- Ali Brivanlou, PhD, Robert & Harriet Heilbrunn Professor, Head of Laboratory of Stem Cell Biology, and Synthetic Embryology, The Rockefeller University; Co-founder, Rumi Scientific Inc.
- Navdeep Chandel, PhD, David W. Cugell Professor of Medicine & Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University
- Moses Chao, PhD, Professor of Cell Biology, Physiology & Neuroscience, and Psychiatry, NYU Langone School of Medicine
- Anne Churchland, PhD, Professor, Arnold Scheibel Chair of Neuroscience, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles
- Mikael Dolsten, MD, PhD, Former Chief Scientific Officer and President, Worldwide Research, Development and Medical, Pfizer, Inc.
- Winrich Freiwald, PhD, Denise A. and Eugene W. Chinery Professor and Head of the Laboratory of Neural Systems, The Rockefeller University
- Fred “Rusty” Gage, PhD, Professor, Laboratory of Genetics, Vi and John Adler Chair for Research on Age-Related Neurodegenerative Disease, The Salk Institute for Biological Studies
- Michael E. Greenberg, PhD, Nathan Marsh Pusey Professor of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School, Harvard University
- Richard Isaacson, MD, Director of Brain Health, Atria Institute; Adjunct Associate Professor of Neurology, Weill Cornell Medicine
- Dean Kamen, Founder, FIRST; President, DEKA Research & Development Corporation
- Christopher P. Kellner, MD, Associate Professor of Neurosurgery, Director of the Cerebrovascular Center, Mount Sinai Health System
- Eric J. Nestler, MD, PhD, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Dean, Professor of Neuroscience & Psychiatry, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai; Chief Scientific Officer & Executive Vice President, Mount Sinai Health System
- Sergiu Pasca, MD, Kenneth T. Norris, Jr. Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Bonnie Uytengsu and Family Director of the Stanford Brain Organogenesis Program, Stanford University
- Gregory A. Petsko, Professor of Neurology, Harvard Medical School and Brigham & Women’s Hospital; Tauber Professor Biochemistry and Chemistry, Emeritus, Brandeis University; Adjunct Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Cornell University
- James Rothman, PhD, Nobel Laureate; Sterling Professor of Cell Biology; Professor of Chemistry; Director, Nanobiology Institute, Yale University
- Bernardo Sabatini, MD, PhD, Alice and Rodman W. Moorhead III Professor of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School
- Scott A. Small, MD, Director, Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center; Boris and Rose Katz Professor of Neurology, The Taub Institute, The Sergievsky Center; Departments of Neurology, Psychiatry, Radiology, Columbia University Irving Medical Center
- Hermann Steller, PhD, Professor and Head of Laboratory, Laboratory of Apoptosis and Cancer Biology, The Rockefeller University
- Beth Stevens, PhD, Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Institute Member, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; Lavine Family Research Chair, F.M. Kirby Neurobiology Center, Boston Children’s Hospital
- Bruce Stillman, PhD, President and Chief Executive Officer, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
- Richard Tsien, PhD, Founding Director, Neuroscience Institute; Druckenmiller Professor of Neuroscience, Department of Neuroscience and Physiology, NYU Langone Medical Center
- Stacie Weninger, PhD, President, FBRI
- George Yancopoulos, MD, PhD, Co-Founder, Co-Chairman, President and Chief Scientific Officer, Regeneron
- Michael Young, PhD, Nobel Laureate; Richard and Jeanne Fisher Professor, The Rockefeller University
- Anthony Zador, MD, PhD, Alle Davis Harrison Professor of Neuroscience, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
- Feng Zhang, PhD, Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Core Member, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; Investigator, McGovern Institute for Brain Research, MIT; James and Patricia Poitras Professor in Neuroscience, MIT; Departments of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Biological Engineering, MIT
About The Pershing Square Foundation
The Pershing Square Foundation is a family foundation established in 2006 to support exceptional leaders and innovative organizations that tackle important issues and deliver scalable and sustainable global impact. Pershing Square Philanthropies, which includes The Pershing Square Foundation, has committed more than $930 million in grants and investments in target areas including health and medicine, education, economic development and innovation. Bill Ackman and Neri Oxman are co-trustees of the Foundation. For more information, visit: https://pershingsquarephilanthropies.org.
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