Brain health research awards position Texas scientists for major state funding

On September 28, a group of Texas scientists gathered at Dallas Country Club to learn which of their colleagues would receive funding to pursue some of the most pressing questions in brain health research. Six projects won outright, and three others competed for a seventh award through a live audience vote styled after a venture capital pitch competition. The total awarded that day: $466,000 in grants from Friends of BrainHealth, a donor circle that has spent nearly two decades turning early-stage ideas into rigorous science.

The timing of these awards carries particular weight. For the first time, the funding organization expanded beyond its traditional support for emerging researchers to also recognize established principal investigators—a signal that the landscape for brain health research in Texas is shifting. The state recently created the Dementia Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, or DPRIT, which will distribute multimillion-dollar grants to qualified research teams. The Friends of BrainHealth awards, modest in isolation, are designed to serve as a launchpad: seed money that allows scientists to generate preliminary data, test novel approaches, and build the evidence base they'll need to compete for those far larger state grants.

The organization itself has been operating on this principle since its founding nearly twenty years ago. In that time, it has distributed $6 million across 69 seedling grants—small investments in unproven ideas that, collectively, have shaped the direction of brain health research at the Center for BrainHealth. The model assumes that early philanthropic support, when given to the right researchers pursuing the right questions, can accelerate the path from hypothesis to discovery to real-world application. This year's awards suggest that model is about to scale significantly.

The six winning projects span the full spectrum of dementia-related research. Two visionary scientists—Zhengsi Chang and Ziwei Zhang—received funding to investigate why some people with Alzheimer's disease maintain cognitive function despite the disease's typical progression, examining the biological markers that might explain this resilience. Francesca Filbey is studying how a class of diabetes medications affects brain health and metabolic function through longitudinal neuroimaging. Dan Krawczyk is testing whether a light-guided training intervention can reduce dementia risk and improve overall brain health. Among the emerging scientists, Mary Glen is working to validate a tool called the BrainHealth Index as a way to detect the earliest signs of cognitive decline. Gayathri Maruthy is developing profiles that distinguish between people moving toward dementia and those moving away from it, using eight different health and lifestyle factors. Ashley Campos and Stephanie Rodriguez are testing whether mindfulness-based therapy can ease the psychological burden on people caring for dementia patients. Christine Dugas, who won through audience vote, is exploring whether simple retinal scans—a non-invasive measure of blood vessel health in the eye—can serve as an early warning system for dementia risk.

What unites these projects is their focus on prevention and early detection rather than late-stage intervention. They reflect a broader shift in dementia research toward understanding the years or decades before symptoms appear, when the brain is undergoing changes that might still be reversible. They also reflect the priorities of the donor community. Andy Walsh, one of the campaign's co-chairs, emphasized that Friends of BrainHealth operates as more than a funding mechanism—donors are actively engaged in the science, attending presentations, asking questions, and helping researchers refine their work. This year, that community of supporters contributed more than $466,000 to the cause.

The emergence of DPRIT creates a new calculus for researchers in Texas. A $466,000 award from Friends of BrainHealth is significant for early-stage work, but it is also explicitly designed as a stepping stone. The preliminary data generated by these projects—the proof of concept, the effect sizes, the feasibility demonstrations—will become the foundation for applications to DPRIT and other major funding sources. If the model works as intended, the seed funding awarded this September could eventually catalyze research programs worth millions of dollars, expanding across the state and potentially beyond. The next decade will reveal whether that promise translates into practice.