Research

Safadi Program

Safadi Program of Excellence in Clinical and Translational Neuroscience

Whether in clinical care or medical research, it is critical for physicians and scientists to partner in order to make important advances. This is particularly true in the neurosciences, where the brain presents an immense frontier for scientific advances utilizing collaborative tools and integrative strategies. The Safadi Program of Excellence in Clinical and Translational Neuroscience at the University of Chicago Medicine was launched on April 18, 2017, with the aim of facilitating this multidisciplinary interface, and creating opportunities for collaboration among scientists and clinicians engaged in the diagnosis and treatment of neurological disorders. (Learn more about Mr. Mohammad Safadi.)

Issam Awad
Safadi Program Director
John Harper Seeley Professor of Neurological Surgery, Neurology & The Comprehensive Cancer Center
Director, Neurovascular Surgery

Seth Himelhoch
Lowell T. Coggeshall Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience
Chairman of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience

John Maunsell
Albert D. Lasker Distinguished Service Professor of Neurobiology
Director of the Neuroscience Institute

Shyam Prabhakaran
James Nelson and Anna Louise Raymond Professor of Neurology
Chairman of Neurology

Mark Siegler
Executive Director Emeritus, Bucksbaum-Siegler Institute of Clinical Excellence
Lindy Bergman Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Medicine and Surgery

Julian Solway
Director, Institute for Translational Medicine
Co-Director of the Berggren Center for Quantum Biology and Medicine
Walter L. Palmer Distinguished Service Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics
Dean for Translational Medicine, Biological Sciences Division
Chair of Committee on Molecular Medicine
Professor of Pediatrics

Mohamad Bydon
Chair, Department of Neurological Surgery
Stahl Professor of Neuroscience in the Wallman Society of Fellows

Deadline for Submission: December 1, 2025
Project Period: Maximum 12 months, to commence any time after January 1, 2026
New for 2026: Funding has been significantly increased - grants of up to $40,000 are now available. This expanded budget provides greater support for ambitious, high-impact pilot work and cross-disciplinary training initiatives.

Full time faculty in any track at the University of Chicago are invited to apply for Safadi Pilot Grants, to support the generation of preliminary or exploratory data involving novel multidisciplinary neuroscience collaborations, or to help support fellowship training involving novel multidisciplinary tools and concepts.

Proposals should articulate the novel multidisciplinary collaboration, and disease relevance or collaboration with clinical neuroscience group. Applications are due at midnight, December 1, 2025. Decisions about winning proposals will be made before January 1, 2026, and funding for up to 12 months may be requested to commence any time after that date.

Proposals will be evaluated based on:

Innovation
Scientific rigor
The uniqueness of opportunity/infrastructure/milieu
Contribution to multidisciplinary program development, specifying what disciplines it proposes to bridge
Potential impact on clinical neuroscience translation or disease applications
Future directions (i.e. how pilot data will be used for future project application; or how would fellowship support will be leveraged in future career development in multidisciplinary perspective).

2026 Safadi Pilot Grant Application Online Form

The 2026 Safadi Lecture

David J. Anderson, PhD

Seymour Benzer Professor of Biology
Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience Leadership Chair
Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Director, Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience
California Institute of Technology

Event Details:
Wednesday, October 7, 2026
10:00am-12:00pm (CST)
The Rubenstein Forum at The University of Chicago
In person and by Zoom

David J. Anderson has been a member of the faculty in the Division of Biology and Biological Engineering at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena since 1986. He is currently the Director of the TianQiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience at Caltech, and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Dr. Anderson's research career has spanned multiple topics in neuroscience, from the study of neural crest stem cells that generate the developing peripheral nervous system, to the neural circuits that mediate innate emotional behaviors, such as fear and aggression. He has published over 225 primary research articles and is the co-author with Caltech colleague Ralph Adolphs of The Neuroscience of Emotion: a New Synthesis (2018, Princeton University Press). Dr. Anderson has trained over 50 PhD students or postdoctoral fellows. He received the W. Alden Spencer Award in Neurobiology from Columbia University in 1999, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2002), the US National Academy of Sciences (2007), and is a recipient of the 2017 Perl-UNC Neuroscience Prize and the 2018 Edward M. Scolnick Prize in Neuroscience from MIT. Dr. Anderson played a key role as an adviser to the late Paul Allen in the founding of the Allen Institute for Brain Sciences and the creation of the Allen Brain Atlas, and continues to serve as an adviser to that Institute. He has also served on two working groups for the NIH's BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovation in Neurotechnology) Initiative.

Safadi Faculty Scholars

The Safadi Program is proud to have contributed to the recruitment and start-up support of key faculty in the Departments of Neurology and Neurological Surgery, who will lead transformational neuroscience programs relevant to human diseases.