Zuckerberg, Chan to fund Stanford award to fight Alzheimer’s disease
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, have launched a new effort with Stanford School ofMedicine to fight Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative diseases.
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative will be funding fiveyear and three-year grants to scientists, including one that will support early- career investigators willing to pursue bold, innovative ideas to fight the diseases, Stanford Medicine announced Tuesday.
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is a philanthropic project launched by the couple in 2015. Chan and Zuckerberg publicly welcomed their daughter Max by launching the charity to “advance human potential and promote equality for all children.” They said at the time that they planned to sell or gift up to $1 billion of Facebook stock each year for the next three years, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
The new five-year award will be named after Ben Barres, a noted Stanford neuroscientist who died in December at the age of 63. Barres was a pioneer in re- search on the possible relationship between brain cells known as glia and diseases like Parkinson’s. As a transgender man, he was an outspoken advocate of equal opportunity for women and members of minorities in the sciences, according to his obituary in theNewYork Times. Before his death due to pancreatic cancer, Barres was an adviser to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and helped craft the awards program.
“He exemplified the values of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, especially our work in neurodegenerative disease,” said Cori Bargmann, president of science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, in the announcement.
The five- year award, known as the CZI Ben Barres Early Career Acceleration Award, is open to scientists and doctors from throughout the world — even those who are new to the field of neurodegenerative diseases. The awardwill be $500,000 a year for a total of $2.5 million.
The three-year award — which seeks small, interdisciplinary groups of scientists collaborating on innovative projects — will provide recipients with $350,000 a year for a total of $1.05 million.
The new awards are “are an inspiredway to honor the memory of Ben, a remarkable person and a beloved mentor who embodied the spirit of the awards in his brilliance, creativity and passion for neuroscience,” said Lloyd Minor, dean of Stanford Medicine.