Fellowships and Grants

Kavli Award for Distinguished Research in Neuroscience

Established to recognize the best doctoral dissertation in the neural sciences each year. We seek to reward work that is original, raises provocative questions about the field, and/or provides exceptional conceptual advances. Nominations are sought from all of the basic and physical sciences departments across the University. Graduate students who have completed their pre-doctoral work (successful thesis defense and deposit) in a given calendar year (from January 1 through the following February Columbia conferral deadline) are eligible for nomination (typically announced in January/February and due in April, awarded in May).

Kavli Postdoctoral Fellowships

The Kavli Institute for Brain Science encourages investigators to take their research in novel directions by incorporating the collaborative expertise of other Institute labs: one-year Postdoctoral Fellowships provide salary support to a fellow working on such joint projects. Request for applications is typically announced in March and due in May for awards starting July 1.

Kavli Grants

These small, competitive awards provide an opportunity for Kavli Institute for Brain Science investigators to fund pilot projects that may be too unorthodox to receive funding through traditional avenues, enabling them to generate the preliminary data to go on to apply for NIH funding. Priority is given to projects that involve inter-lab collaboration (at least one of the collaborating investigators must be a member of KIBS). Request for applications is typically announced in March and due in May for awards starting July 1.

Kavli funding enabled KIBS Investigator Vince Ferrera, in the Department of Neuroscience, to pair up with Elisa Konofagou in the Department of Biomedical Engineering to develop a potentially revolutionary method for intravenous drug delivery. They are refining a novel minimally invasive technique developed by Dr. Konofagou (Focused Ultrasound) to carry pharmacological agents across the blood-brain barrier and deliver them to targeted brain regions in primates. This could have the potential to revolutionize therapies for neurological disorders, and in basic science research replace more invasive techniques, such as intracranial microinjection.

This work has already resulted in two peer-reviewed publications:

1. Tung YS, Marquet F, Teichert T, Ferrera V, Konofagou EE (2011) Feasibility of Noninvasive Cavitation-Guided Blood-Brain Barrier Opening Using FUS and Microbubbles in Non-Human Primates. Applied Physics Letters 98:163704.
2. Marquet F, Tung Y-S, Teichert T, Ferrera VP, Konofagou EE (2011) Noninvasive, transient and selective blood-brain barrier opening in non-human primates in vivo. PLoS One 6(7):e22598.

Kavli NanoNeuro Initiative (Columbia and Cornell Partnership)

Established in 2021 by Rafael Yuste from Columbia’s Kavli Institute for Brain Science (KIBS), and Paul McEuen from the Kavli Institute at Cornell for Nanoscale Science (KIC), with funding from the Kavli Foundation, this program will explore the interface between Nanoscience and Neuroscience, focusing on developing nanotools for the measurement and manipulation of neural circuits. The heart of this initiative will be a Kavli NanoNeuro Fellows program that will recruit a talented group of inter-disciplinary postdoctoral fellows who will conduct research in two or more labs across KIBS and KIC, and be provided with independent funding and support to break down boundaries of disciplines. The NanoNeuro Initiative will be strengthened with biannual retreats and symposia, a seminar series, and a visitor program between these two local institutions.

To learn more, visit their website by clicking here (https://kavlinanoneuro.engineering.cornell.edu/)

Kavli Scholars

The Kavli Scholars program is an opportunity to support faculty members through a shared naming opportunity at the University between the Kavli Foundation and other partners. Two matching donors have been established so far to establish one Simons-Kavli Scholar (through the generosity of Marilyn and Jim Simons), and two Grossman-Kavli Scholars (through partnership with the Sanford Grossman Charitable Trust). Each Kavli Scholar will be selected from among the entire Columbia faculty community, on a competitive basis, by the director and co-directors of KIBS at Columbia University, in consultation with an external advisory group. Faculty recipients will be appointed for a three-year period, on a rotating basis, to ensure flexibility in funding support across the range of relevant faculty at critical stages in their research programs.

• Randy Bruno: Grossman-Kavli Scholar, 2013-2015
• Rudy Behnia: Grossman-Kavli Scholar, 2018-2020
• Elias Issa: Grossman-Kavli Scholar, 2021-2023
• Attila Losonczy: Simons-Kavli Scholar, 2019-2021