NOMIS–Gladstone Fellowship Program

As populations around the world are living longer than ever before, the prevalence of neurodegenerative disorders has been rising at an unprecedented pace. Effective treatments for these conditions are lacking and urgently needed. Scientists at the Gladstone Institute of Neurological Disease (GIND) in San Francisco, California, are taking an unconventional and interdisciplinary scientific approach to advance the understanding of the central nervous system to a point were rationale therapeutic strategies can be developed for a range of important brain disorders, including neurodegenerative dementias, movement disorders and neuroinflammatory diseases such as multiple sclerosis, epilepsy and neuropsychiatric conditions.

GIND is dedicated not only to making groundbreaking scientific discoveries but also to empowering the next generations of scientists to solve complex neuroscientific and biomedical problems. To support this effort, the NOMIS Foundation and GIND have established the NOMIS–Gladstone Fellowship Program, which aims to teach outstanding postdoctoral scholars how to creatively combine leading-edge technologies with integrative approaches, crossing experimental models and the human condition. The fellowship offers exceptional scientists the freedom to address big unanswered questions at the intersection of two or more scientific disciplines.

NOMIS–Gladstone Fellows receive rigorous scientific training and personalized attention and mentoring, as well as the opportunity to develop professional competencies such as leadership, collaboration, scientific writing, grantsmanship, lecturing and management. Collaborations with nearby universities including the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), UC Berkeley and Stanford further expand the opportunities for professional and career development. NOMIS–Gladstone Fellows will have an affiliation with UCSF’s Department of Neurology and will be appointed as staff scientists at GIND.

There, fellows will help elucidate fundamental mechanisms and address disease-relevant topics such as the basic functions and roles of proteins implicated in brain disorders; the biological importance of the neurovascular junction; the communication between neuronal and glial cells; the interactions between the immune and nervous systems; the regulation of brain rhythms by interneurons and glia; and the uniqueness of brain energy metabolism.

About the Gladstone Institute of Neurological Disease

Founded in 1998, the Gladstone Institute of Neurological Disease is part of the Gladstone Institutes, an independent not-for-profit research organization that has an affiliation agreement with the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). GIND combines exemplary levels of scientific rigor and innovation with deep knowledge and understanding of brain disorders. Indeed, besides scientific excellence, a key criterion for recruitment into the institute is a genuine passion for unraveling disease mechanisms and for identifying novel ways to block them. This feature also creates a very enabling environment for integrative training in neuroscience, as virtually every principal investigator in the institute aims to understand brain functions at all levels of complexity, from molecules to cells, circuits to networks, and brain rhythms to behavioral outputs.