The Washington Initiative for Neuroscience (WIN) is a new hub for unifying neuroscience activities across the state. WIN’s goal is to grow and support a diverse pipeline of scientists and clinicians in the field of neuroscience, to improve collaboration between these professionals through multidisciplinary training and joint mentoring from across Washington’s educational institutions, and to engage the broader public in efforts to improve brain health through targeted outreach and education.
 
To help catalyze new ideas, WIN invited brief proposals for planning grants that will support the development of teams and projects intended to enrich neuroscience innovation and collaboration across the state. Successful proposals involve groups of neuroscientists from at least two separate academic units or Washington State institutions/companies. These planning grants will support mini retreats to enable teams to develop a plan for a much larger funded initiative or project.
 
Four planning proposals with a principal investigator (PI) from our department have been funded. The first, led by Jesse Fann, MD, MPH and Rebecca Hendrickson, MD, PhD, is titled “Leveraging neuroscience research, clinical, and educational expertise to improve the lives of individuals with neurotrauma.” Researchers, clinicians, and educators will convene to lay the groundwork for new research collaborations across diverse domains of neurotrauma research in our region and develop a roadmap for a ‘learning health system’ where underrepresented patients are invited to engage in cutting edge research and trainees can more readily participate in research.  
 
Becky Sladek, MS, Jed Thompson, and Thabele (Bay) Leslie-Mazwi, MD are leading an effort to plan a Neuroscience Incubator Week hosted by the University of Washington. The WIN planning grant will be used to develop a framework for an event that would foster new connections and research directions with the aim of cross-department and cross-institution collaborations. It would bring together multiple communities engaged in both basic and applied neurosciences and would strive to involve a wide range of people including future neurologists and trainees from diverse communities across the state.
 
And Jeff Iliff, PhD is a co-PI on two projects. The first, with Tommy Woods, PhD, aims to re-establish the recently shuttered Seattle Longitudinal Study to leverage decades of pre-exiting data to address open questions on resilience and reserve as they relate to Alzheimer’s-related neuropathology. His second project is titled “Understanding cognitive changes in the perimenopausal brain” and will be led by Anitha Pasupathy, PhD. This project would focus on an understudied natural aging process in women: Females the world over experience cognitive disruptions during perimenopause but the underlying mechanisms and linkage to downstream age-related cognitive decline are unknown. Rebecca Hendrickson, MD, PhD is a co-PI on this project as well.