Innovative Multidisciplinary Research Pilot Award FY 25 Recipients

The Stanley and Judith Frankel Institute for Heart and Brain Health and the Michigan-Biology of Cardiac Aging (M-BoCA) program of the Frankel Cardiovascular Center, are delighted to announce that the recipients of this year's Innovative Multidisciplinary Research Pilot Award are:

• Andre Monteiro Da Rocha, Ph.D. (Internal Medicine – Cardiology) and Kenneth Cadigan, Ph.D. (Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology) for their proposal: “Wnt and aging-associated diastolic dysfunction”
• Matthias Truttmann, Ph.D. (Molecular and Integrative Physiology) and Andrea Thompson, MD, Ph.D. (Internal Medicine – Cardiology) for their proposal: “Novel FICD inhibitors to improve cardiomyocyte and motor neuron proteostasis”

“We are particularly excited to see these partnerships between investigators, as they represent exactly the kind of collaborative, cross-disciplinary work that will advance our understanding of brain and cardiac aging,” said Dr. Ahmed Abdel-Latif, Director of M-BoCA.  “We remain deeply committed to supporting early-career investigators and novel research directions in the biology of aging. These awards reflect our conviction that breakthrough discoveries often emerge from bold ideas and unexpected collaborations. We look forward to seeing how these projects develop and contribute to our understanding of heart and brain health."

The Innovative Multidisciplinary Research Pilot Award provides $100,000 annually for two years to support highly innovative research with the potential to substantively impact heart and brain health.

The objective of this pilot funding is to support projects that may be too innovative and speculative for traditional funding sources but still have a likelihood of producing impact findings. Aimed at encouraging compelling proposals across the full spectrum of our programmatic disciplines in support of innovative and impactful heart & brain research projects. We hope to support increased collaboration between experienced and new researchers to foster mentorship opportunities and knowledge exchange.  

Dr. Anthony Rosenzweig, Director of the Frankel IHBH commented, “It was a pleasure to partner with Dr. Abdel-Latif and the M-BOCA program of the Frankel Cardiovascular Center on these awards, which recognize the crucial role of aging in heart and brain disease. We are delighted to help support these innovative proposals and look forward to learning more as their science evolves.”

We will launch the Frankel IHBH Multidisciplinary Pilot Award FY 26 call for applications in June 2025.

Please contact our team with any questions or for additional information.