Research

Safadi Program

Safadi Program of Excellence in Clinical and Translational Neuroscience

Whether in clinical care or medical research, it is critical for physicians and scientists to partner in order to make important advances. This is particularly true in the neurosciences, where the brain presents an immense frontier for scientific advances utilizing collaborative tools and integrative strategies. The Safadi Program of Excellence in Clinical and Translational Neuroscience at the University of Chicago Medicine was launched on April 18, 2017, with the aim of facilitating this multidisciplinary interface, and creating opportunities for collaboration among scientists and clinicians engaged in the diagnosis and treatment of neurological disorders. (Learn more about Mr. Mohammad Safadi.)

Issam Awad
Safadi Program Director
John Harper Seeley Professor of Neurological Surgery, Neurology & The Comprehensive Cancer Center
Director, Neurovascular Surgery

Seth Himelhoch
Professor and Chairman
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience

John Maunsell
Albert D. Lasker Distinguished Service Professor of Neurobiology
Director of the Grossman Institute for Neuroscience

Shyam Prabhakaran
James Nelson and Anna Louise Raymond Professor of Neurology
Chair of Neurology

Mark Siegler
Executive Director, Bucksbaum Institute of Clinical Excellence
Lindy Bergman Distinguished Service Professor of Medicine and Surgery
Director, MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics

Julian Solway
Director, Institute for Translational Medicine
Walter L. Palmer Distinguished Service Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics
Dean for Translational Medicine, Biological Sciences Division
Vice Chair for Research, Department of Medicine
Chair, Committee on Molecular Medicine
Professor of Pediatrics

Bakhtiar Yamini
Professor of Neurological Surgery
Director, Neurosurgical Oncology
Interim Chair, Department of Neurological Surgery

Deadline for Submission: December 1, 2024
Project Period: Maximum 12 months, to commence any time after January 1, 2025

Full time faculty in any track at the University of Chicago are invited to apply for Safadi Pilot Grants, to support the generation of preliminary or exploratory data involving novel multidisciplinary neuroscience collaborations, or to help support fellowship training involving novel multidisciplinary tools and concepts.

Proposals should articulate the novel multidisciplinary collaboration, and disease relevance or collaboration with clinical neuroscience group. Applications are due at midnight, December 1, 2024. Decisions about winning proposals will be made before January 1, 2025, and funding for up to 12 months may be requested to commence any time after that date.

Proposals will be evaluated based on:

Innovation
Scientific rigor
The uniqueness of opportunity/infrastructure/milieu
Contribution to multidisciplinary program development, specifying what disciplines it proposes to bridge
Potential impact on clinical neuroscience translation or disease applications
Future directions (i.e. how pilot data will be used for future project application; or how would fellowship support will be leveraged in future career development in multidisciplinary perspective).

2025 Safadi Pilot Grant Application Online Form

The 2025 Safadi Lecture

"Representing the
Visual World"

Wednesday, October 1, 2025
10am-Noon
The Rubenstein Forum at The University of Chicago

Doris Tsao, PhD
Professor, University of California Berkeley
Department of Molecular & Cell Biology, and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute

Doris Tsao is a professor of biology at the University of California Berkeley and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She joined UC Berkeley in 2021, and prior to that was professor at Caltech from 2009-2021. She studied biology and mathematics at Caltech as an undergraduate and received her Ph.D. in neuroscience from Harvard in 2002. She studies the neural mechanisms underlying vision in order to understand how the brain creates our perception of reality. Her lab is investigating mechanisms at multiple stages in the visual hierarchy, from early processes for segmenting visual input into discrete objects, to mid- and high-level perceptual processes for assigning meaningful identity to specific objects, to processes by which these perceptual representations are integrated into coherent scene representations. .She is widely recognized for pioneering the use of fMRI to target electrodes for studying visual processing in monkeys, and in particular for her discovery of the macaque face patch system, a network of regions in the temporal lobe dedicated to face processing. She has received multiple honors including the Sofia Kovalevskaya Award (2004), Eppendorf & Science International Prize in Neurobiology (2006), MacArthur Fellowship (2018), and Kavli Prize (2024). She was elected to the National Academy of Science in 2020.

Safadi Faculty Scholars

The Safadi Program is proud to have contributed to the recruitment and start-up support of key faculty in the Departments of Neurology and Neurological Surgery, who will lead transformational neuroscience programs relevant to human diseases.