The Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience at Stanford’s Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute has contributed to funding four innovative new research projects among eight newly awarded by the Rosenkranz Aging and Rejuvenation Seed Grant Program.
Funded by the Rosenkranz Foundation, these grants provide early-stage funding for visionary researchers at Stanford to test new or unconventional ideas with the potential to transform our understanding of the aging process and open new avenues for promoting resilience, repair, and rejuvenation.
The program’s first call for research proposals in Fall of 2025 generated scores of exciting proposals — many more than could be funded in a single round of grants. However, with the added partnership of the Knight Initiative, the program will be able to support more research projects than initially envisioned.
The newly funded projects are creative and wide-ranging, from attempting to rejuvenate youthful brain plasticity using magnetic stimulation to charting declines in genome organization and epigenetic memory in aging brain cells.
“We are excited to announce the outcome of this grant opportunity, and grateful to the Knight Initiative for making it possible to support more of these exciting research projects,” said Anne Brunet, the Michele and Timothy Barakett Endowed Professor in the Department of Genetics at Stanford Medicine, who led the Rosenkranz grant call with Knight Initiative Director Tony Wyss-Coray.
2026 Rosenkranz Aging and Rejuvenation Seed Grants
*Partially or fully supported by the Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience
Depleting Myeloid-Biased Hematopoietic Stem Cells to Rejuvenate Aged Immunity and Extend Healthspan
Jason Ross (Radiation Oncology)
EHR-Derived Dynamic Proteomics for Characterizing Aging Trajectories, Resilience, and Rejuvenation at Population Scale
Nima Aghaeepoour (Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine)
*Sleep-state transcranial magnetic stimulation to rejuvenate prefrontal plasticity and cognitive healthspan in aging
Andrea Goldstein-Piekarski (Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences) and Corey Keller (Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences)
*Direct Pharmacologic Activation of the Proteasome to Restore Proteostasis in Aging
Onn Brandman (Biochemistry) and Kang Shen (Biology)
TMEM106B as a lever of brain aging pace
Aaron Gitler (Genetics) and Monther Abu-Remaileh (Chemical Engineering)
*Data-Driven Mapping of Brain Network Resilience and Rejuvenation in Aging
Yu Zhang (Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences) and Ehsan Adeli (Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences)
*Tracking age-associated erosion of genome mobility, repair, organization, and epigenetic memory in the brain with multimodal single-cell technologies
Alistair Boettiger (Developmental Biology) and Longzhi Tan (Neurobiology)
Impact of Young-Donor Gut Microbiome Transplant and Diet on Markers of Aging
Justin Sonnenburg (Microbiology and Immunology), Christopher Gardner (Stanford Prevention Research Center), and Sean Spencer (Medicine—Gastroenterology and Hepatology)