Seven projects awarded the StratNeuro Collaborative Neuroscience grant 2025
Each project has been awarded 3 million SEK over a two-year period.
The StratNeuro Collaborative Neuroscience Grant is designed to foster ambitious, multidisciplinary collaborations across the field of neuroscience. The grant aims to support research projects that are not only of outstanding scientific quality, but also innovative, feasible, and collaborative in nature—bridging disciplines to generate new insights into the nervous system in health and disease.
This year, the interest in the program was exceptionally high: 45 Letters of Intent were submitted in January 2025 by researchers across Karolinska Institutet and its affiliated hospitals and institutions. Following a thorough evaluation by the StratNeuro Board, the top 13 projects were invited to submit full proposals.
To ensure a robust and transparent review process, these proposals were assessed by four external reviewers:
- Cecilia Lundberg, Lund University
- David Engblom, Linköping University
- Mart Saarma, University of Helsinki
- Satu Palva, University of Helsinki
Based on the external reviewers' evaluations and recommendations, the StratNeuro Board has selected seven collaborative projects to receive funding for 2025. The selected teams bring together researchers from different fields and units, demonstrating novel synergies and a strong potential to advance neuroscience through interdisciplinary approaches. Each project will be awarded 3 million SEK over a two-year period.
The awardees are (in alphabetical order according to the main applicant's surname):
- Konstantinos Ampatzis , Department of Neuroscience, and Stefania Giacomello, KTH
- Project: "Activity-Dependent Neurotransmitter Switching: A Unified Approach for Uncovering the Underlying Mechanisms"
- Klas Blomgren, Department of Women's and Children's Health and Joakim Lundeberg, KTH.
- Project: "How does lithium protect the brain against ionizing radiation?"
- Gonçalo Castelo-Branco, Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics, and Burcu Ayoglu, KTH
- Project: "Development of Simultaneous Transcriptomic, Epigenome and Protein spatial profiling (STEPspatial) to investigate neural development and neurodegeneration"
- François Lallemend, Deparment of Neuroscience, and Laurence Picton, Department of Neuroscience
- Project: "Functional organization of the mammalian vestibular system"
- Thomas Perlmann , Department of Cell and Molecular Biology, and Johan Holmberg, Department of Cell and Molecular Biology.
- Project: "Decoding the influence of chromatin accessibility on dopaminergic identity and Parkinson’s disease-like neuronal pathology"
- Michael Ratz, Department of Cell and Molecular Biology, and Ilaria Testa, KTH
- Project: "BrainScope: volumetric spatial RNA-sequencing of single-neuron connectivity"
- Janina Seubert, Department of Clinical Neuroscience, and Christoph Pfeiffer, Department of Clinical Neuroscience
- Project: "How is food reward value represented in the insula? An olfactory osMEG study"
These collaborations exemplify StratNeuro’s mission to promote neuroscience research that cuts across traditional boundaries—uniting experimental, clinical, and computational approaches to tackle complex questions in brain science.
We congratulate all funded teams and look forward to following the progress and impact of these exciting new projects!