The mission of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) is to make all diseases curable, or at least manageable, by the end of this century. Specifically for neurodegeneration, they have set up the Neurodegeneration Challenge Network (NDCN) to connect outstanding researchers across the globe and across disciplines. In 2018, a Mission Lucidity team became part of the network and received a CZI Collaborative Science award for their Parkinson’s brain-on-a-chip project, led by Prof. Patrik Verstreken.

To stimulate local collaboration and the growth of a broader neurodegeneration community at institutes part of the NDCN, CZI continues to provide additional funding opportunities. Recently, a team of postdocs and PhD students from the Verstreken lab received a CZI Community grant, entitled “A platform for knowledge sharing to enhance the efficacy of neurodegeneration research”.

Postdoc Amit Chouhan: “This community project aims to bring researchers, irrespective of their training level, closer and provide a platform to share their knowledge, scientific experience, technical expertise and ideas in a platform based on communication and discussion. It will also help participating postdocs and Ph.D. students to acquire new transferrable skills including public speaking, scientific communication, event planning and management.”

As part of the project, the team will host four scientific sessions in 2020. Each will include a seminar from an invited speaker on a topic related to neurodegeneration, followed by a group debate. The sessions will be open for researchers at every level. They will be hosted by the Center for Brain & Disease Research at VIB-KU Leuven, but researchers from other Flemish institutes and universities will also be invited.