The Allen Institute today debuted the 2019 Next Generation Leaders, a group of six early-career neuroscientists who will participate in a special advisory council for the Allen Institute for Brain Science, a division of the Allen Institute. Now in its sixth year, the Next Generation Leaders Program was created for and by researchers in early stages of their scientific career, who don’t always get the benefit of formal external advice.

“Over the past six years of this program, we’ve seen amazing accomplishments from our current and former Next Generation Leaders,” said Christof Koch, Ph.D., President and Chief Scientific Officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science. “The 2019 group is an impressive cadre of rising stars in neuroscience and we’re looking forward to the perspective they will bring to our research programs.”

The program also provides professional development for its members by offering training on how to serve as scientific advisors to another organization, roles typically not given to scientists until they are well advanced in their careers.

Next Generation Leaders are selected each year through a competitive process that includes applications from around the world. The six Next Generation Leaders selected will each have a three-year term on the advisory council.

“Being a part of this council really opened me up to a wonderful wealth of research that’s done at the Allen Institute and gave me a broader understanding of how the brain works,” said Lucy Palmer, Ph.D., a neuroscientist who leads the Neural Network Laboratory at the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health at the University of Melbourne and was a member of the second Next Generation Leaders cohort. “I’ve also learned a lot from my fellow Next Generation Leaders, and started new collaborations through these connections. It’s a fantastic network.”

The 18-member council will convene at this year’s Showcase Symposium at the Allen Institute, held Nov. 11-12, where they will present their own research and give feedback on research presented by early-career Allen Institute researchers. The members also attend one additional scientific advisory council meeting per year to provide feedback on specific research projects.

The newly appointed Next Generation Leaders are:

• Aparna Bhaduri, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of California, San Francisco
• Christina Kim, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Stanford University
• Scott Linderman, Ph.D., Assistant Professor at Stanford University
• Michael Lodato, Ph.D., Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School
• Nick Steinmetz, Ph.D., Assistant Professor at the University of Washington
• Eric Yttri, Ph.D., Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University

About the Allen Institute for Brain Science

The Allen Institute for Brain Science is a division of the Allen Institute (alleninstitute.org), an independent, 501(c)(3) nonprofit medical research organization, and is dedicated to accelerating the understanding of how the human brain works in health and disease. Using a big science approach, the Allen Institute generates useful public resources used by researchers and organizations around the globe, drives technological and analytical advances, and discovers fundamental brain properties through integration of experiments, modeling and theory. Launched in 2003 with a seed contribution from founder and philanthropist, the late Paul G. Allen, the Allen Institute is supported by a diversity of government, foundation and private funds to enable its projects. The Allen Institute for Brain Science’s data and tools are publicly available online at brain-map.org.