On May 12, 2026, Stanford University announced a $90 million gift from Penny and Philip H. Knight, MBA ’62, that will enable the Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience at Stanford’s Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute to extend and deepen its work building a new science of healthy brain aging. The new gift will allow the initiative, launched in 2022 with a $75 million gift from the Knight family, to expand the thriving research community it has cultivated at Stanford and further its mission to decode the secrets of resilient aging and build a future free from dementia and neurodegenerative disease.

Despite decades of research and many billions in investments, progress in developing effective interventions to counter Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative disorders has been frustratingly slow. The Knight Initiative offers an inspiring new framework for progress in the field by challenging researchers to ask not just what goes wrong in neurodegenerative disease but what goes right in the brains of those who live into old age with their health and cognition intact.

In the coming years, enabled by the continued generosity of the Knight family, the Initiative will expand its efforts to build a more complete understanding of the biological drivers of brain resilience – mapping the molecular evolution of human brain aging with cutting-edge technologies and developing new AI and laboratory models to test interventions that could enhance brain function deep into old age.

The Initiative will also continue to invest in the creative and innovative research of the Stanford research community through regular grant calls and support for the next generation of researchers focused on the science of resilient aging.

The molecular signatures of brain aging the lab is identifying have the potential to transform our understanding of the key biological systems that go right in healthy aging and go wrong in age-related disease. The lab’s datasets will all be made openly available to the global research community to further accelerate scientific discovery. Empowered by the new gift from the Knight family, the initiative plans to launch parallel internal research efforts that will build on the unprecedented molecular data coming out of the Brain Resilience Laboratory.

In addition to the Brain Resilience Laboratory’s signature projects, the Knight Initiative has inspired a growing community of Stanford scientists pursuing new approaches to preventing or treating neurodegenerative disorders within their own labs – work the new gift will help expand.

In its first four years, the Initiative has invested in 69 innovative research projects by nearly 100 faculty and postdoctoral scientists across 29 Stanford departments, enabling researchers to form new collaborations and tackle bold, out-of-the-box questions – projects that would often be difficult to support through traditional research funding mechanisms.