Message from the Executive Director

Resiliency is the ability to bend, not break. I’m sure Stiles-Nicholson Brain Institute members have called on their resiliency many times to keep research moving. Together, we have stayed strong, and that strength can be seen in MasterMinds 2026, including the bright minds joining the Neuroscience Graduate Program, inventors making tools to watch molecules dance, faculty exploring the continuum from body to brain and dreaming and demonstrating how to treat addiction, depression, Alzheimer’s disease and brain cancer. Our community sponsors trust in this resilient group to build the new Florida Atlantic University Center for the Resilient Mind, are featured in this year’s publication. We are grateful to the Palm Health Foundation, the Merrell Family Foundation and Frances Fisher, whose collective $600,000 in seed funding will empower the center to identify the mechanisms of resiliency and inspire generations to forge a connection between the granular lessons of neuroscience and human needs. Here's a look at the center's programs:

• Program for Resilient Youth – A $400,000 grant from the Community Foundation of Broward and the Sharron and Joseph Ashby Hubert Fund, launched efforts to understand how early life stress can be throttled, preventing lasting scars on one’s psyche. A connection found the immune system and maternal separation has since led to multiple grants and the support of faculty linking body to brain.
• Program for Resilient Aging – Spurred by the launch of the David and Lynn Nicholson Center for Neurodegenerative Disease Research, the institute received $200,000 from the George T. Elmore Impact for Good Initiative, to support the neurobiological and mental problems of the aging. These funds help send young scientists to conferences to learn from leaders in the field.
• Program for Resilient Communities - This program reminds us that our brain and mental health greatly benefit from the support of others. As a child of a family of tragedy, I learned how the help offered by others sustained my imagination and helped me wire together the brain circuits needed to achieve something I never could have imagined. Now, 64 years later, I live at a time where the impact of community can be studied in the brain.

• In this regard, FAU has made a bold investment in both animal and human imaging technologies, as well as in the faculty, who can use these scanners to monitor brain activity. To support this effort, the institute is training computational neuroscientists and neuroengineers to pursue this research and watch the brain in action. With faculty of the institute-sponsored Center for the Future of Mind, AI and Society, we are challenged to understand how these mental traces underlie human consciousness.

• Program for Artistic Resilience – This program seeks to understand how artistic expression changes brains and minds, and can lead to insight, healing and peace. In memory of Joyce and Dusty Sang’s son Ryan, this effort is embodied in the Insights VIII exhibit on display at the FAU Ritter Art Gallery, FAU Boca Raton campus, Feb. 19 to March 15. The exhibit presents the creative expressions of artists with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. I know my time with the Ryan Licht Sang Foundation’s creative works and artists has helped me personally deal with stigma from my own illness.

Lastly, the Neuroscience Graduate Program had a banner year recruiting trainees. Anna Ewing and John Capotosto provided recruitment fellowships, and the June Jones Foundation, helped with research fellowships. Although you will see the exploits of the older beards in this issue, these young scientists will one day be standing in their shoes as a result of their resilient minds. And finally, we are grateful to the Stiles-Nicholson Foundation for continued funding of our impactful ASCEND program.

Randy D. Blakely, Ph.D.
Executive Director, Stiles-Nicholson Brain Institute
Director, Neuroscience Ph.D. Program
David J. S. Nicholson Distinguished Professor in Neuroscience
Professor of Biomedical Science, Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine
Florida Atlantic University