The Simons Foundation commits $80 million over 10 years to study how the brain uses energy

The Simons Foundation is committing $80 million over 10 years to the Simons Collaboration on Brain Energetics, which will study how the brain's energy supply shapes the way it computes, the New York foundation announced on November 2.

The collaboration brings together 26 investigators at 18 institutions, led by co-directors Thomas Clandinin of Stanford University and Anna Devor of Boston University. It is the foundation's fourth current neuroscience collaboration, alongside its collaborations on ecological neuroscience, plasticity and the aging brain, and the global brain.

What will the money pay for?

Basic research on what the brain's energy limits mean for how it works. The foundation lists four areas: how much energy different brain cells use for tasks such as firing signals or clearing waste, including new sensors for molecules like glucose and ATP; how energy supply shapes larger circuits for vision, navigation and memory; how neurons and blood vessels work together to deliver energy, which could help researchers read fMRI scans; and how the brain copes when energy runs short, as in diabetes, low oxygen or pregnancy.

The teams will study worms, flies, mice and humans, with a strong emphasis on theory, computation and shared data. "Every thought and action depends on neurons performing computations that are extraordinarily costly in energy terms," said Kelsey Martin, executive vice president of the foundation's Autism & Neuroscience division, in the announcement. Hannah Bayer, a senior scientific officer, said the group is "committed to open data."

How large is $80 million for Simons?

It is a modest share of a large grantmaker's budget. Spread evenly, $80 million over 10 years averages $8 million a year. If it were split evenly among the 26 investigators, that would be about $308,000 per investigator per year. The foundation has not said how it will divide the money, so the per-investigator figure is our illustration only.

For scale, we checked the foundation's most recent Form 990-PF, the annual return private foundations file with the IRS, as posted on ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer. It reports $317.1 million in grants paid in 2023 and $4.59 billion in assets at year end. $8 million a year is about 2.5% of that 2023 grant total, by our arithmetic. Our guide to reading a Form 990 explains where those lines sit on the return.

Where are the investigators?

Mostly in the United States. Of the 18 institutions, 14 are American, among them Stanford, Boston University, Harvard, MIT, Yale, Columbia, Rockefeller University, Washington University, Weill Cornell Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, UCSF, the Allen Institute, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus and the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience. The other four are the University of Oslo, Cardiff University, the University of Edinburgh and the Institute of Science and Technology Austria, by our count of the foundation's list.

What should research nonprofits take from it?

In our view, the model is worth noting for smaller funders too. Simons funds a named team for a long, fixed term around one scientific question and asks it to share data, rather than making one-off project grants. Ten years is long enough for a question that needs new tools before it yields results. For another recent gift for brain research, see our story on the $23 million gift for dementia research at UC Irvine.