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The 93 undergraduate students will receive invaluable, hands-on research experience in nearby Simons Foundation-supported neuroscience labs.

The program supports talented early-career scientists as they transition to tenure-track faculty positions. Submit your application by January 13, 2027.

Deisseroth wins the award, along with Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel, for discoveries leading to the development of optogenetics — a technique that uses light to control cellular signals.

The events selected for funding include a training program for African autism researchers, a computational neuroscience forum and a conference supporting open-science tools in neurophysiology.

… genotype-phenotype studies.” The data are available to approved researchers via SFARI Base. Please contact [email protected] with any questions.

Autism BrainNet (ABN) announces the release of genetic data from the laboratories of Tomasz Nowakowski and Stephan Sanders. This release includes omics data from studies of postmortem brain …

… distinction lets researchers separate genetics from environment. A sibling with more of the genetic variants linked to a trait, such as shyness, tended to score higher on …

… understanding between autistic and nonautistic people. The difficulty that each group has in reading the other runs deeper than a simple skills gap. Much of it stems …

The data include PacBio long-read whole genome sequencing data for 110 individuals from 37 families participating in the SPARK autism research study.

… competition for space. This same separation also makes it possible to study brain activity during cooperation without that physical complication. It offers researchers a more direct way …

Simons Searchlight, a program of the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI), announces the release of new de-identified participant data available to qualified researchers. This release includes …

These workshops seek to support research that applies emerging genomic technologies and artificial intelligence approaches to develop a more comprehensive understanding of autism’s genetic architecture.

The Simons Foundation is pleased to announce the 2026 class of its Fellows-to-Faculty program. The program supports talented early-career scientists and their research visions as …

… work.”

… reported that measures of gene expression and chromatin accessibility across the genome followed patterns specific to the XX or XY status of an individual cell, regardless of …

The Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative held its annual investigator meeting on March 16–18, 2026, in New York City.

SFARI plans to support 17 meetings organized by patient advocacy groups within the Simons Searchlight community.

… 6852 (2023) PubMed Liu C. et al. Science 375, 1378–1385 (2022) PubMed Krok A.C. et al. Nature 621, 543–549 (2023) PubMed Chantranupong L. et …

Epilepsy and intellectual disability often occur alongside autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and researchers have long suspected that these conditions share common biological roots.

… forming connections with other neurons, making it genetically vulnerable. The same research team had previously identified this window as a time of heightened autism risk using an …

The Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative will hold three workshops aimed at developing a multiyear collaborative effort in quantitative behavioral analysis of individuals with autism.

On January 22–23, 2026, SFARI held a workshop to explore advanced quantitative phenotyping methods for capturing visible behaviors, including motor phenotypes.

To enable bold and innovative new directions in autism research, the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI) welcomes applications for its recently launched New Ideas grant program. These …

… rigor, proposals are evaluated on how clearly they articulate their relevance to autism and related NDDs. We encourage applicants to familiarize themselves with the current landscape of …

The Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI) is funding 16 projects through its 2025 Data Analysis awards. This award is designed to encourage the use of large, publicly …

… learning-related differences in sensory function. By revealing how disrupted cortical–midbrain communication interferes with the flexible interpretation of environmental cues, this work offers a framework for …

These awards support interdisciplinary research into the sex bias associated with autism and its underlying biological mechanisms.

… SVs4, making it difficult to identify those relevant to disease. Comparing variants within families and against hundreds of long-read reference pangenomes allowed the team to filter …

Recent SFARI-funded research challenges the idea that autism represents a single condition driven by a uniform set of genetic risk factors. Instead, the results support a developmental …

The Simons Foundation is now accepting applications from undergraduate students to participate in its Shenoy Undergraduate Research Fellowship in Neuroscience (SURFiN) program for the 2026–2027 academic year …

SFARI-funded research demonstrates that activating serotonergic 5HT2c receptors leads to an increase in intracellular calcium, early-response gene expression and elevated protein secretion into cerebrospinal fluid.

… PAG-organized conference, you can explore the Conference Grant Support for Rare Neurodevelopmental Disorder Communities Participating in Simons Searchlight RFA. Applicants must submit a letter of intent …

SFARI-funded research finds that RAPGEF4 is a key molecular regulator orchestrating prefrontal cortical maturation in primates.

The Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI) is pleased to announce a new data release from Simons Searchlight aimed at improving the scientific understanding of autism.

SFARI-funded research demonstrates that SCN8A mutations underlying DEE-13 disrupt both cortical and hippocampal networks, but in distinct ways.

On September 29, 2025, the SFARI Autism Rat Consortium (ARC) held its annual meeting in the Usher Institute of the University of Edinburgh. This year’s event brought …

Simons Searchlight offers open-source data and tools to researchers worldwide who study autism and related neurodevelopmental conditions.

… has shown that this inhibitory synchronicity is indeed a driver of seizure vulnerability. Mapping the Senses of Internal Organs Fellows-to-Faculty member Chen Ran, an assistant …

… fellowship encouraged you to collaborate with people in different fields? Absolutely. Once a year or twice a year, for as long as you’re a grantee, you …

… other Simons Investigators. For example, I collaborate with Stephan Sanders on analyses of human postmortem brain tissue profiling. I collaborate with Omer Bayraktar to further understand which …

… Autism Spectr. Disord. 87, 101840 (2021) PubMed

… Neurosci. 27, 1864–1879 (2024) PubMed Karczewski K.J. et al. Nature 581, 434–443 (2020) PubMed Howe K.L. et al. Ensembl 2021. Nucleic Acids Res …

This year’s new cohort of National Academy of Medicine members includes two investigators funded by the Simons Foundation. Election to the academy “recognizes individuals who have demonstrated …

A new study finds that mice with variants in autism-associated genes have difficulty flexibly updating their expectations. The mice relied more on frontal brain areas associated with …

… linking genes and behavior. The magnitude of this problem requires communal efforts among scientists working on different organisms and systems. Creating such synergy served as a motivation …

This program provides highly motivated undergraduates with opportunities to gain first-hand research experience and career development.

The awards help senior postdoctoral researchers with fresh perspectives on autism and neuroscience transition to tenure-track faculty positions.

The Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI) is pleased to announce the recipients of its Autism Rat Models Consortium 2.0 grants. This grant program will expand on …