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Meet the 2024 Glenn Foundation Discovery Award recipients

Meet the 2024 Glenn Foundation Discovery Award recipients


AFAR is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2024 Glenn Foundation Discovery Award:

Jeffrey Friedman, MD, PhD
Professor, Rockefeller University; Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute


Myriam Heiman, PhD
Associate Professor of Neuroscience, Massachusetts Institute of Technology



The Glenn Foundation Discovery Award was created to support research projects with strong potential to develop pioneering discoveries to understand the underlying biological mechanisms that govern normal human aging and its related physiological decline. Two three-year awards of $525,000 are made annually ($175,000 per year for three years).

Dr. Friedman’s Discovery Award is titled “Cellular and Molecular Basis for Hypothalamus Aging. By studying individual brain cells, Dr. Friedman aims to understand the changes that occur as we age. This knowledge could help develop new treatments for age-related diseases and improve overall health as we get older. Learn more about Dr. Friedman’s research at Rockefeller University here and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute here.

Dr. Heiman’s Discovery Award is titled “Charting the Cellular Rejuvenation Landscape in Aging Neurons."  Dr. Heiman aims to understand the mechanisms that underlie the exceptional longevity of nerve cells in our brain. If understood these mechanisms could be targeted to restore nerve cell function in the context of aging and neurodegeneration and could also potentially be induced in other cell types of the body to increase the healthspan of the whole organism. Learn more about Dr. Heiman’s research at MIT here.

Learn more about the Glenn Foundation Discovery Awards here.

AFAR is grateful to the Glenn Foundation for Medical Research for their support of this grant program.

Glenn Foundation for Medical Research

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