The American Parkinson Disease Association (APDA), has awarded more than $1.1 million in seven research grants, four post-graduate fellowships, and funding for centers for advanced research at eight major academic and medical centers across the country. To date, the country’s largest grassroots organization serving 1.5 million Americans with the disease has contributed more than $80 million to patient/caregiver support and education and as a funding partner in most of the major scientific breakthrough in Parkinson’s disease research.
Researchers at six institutions received one-time $50,000 research grants including Laura Vopicelli-Daley, PhD and Talene Yocoubian, MD, PhD, the University of Alabama at Birmingham; Xin Qi, PhD, Case Western Reserve University; Ming Guo, MD, PhD, the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine; Sheng-Han Kuo, Columbia University; Terry Ellis, PhD, PT, NCS, Boston University, and C. Savio Chan, PhD at Northwestern University.
One-year, $35,000 post-doctoral fellowships were awarded to Mian Cao, PhD, Yale University; Cathy N.P. Lui, PhD, Northwestern University; Dirk Landgraf, PhD, Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, and João Paulo Lima Daher, MD, PhD, the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
APDA centers for advanced research are funded $75,000 annually and work to strengthen and help to integrate already existing investigative teams. These centers have at least three successful research programs, preferably National Institutes of Health-funded, and include significant patient-oriented research. They are located at Boston University School of Medicine; Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta; Rutgers/Robert Wood Johnson School of Medicine, New Brunswick, NJ; University of Virginia Medical School, Charlottesville; UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine; University of Pittsburgh; University of Alabama at Birmingham, and Washington University Medical Center, St. Louis.