The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research has announced the expansion of the Edmond J. Safra Fellowship in Movement Disorders program.

Launched in 2014 by MJFF and the Edmond J. Safra Foundation, the fellowship program annually awards funding in support of medical centers around the world to provide neurologists with additional training in Parkinson's and other movement disorders. According to MJFF, an estimated six million people worldwide are living with Parkinson's — a figure that is expected to double by 2040 — and the program is aimed at narrowing the gap between trained neurologists and people with the disease.

During the most recent round of funding, eight centers were selected to train the Class of 2024: Cleveland Clinic; Emory University in Atlanta; Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore; Radboud University Medical Centre in Nijmegen, Netherlands; Rush University Medical Center in Chicago; Toronto Western Hospital; University College London; and the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

To date, the fellowship program has graduated twenty-one new Parkinson's specialists and is on track to graduate forty-eight new movement disorder specialists around the world by 2025. The 2021 graduating class includes Whitley W. Aamodt (University of Pennsylvania); Christopher Y. Caughman (Emory University); Neil Shetty (Northwestern University); Judith van Gaalen (Radboud University); and Amir Badiei (University of California, San Francisco).

"Thanks to the generosity of our partner the Edmond J. Safra Foundation, the Edmond J. Safra Fellowship is changing the future of care and research for people and families living with Parkinson's," said MJFF chief executive and co-founder Debi Brooks. "The Edmond J. Safra Fellows and their mentors are committed to the Parkinson's community. They are dedicating their lives and careers to deliver high-quality care and lead impactful research."