Stanford University has announced a $75 million gift from Nike co-founder Phil Knight and his wife, Penny, in support of a multidisciplinary neurodegenerative brain disease research initiative at the university’s Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute.

The Phil and Penny Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience will explore the causes of cognitive decline from diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, as well as potential treatments, focusing on the sources of brain aging, identifying the principles of brain health, establishing techniques to encourage healthy aging and brain resilience, and finding early diagnostics, neurotherapeutics, and effective treatments for brain degeneration.

“Forging new connections among Stanford clinical experts and Stanford’s leading basic scientists, engineers, researchers, and other scientific staff will bring novel collaborations, perspectives, and technologies into our ability to treat the whole patient, keeping people healthy and thriving longer,” said Stanford University School of Medicine dean Lloyd Minor.

“Landmark advances have yielded new tools…[that] include the sequencing of the human genome, the analysis of the brain at the level of a single cell, revolutionary imaging capabilities, discoveries in nanoscience and physics, optogenetics, and human brain organogenesis,” said Knight Initiative director Tony Wyss-Coray. “By uniting the Stanford neuroscience community around the unsolved challenge of neurodegeneration, the Knight Initiative aims to exploit these new tools and techniques, as well as the reduced barriers to interdisciplinary collaboration, to inspire a new science of brain aging and resilience and usher in a new era for brain science.”

(Photo credit: GettyImages/Pornpak Khunatorn)