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 the work done by the original Autism Rat Models Consortium, which launched in 2022 to investigate the biology of autism risk genes by using SFARI rat models as an experimental system.
Grants awarded through this program are intended to recharge and extend the original consortium of researchers and to integrate new ideas and new researchers into the existing collaborative framework. These grants will be funded by Simons Foundation International and administered by SFARI.
SFARI intends to award nearly $12 million to 15 investigators for eight projects. The awardees are listed below.
Benjamin Auerbach (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
Identifying convergent and divergent sensory phenotypes across genetically diverse rat models of ASD
Anne Churchland (University of California, Los Angeles)
Coordinated, brain-wide changes underlying perceptual decision-making in autism rat models
Sandeep Robert Datta (Harvard University), Paul Dudchenko (University of Stirling), Adrien Peyrache (McGill University) and Emma Wood (University of Edinburgh)
Sensory integration and cognitive inflexibility in rat models of neurodevelopmental disorders
James Dooley (Purdue University)
Changes in sleep and sensorimotor development in Fmr1 knockout rats
Loren Frank, Kevin Bender and Nadav Ahituv (University of California, San Francisco)
Understanding the cellular and circuit bases for behavioral impairments in the Scn2a knockout rat
Tim Hanks (University of California, Davis)
The role of circuit-specific dopamine neuromodulation in autism-related behaviors
Margaret McCarthy and Steffen Wolff (University of Maryland, Baltimore)
The power of play: connecting SFARI-ASD gene disruption to synapses, circuits and neuronal activity during adolescent rat social behavior
Bence Ölveczky (Harvard University), Ann Kennedy (Scripps Research Institute) and Naoshige Uchida (Harvard University)
Neural circuit mechanisms underlying social interactions in autism rat models
