Welcome to the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI) website, SFARI.org. Launched in 2006 as a scientific initiative within the Simons Foundation‘s suite of programs, the mission of SFARI is to advance the basic science of autism and related neurodevelopmental disorders. SFARI is housed within the Autism and Neuroscience division of the Simons Foundation and benefits from close interactions with the Simons Foundation Neuroscience Collaborations and Informatics programs.
SFARI aims to advance autism science though several avenues.
- Convening the Scientific Community
The inspiration for SFARI came in 2003 after the Simons Foundation convened a roundtable meeting of top scientists to discuss the state of autism research. SFARI continues this tradition of gathering scientists and autism community members through a variety of workshops and meetings. The ideas that emerge from these events advance the field of autism research and often give rise to new SFARI-funded initiatives. Descriptions of past events can be found here.
SFARI also benefits from the expertise of its distinguished Scientific Advisory Board, from advisory boards for specific SFARI-supported projects and from its scientific grant review panels.
- Funding Innovative Research and Early Career Scientists
SFARI currently supports over 300 investigators worldwide through a variety of funding mechanisms, including individual investigator and larger collaborative grants as well as early career awards. Grants are awarded through a competitive process that begins with Requests for Applications (RFAs) that are posted on our Funding Opportunities page.
Since its launch, a major focus of SFARI supported research has been on human genetics. This work has identified more than 200 highly penetrant risk genes for autism and related neurodevelopmental disorders, highlighting the heterogeneity of risk factors and providing a firm foundation for exploring neurobiological changes that result from these genetic differences. To ensure that SFARI continues to be as impactful over the coming five to ten years, we are currently engaged in a strategic planning effort to identify the most promising and innovative new approaches to understanding the basic science of autism and related neurodevelopmental disorders. The strategic priorities that emerge from this process will inform future funding opportunities, which we anticipate announcing in late 2025 and early 2026.
Aligned with the Simons Foundation’s commitment to creating pathways to science, SFARI also funds early career training programs that create a pathway for outstanding new scientists to enter the autism research field. These include the Fellows-to-Faculty Award, which facilitates the transition from postdoctoral fellowship to junior faculty, as well as the Shenoy Undergraduate Research Fellowship in Neuroscience (SURFiN), which allows for undergraduate students with limited access to research opportunities to work in the laboratories of SFARI investigators.
- Establishing Shared, Research-Ready Resources
SFARI is committed to the practice of open science and recognizes that data sharing accelerates both basic research and its translation into clinical care. True to this commitment, we continue to enable shared resources that are available to autism researchers worldwide.
We maintain large cohorts that include well-characterized individuals with autism as well as individuals who carry genetic variants associated with autism or related neurodevelopmental disorders. Available cohorts include the Simons Simplex Collection, Simons Searchlight, SPARK and the Autism Inpatient Collection.
SFARI houses databases that include clinical, phenotypic, genetic and neuroimaging data and biospecimens from our cohorts and other SFARI-funded projects. We also offer data analysis tools that can help researchers interrogate genetic risk factors for autism and explore genotypic and phenotypic data from SFARI cohorts.
Through SFARI’s Research Match program, researchers can apply to recruit individuals enrolled in SFARI cohorts into new research studies.
These cohorts and tools are complemented by a collection of biological resources created to facilitate laboratory studies of autism. These include induced pluripotent stem cells generated from a subset of individuals in SFARI cohorts, post-mortem human brain tissue and genetically modified zebrafish, mouse and rat experimental models.
More information about SFARI shared resources is available here. The SFARI Data and Biospecimen Repository (SDBR) team provides navigation for researchers interested in SFARI resources and can be reached here.
We at SFARI are committed to supporting the best science that addresses the many challenges posed by autism, and we hope that SFARI.org is useful to you. The scientific staff and I welcome your input and your suggestions for new resources and directions that will help advance the basic science of autism and related neurodevelopmental disorders.