The Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (BBRF) is pleased to announce the recipients of its 2026 Klerman & Freedman Prizes, honoring exceptional clinical and basic research in mental illness by early-career scientists. The prizes are awarded annually to recognize the work of outstanding scientists who have been supported by the Foundation’s Young Investigator Grants Program.
“The 2026 Klerman and Freedman Prize honorees are advancing some of the most promising frontiers in brain and behavior research, from mood and sleep circuitry and scalable psychotherapies to the neural mechanisms underlying social cognition, myelin biology, and brain-body communication,” said Jeffrey Borenstein, M.D., President & CEO of the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation. “Their work illustrates the power of supporting early-career investigators whose ideas can open new paths toward prevention, treatment, and recovery for people living with mental illness.”
2026 Klerman Prize for Exceptional Clinical Research
Joline M. Fan, M.D., M.S.
University of California, San Francisco
“The Klerman Prize is deeply meaningful to me because it recognizes work we are doing to understand brain circuits underlying mood and sleep and to translate these findings to personalized neuromodulation therapies. I am deeply honored and humbled to acknowledge that these types of efforts require a huge team of support, including from mentors, collaborators, and patients.”
Dr. Fan’s research focuses on understanding overlapping brain circuitry underlying mood, sleep, and epilepsy, and on advancing personalized neuromodulation strategies for psychiatric and neurologic disorders. Her work investigates how deep-brain networks regulate mood, arousal, and pathological excitability. Utilizing intracranial recordings from an ongoing clinical trial at UCSF involving individuals with treatment-resistant depression, Dr. Fan has demonstrated that corticolimbic and arousal networks are interconnected and that targeted stimulation of these circuits can modulate both mood and wakefulness. Her studies have helped identify neural biomarkers that may guide more personalized therapeutic interventions. More recently, she has advanced the use of low-intensity focused ultrasound as a non-invasive tool for stimulation mapping and modulation of deep brain networks involved in mood and related symptoms.
Honorable Mentions – Klerman Prize
Erica Berlin Baller, M.D., M.S.
University of Pennsylvania
Dr. Baller cares for hospitalized individuals with both medical and psychiatric disorders and leads a research program that uses multiple sclerosis as a model to understand how white matter disease in the brain contributes to mood, anxiety, and cognitive disorders. To do this, she combines advanced brain imaging, medical record research, and targeted clinical patient evaluations to map how injury location and burden relate to symptom profiles and clinical trajectories. Her work aims to enable early, targeted treatment for the general psychiatric population, as well as patients most vulnerable to psychiatric complications of neurological diseases.
Nili Solomonov, Ph.D.
Weill Cornell Medicine
Dr. Solomonov focuses on developing scalable, neuroscience-informed psychotherapies for depression. She applies computational modeling, artificial intelligence, and neuroimaging to identify mechanisms of treatment response and design targeted interventions. Her lab conducts clinical studies in mid- and late-life depression, suicidality, and postpartum depression, leveraging multimodal longitudinal data to uncover illness heterogeneity. A central focus of her work is social reward processing as a mechanism of action, which has informed the development of interventions such as Engage & Connect and machine learning–based approaches for precision treatment assignment. Her program emphasizes translation of scientific insights into scalable interventions, delivered to underserved populations in community settings.
2026 Freedman Prize for Exceptional Basic Research
Vineet Augustine, Ph.D.
University of California, San Diego
“Receiving the Freedman Prize is a profound honor. To be recognized by BBRF for research that started with a simple question and grew into a new exciting area is something I will carry with me throughout my career. I am deeply grateful to BBRF and to the scientific community that has supported this work.”
Dr. Augustine’s laboratory studies how signals from the body’s internal organs are sensed, transmitted to the brain, and translated into physiological responses and behavioral states. His central focus is cardioception, the neural encoding and central representation of cardiac signals, a research domain his laboratory has established and defined. His team asks a fundamental question: does the heart actively shape how the brain works, or is it merely regulated by the brain? His most recent work demonstrates that myocardial infarction (heart attack) is not a condition confined to the heart but a distributed neurobiological disorder orchestrated by a defined three-node circuit linking specialized pain-sensing neurons in the vagus nerve, hypothalamic brain circuits, and sympathetic ganglia in the neck, and it actively drives disease progression after a heart attack. When any node of this circuit is blocked, heart damage is substantially reduced, electrical stability is restored, and cardiac function improves. This work opens new avenues for circuit-based therapeutics targeting heart disease through the nervous system.
Honorable Mentions – Freedman Prize
Xiaoting Wu, Ph.D.
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
Dr. Wu’s research aims to understand how neural circuits and brain activity support social cognition in both health and disease. Her lab focuses on social memory, social decision-making, and related aspects of social behavior, with a particular interest in how molecules and neuromodulators shape the function of brain circuits. To achieve this, her lab combines cellular, circuit, and systems-level approaches to map how the composition of neural circuits gives rise to brain activity and subsequently social behavior. Dr. Wu hopes to use these insights to advance the development of therapies for the social deficits common in autism, schizophrenia, and mood disorders.
Wendy Xin, Ph.D.
University Health Network / University of Toronto
Dr. Xin studies how neurons interact with oligodendrocytes, the cells that make myelin in the central nervous system. Disruptions in myelin lead to significant motor and cognitive impairment and are also linked to a range of neurodevelopmental and psychiatric conditions, including schizophrenia, autism spectrum disorders, and mood disorders. Dr. Xin is exploring how oligodendrocytes and myelin influence brain development, activity, and plasticity. Her work aims to deepen our fundamental understanding of the brain and pave the way for new therapeutic approaches targeting myelination to treat neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders.
About the Klerman & Freedman Prizes
Established in memory of pioneering psychiatrists Gerald L. Klerman, M.D., and Daniel X. Freedman, M.D., these prizes recognize outstanding research conducted by recipients of BBRF Young Investigator grants. Winners are selected by committees of the Foundation’s Scientific Council, a group of 191 leading experts across neuroscience and psychiatry.
About the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation
The Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (BBRF) awards research grants to develop improved treatments, cures, and methods of prevention for mental illness. These illnesses include addiction, ADHD, anxiety, autism, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, depression, eating disorders, OCD, PTSD, and schizophrenia, as well as research on suicide prevention. Since 1987, the Foundation has awarded more than $476 million to fund more than 5,700 leading scientists around the world. 100% of every dollar donated for research is invested in research . BBRF operating expenses are covered by separate foundation grants. BBRF is the producer of the Emmy® nominated public television series Healthy Minds with Dr. Jeffrey Borenstein , which aims to remove the stigma of mental illness and demonstrate that with help, there is hope.