We are pleased to announce that Stanford Psychiatry’s Feng Vankee Lin, Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, has received a grant from the National Institute on Aging titled “NEW Brain Aging Annual Workshop 2025-2028.”

Brain modulation interventions, such as cognitive training, neurofeedback, non-invasive/minimally invasive brain stimulations, and mind-body interventions, are increasingly favored for managing neurocognitive and neuropsychiatric symptoms in aging-related mental and neurological disorders, like dementia, late-onset depression, and Parkinson’s disease, due to their low risk, low cost, and potential scalability. However, the effects of such interventions on behavioral, functional, and symptomatic outcomes remain inconsistent and, at times, unsatisfactory. These limitations largely stem from an incomplete understanding of the interplay between components of the interventions, brain aging and pathologies, and disorder-related outcomes, leading to suboptimal matching of interventions with targeted symptoms.

Addressing these challenges requires a systematic investigation into the causal relationships between intervention-induced therapeutic targets, the influence of brain aging and pathology, and the heterogeneity in disorder-associated outcomes. This new funding will support a new annual workshop focused on brain aging, aligned with the annual Society for Neuroscience (SFN) meeting. Dr. Lin and colleagues participating in this project will hold three annual workshops, each addressing critical conceptual and methodological themes essential for advancing brain modulation interventions in aging-related mental and neurological disorders research.

Together, the workshops aim to identify gaps and opportunities in studying mechanisms of action in interventions for aging-related mental and neurological disorders across human and animal research, advance experimental designs to establish causality and directionality in intervention components that target these disorders, and explore novel computational approaches, particularly AI-assisted methods, for causal inference and mechanistic modeling.

“Collectively, these efforts will address critical gaps in optimizing implementation of brain modulation interventions, fostering the development and refinement of effective research that focuses on these specific interventions for aging-related mental and neurological disorders,” says Dr. Lin. “Additionally, early career investigators and trainees will be involved and will gain experience in methodological advancements and research translation.”

Dr. Lin leads the Cognitive and Translational Neuroscience Laboratory (CogT), which focuses on promoting successful cognitive aging. The lab’s goal is to identify ways to delay the progression of Alzheimer’s-related dementia and support successful cognitive aging. Recent publications related to this work include “Cross-Species Framework for Emotional Well-Being and Brain Aging: Lessons From Behavioral Neuroscience,” published in JAMA Psychiatry.

More Information

For more details about this project, visit NIH RePORTER.