Date: September 13, 2025
Time: 5:45 pm to 7:15 pm
Track: Plenary - Opening Symposium
This symposium marks the 75th Anniversary of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). For decades, NINDS has advanced pivotal studies in fundamental, translational, and clinical neuroscience, while simultaneously mapping future research needs and training the neuroscience workforce. This two-hour event, co-chaired by Drs. Walter Koroshetz and Eva Feldman, will highlight NINDS contributions to understanding, diagnosing, treating, and preventing neurological disorders, with the goal of reducing disease burden. To mark 75 years of progress, the panel will feature distinguished scientific speakers like Dr. Huda Zoghbi, Dr. Michael Ward, and Dr. Pooja Khatri. Additionally, this symposium will look to the future by highlighting people with lived experience and including a rising star trainee, Dr. Vikram Khurana, encouraging the audience to imagine the next 75 years of neuroscience.
At the conclusion of this symposium, attendees should be able to:
In this presentation Dr. Huda Zoghbi will share how NINDS invested in her career as a young neurologist interested in disease biology and how that shaped her career in neurodegeneration research, especially the ataxias, and research in Rett syndrome and MECP2 duplication syndrome. She will share the impact of NINDS support on people impacted by these disorders.
In this presentation Dr. Michael Ward will showcase seminal discoveries that shaped our approach toward understanding fundamental mechanisms of brain disorders, how these led to breathtaking new treatments for patients, how they established a path toward modern precision neurology, and its bright future. In many ways, the roots of precision medicine can be traced to the early work of pioneering researchers who studied rare, inherited diseases. For the field of neurology, much of this work was supported by NINDS.
This presentation will discuss targeted disease-modifying neurotherapeutics for complex neurodegenerative diseases faces substantive hurdles: unclear biological drivers and markers of progression, chronicity of disease and patient heterogeneity. We outline a promising new strategy to solve this problem. Our approach is grounded in protein-folding biology and integrates functional genomics and stem cell biology with innovative clinical trial design.
This presentation will highlight some of our accomplishments across the clinical neurosciences and present a vision for the future, as we celebrate 75 years of NINDS and 150 years of ANA support.