Ling Hao Wins 2026 Scialog Collaborative Innovation Award

Six cross-disciplinary projects to advance fundamental understanding of how neural systems adapt to today’s rapid environmental changes won 2026 Collaborative Innovation Awards from Scialog: Neurobiology and Changing Ecosystems, cosponsored by Research Corporation for Science Advancement, Allen Family Philanthropies, the Frederick Gardner Cottrell Foundation and The Kavli Foundation.  

Each of the 17 awards, to 15 researchers from the United States and Canada, is for $60,000 in direct costs.

Ling Hao, an associate professor in the University of Maryland's Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, received one of the awards for an interdisciplinary project on "Too Fast and Too Furious: Tradeoffs in Stress-Induced Accelerated Neurodevelopment." Her collaborators include Valerie Tornini, an assistant professor in the Department of Integrative Biology and Physiology and Institute for Society and Genetics at UCLA, and Eviatar Yemini, an assistant professor of neurobiology in the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School. 

This Scialog initiative was launched to spur novel interdisciplinary research into the complex processes behind neurobiological adaptation to stressors such as exposure to pollution, toxins, and increasingly unpredictable environments.

“We are conducting a vast, uncontrolled experiment on every living thing on the planet, from the very biochemistry of our brains to the way organisms sense the world around us,” said RCSA President & CEO Eric Isaacs. “We need better ways to measure and model how organisms shaped by millions of years of evolution can be resilient in the face of anthropomorphic changes to the environment.”