Rockefeller hosts first Leon Levy Neuroscience Fellows Symposium

The first Leon Levy Neuroscience Fellows Symposium will be held at Rockefeller University on Wednesday, May 16. Levy Fellows from Rockefeller, Columbia and New York universities, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Weill Cornell Medical College will discuss their latest neuroscience research with their mentors, former fellows and principal investigators involved with the fellowship program. Cori Bargmann, Torsten Wiesel Professor at Rockefeller, will give the plenary talk.

The Leon Levy Foundation, a philanthropy created by the estate of former Rockefeller University trustee Leon Levy, cofounder of Oppenheimer and Company, supports young researchers in the neurosciences at several of New York’s leading research institutions. The Levy Foundation works through these institutions to identify and support the best people and ideas at this critical stage in their young careers.

In 2008, the Levy Foundation awarded a $4.5 million grant to the university to fund the Leon Levy Presidential Fellowships in Neuroscience. Designed to recruit young scientists whose research is at the crossroads of physics, mathematics and neuroscience, the Levy Fellowships in Neuroscience serve as the pilot phase in a larger Presidential Fellows Program designed to encourage interdisciplinary research.

The neuroscience fellowships are two-year, non-tenure-track appointments, and fellows have independent positions not attached to existing laboratories at the university. Grant money covers fellows’ salaries, research and equipment, as well as travel to scientific conferences and a lecture series.

At Rockefeller, the Levy Fellowships in Neuroscience were established within the Shelby White and Leon Levy Center for Mind, Brain and Behavior, originally founded in 1998 through a grant from Levy and his wife, Shelby White, to conduct research on the neural basis of complex mental processes. The White-Levy Center is co-directed by Bargmann, who also is an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and President Emeritus Torsten N. Wiesel.

The Leon Levy Foundation, founded in 2004, is a private, not-for-profit foundation. The foundation’s overarching goal is to continue the tradition of humanism characteristic of Levy by supporting scholarship at the highest level, ultimately advancing knowledge and improving the lives of individuals and society at large.