The Craig H. Neilsen Foundation is awarding $4 million to academic institutions for scholarships to 32 students with spinal cord injury (SCI). These scholarships include support for tuition and fees, as well as funds to remove additional financial barriers the students may face while attending college—including costs associated with housing, transportation, and adaptive technology. We are proud to partner with organizations of various sizes, across the country that offer associate, bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees, and we applaud all students who challenge themselves by pursuing higher education.

The Neilsen Foundation launched this program with eight schools in 2014. It acknowledged our Founder’s dedication to education access and tried to address some of the specific needs for students with SCI. The number of institutions we partner with has grown, increasing to 11 in 2018, then up to 17 in 2022. To date, the Foundation has helped 328 students with SCI and committed approximately $25 million towards their education goals.

The organizations that partner with the Foundation are giving students with SCI the opportunity to succeed by breaking down barriers to academic success. That might mean making campus activities more accessible, encouraging peer interactions, or meeting the specific needs of individual scholarship recipients. In addition to their time in the classroom, some students have also participated in adaptive sports and joined teams or clubs on campus. To facilitate this integration into campus life, the Foundation works with the disability resource office staff and underwrites some of the programming.

To highlight the recruitment and retention success of our partner institutions, the Neilsen Foundation has launched a webpage showcasing the scholarship recipients who have graduated. Julea Juarez, who oversees the Neilsen Scholarship Program, shares, “The success of the Program relies on our partner institutions who work hard to identify students with spinal cord injuries attending their institutions. Recipients of the scholarship are supported throughout the duration of their degree program.”

The Craig H. Neilsen Foundation is proud to announce its Spinal Cord Injury on the Translational Spectrum (SCIRTS) portfolio is awarding $10 million in new grants. When the Foundation began its grantmaking in 2003, it awarded one research grant totaling $200,000. Twenty years later, it has awarded a total of 519 SCIRTS grants, amounting to more than $148.5 million in research support.

The SCIRTS portfolio encourages creativity and leadership in the field of spinal cord injury (SCI) research in three categories. It supports early career Postdoctoral Fellowships, as well as Pilot Research Grants that enable junior or established scientists to test procedures and collect data needed to initiate larger, more conclusive studies and clinical trials, and Senior Research Grants, which support and encourage new thinking in SCI treatments.

In the early years of the portfolio, many of the proposals we received reflected the field’s focus on cells and regeneration. Over time, researchers have heard the voice of people with lived experience and our support has evolved to include more funding for work related to issues and activities that impact the daily life of people with SCI. Studies aimed at pain relief and improving the function of organ systems throughout the body are now as common as those aimed at restoring movement or sensation.

By understanding the needs of people living with SCI and expanding our partnerships, the hope is we can develop solutions to alleviate dysfunction and improve an individual’s quality of life. Our grantee partners are finding creative new ways of thinking about and understanding how the spinal cord’s systems change after injury. Translating that new knowledge into improved medical approaches is the ultimate goal.

A third of the funded projects in 2023 are continuing work using electrical stimulation, either directly or in combination with other therapies. This research is helping scientists develop treatments for the many secondary conditions connected to SCI, including breathing, bowel, bladder, and cardiovascular issues. Other researchers are pursuing ways to protect or repair the nerves in the spinal cord following an injury. These involve efforts to understand how the damage in the cord happens and determine how specific therapies could prevent or reverse that damage to improve recovery.

A point of pride for the Neilsen Foundation’s staff is the steady stream of applications for our Postdoctoral Fellowships because today’s postdocs are tomorrow’s leaders in the field. Postdocs supported by our grants have more than double the national average of placement in research faculty positions. Some of these professors, who started their careers with a SCIRTS Postdoctoral Fellowship, have become inspiring mentors and pioneers, making breakthroughs in SCI research, and encouraging the next generation of scientists to rethink what’s possible.

Every person with a spinal cord injury tells a different story about their initially overwhelming experience and how they learned to thrive. Those early weeks, post-injury, can be scary, frustrating, and tough, but the adversity can drive some to become advocates and mentors, empowering others to view their lives with fresh inspiration. Regardless of a person’s age, gender, or socioeconomic status, it should be possible—and easier—to find organizations dedicated to providing resources, guidance, activities, and paths to employment and education. The Neilsen Foundation partners with organizations that provide services and programs that help people as they learn about and evolve their new normal to live life with a spinal cord injury (SCI) to its fullest.

Sometimes it can feel like a fight to get the resources that we’d all assume are in place to support people and families following a traumatic injury, but there is support available. In addition to care coordinators helping the newly injured get the medical support they need, mentors with lived experience can share how they have overcome their own struggles, provide resources and tips on returning to life at home and in the community, and offer guidance through difficult times.

Through the Creating Opportunity & Independence portfolio, the Neilsen Foundation makes grants to organizations that provide financial assistance, housing modifications, job skills training, as well as opportunities to reintegrate into one’s community through arts, sports, and recreational programming. The Neilsen Scholarship Program partners with 17 academic institutions, both community colleges and four-year degree programs, to aid students who want to live out their education dreams, often away from home for the first time. Because these programs don’t solve all of the difficulties people face, the Psychosocial Research portfolio funds studies to identify unresolved issues and find new strategies to enhance coping and participation after SCI. Some of this research focuses specifically on disability justice and socioeconomic disparities that limit access to activities and community support for people living with SCI.

Denise Fyffe, the Director of the Health Equity in Disability and Outcomes Research Laboratory at the Kessler Foundation, is hopeful this research will lead to “a better tomorrow” for many low-income, underinsured people with SCI. “One of the studies we are doing, looking at socioeconomic benefits post-injury, has described some of the challenges individuals with SCI face,” she says. “We developed an early intervention program that gets people thinking about employment at the time they’re in the hospital… We have a Vocational Resource Facilitator, who is talking to newly injured individuals about starting or getting back to a career.”

The Rochester Spinal Association has used Foundation support to add a care coordinator to improve the health, wellness, and community integration for people with SCI. Executive Director Chris Hilderbrant explains, “When you have lower socioeconomic status, you just have fewer resources to get by on. In a community where a lot of people may not have graduated high school, some of the concepts around spinal cord injury are just hard to understand. If you don’t have a frame of reference, it puts you at that much more of a disadvantage to understand your own health needs. The support of a coordinator is a huge help.”

A person’s status in society should not limit their opportunities to thrive after a traumatic injury. Through our grantee partners, we want to encourage individuals with SCI to pay forward any help and support they get by taking the information they receive and their experiences and sharing them with the newly injured as counselors and peer mentors. To achieve its mission, the Neilsen Foundation relies on organizations committed to helping these individuals find the best resources, aid, and care.

When the Craig H. Neilsen Foundation was established, its mission was focused on spinal cord injury (SCI), so of course we were inclusive, right? Our intentions were there but we weren’t thinking about inclusivity beyond the needs of people living with SCI. Over the last 20 years, we’ve continually questioned how we achieve our mission and asked: ‘Are we doing our best to ensure that the Foundation’s decisions are reflective of its values?’ Establishing a broader programmatic mindset, as well as encouraging greater diversity in the scientific community, allows us to put inclusion—one of our five values—into action.

To support and grow a more inclusive scientific environment, earlier this year the Foundation allocated $1 million to promote our Research Inclusion Supplements. Our goal is to encourage our current research grantee partners to recruit and support undergraduate and/or graduate students from groups that are historically underrepresented in the biomedical, clinical, and social sciences. Including students from diverse backgrounds, especially those with disabilities, early in their academic careers in the SCI research process will help evolve the priorities of the field with new ideas and perspectives on issues relating to people living with SCI.

Paralysis touches the lives of people from all parts of our society, so attracting students from many backgrounds to the field of SCI research is a priority. To support the growth of the future scientific workforce, we see it as a responsibility to be more intentional in this effort. If the Neilsen Foundation of tomorrow is looking to learn from a more diverse group of experts, we must help build that today.

At the end of 2022, we invited 40 current grantees to apply for a Research Inclusion Supplement. The feedback has been encouraging so far, as we consider the first round of applications. “I’m really excited,” Neilsen Foundation Program Officer Jacob Shreckengost says. “We had people come in from racially and culturally underrepresented backgrounds, as well as people with disabilities. We’re hitting the places we’re supposed to be hitting.”

As the opportunity to apply for a Research Inclusion Supplement expands, we hope grantee partners will start recruiting more students with disabilities and from other underrepresented backgrounds into their labs. We are hopeful that our efforts will encourage others to think about how they can be more intentional and start their own inclusion journey. Imagine—this could lead to a future in which disability, race, culture, and gender will no longer present barriers for students hoping to improve the lives of people living with spinal cord injury.

The Craig H. Neilsen Foundation is proud to announce new grants totaling over $4.4 million in its Psychosocial Research portfolio. Our 2023 grantee partners are helping to expand the field of psychosocial research and include more early career investigators, as well as a mix of returning grantees, first-time recipients of Neilsen Foundation support, and postdoctoral trainees.

The Psychosocial Research (PSR) portfolio supports science that explores the intersection of social, psychological, and behavioral consequences of spinal cord injury (SCI). These factors affect quality of life, but few researchers have focused on this area. Our partner grantees are looking at the whole person, identifying ways to ease an individual’s transition back into daily life in an unfamiliar body. They consider people’s changing psychological needs and how to make sense of them, listening to how individuals want to live, and developing new tools and therapies to help them achieve their goals.

For our part, we hope to strengthen partnerships by listening to the research community and learning from it, so we can make PSR funding as impactful as possible. Over the past few years, in addition to helping our partners bridge gaps in their studies during the pandemic shutdown, we increased the funding amounts in all PSR categories. We are trying to better support the actual expenses associated with a project by acknowledging inflation, rising travel and equipment costs, as well as establishing childcare allowances. By investing in SCI researchers, we are one step closer to ensuring people affected by and living with SCI can experience full and productive lives in their communities.

We continue to be impressed by the thoughtfulness and creativity of our grantee partners. It’s great to see researchers coming back to the Neilsen Foundation, challenging themselves anew, and offering inspiring ideas. We love seeing study results leading to next steps that show progress is being made.

The portfolio includes areas of focus that continue to be high priorities for people living with SCI. Four new grants will support strategies and interventions related to the management of chronic pain. From testing the effectiveness of hypnotic cognitive therapy to the feasibility of sprint interval training, researchers’ willingness to think beyond traditional treatments speaks directly to the Foundation’s values. We are also supporting multiple studies that will focus on the wellbeing of peer mentors, to identify key factors that contribute to burnout and “compassion fatigue,” and explore how to set healthy boundaries for both mentors and mentees.

Like all Neilsen Foundation portfolios, PSR continues to support vital projects led by people who are trying to make a difference. We are proud to support these bold scientists who continue to be forward-thinking. To learn more about the types of grants funded through the PSR portfolio, you can search for funded grants on the Programs page of our website.