Wednesday, February 11, 2009

MIT alum’s $4.5M gift forms autism initiative

By Mass High Tech staff

MIT has received a gift of $4.5 million from 1958 alum Jim Simons and Marilyn Simons, as well as the Simons Foundation, to create the Simons Initiative on Autism and the Brain at the school.

MIT officials said the autism initiative will coordinate postdoctoral fellowship work and garner interest in autism research. The gift will fund equipment for autism researchers, pilot projects, community colloquium series and the Simons Investigators program, aimed at adding faculty to the field of autism research.

In the last four years, Jim and Marilyn Simons have donated more than $10 million to MIT for work associated with autism.

The Simons Foundation gave a $10 million grant in 2007 to researchers at Boston University, Harvard University and Yale University, as well as seven other universities outside of New England. The funding is intended to develop a databank of DNA samples from U.S. autism patients. The goal of the project is to collect 3,000 samples to help identify different variants of autism and develop treatments.

In 2004, the foundation also pledged a total of $2.6 million over three years to the Yale School of Medicine’s Child Study Center to study infants at risk for autism.