POSTECH Professors Jin-Tae Kim and Seok Kim Develop a Skin-Safe Medical Adhesive Patch Using Shape-Memory Materials

The Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (BBRF), the world’s largest private funder of mental health research grants, today announced the recipients of its 2026 Outstanding Achievement Prizes, recognizing five scientists whose innovative research is advancing the understanding and treatment of mental illness. The prizewinners will present their research at the BBRF International Mental Health Research Symposium on Friday, October 30, in New York City, offering the public an opportunity to hear directly from some of the world’s leading scientists about advances shaping the future of mental health research. The awards will be presented that evening at the BBRF International Awards Dinner.

Researchers from the Mark and Mary Stevens Neuroimaging and Informatics Institute (Stevens INI) at the Keck School of Medicine of USC will lead a worldwide effort to map how eight common psychiatric disorders affect brain function, supported by a five-year, $3.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. The Global Initiative for Harmonized Functional MRI in Psychiatry will analyze over 94,000 brain scans collected at 257 research sites in 27 countries, from participants ages 4 to 95. The project covers schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism spectrum disorder, and anorexia nervosa. The investigators say it will be the largest functional MRI study ever conducted, both in the number of people scanned and the number of labs taking part. The project relies on resting-state functional MRI, which records brain activity while a person lies quietly in a scanner. The scan tracks small shifts in blood oxygen that rise and fall as brain regions work. When two regions rise and fall in step, like musicians keeping time in an orchestra, researchers consider them functionally connected. Recent work has discovered functional networks involved in attention, rumination, and planning, with a complex pattern of switching and interactions between them that is disturbed in mental illness. The effort expands the ENIGMA Consortium, a global network of over 2,500 scientists in 47 countries who conduct some of the largest brain imaging studies of neurological and psychiatric disease. For this project, eight separate international research groups, each focused on one disorder, have agreed to analyze their functional scans with the same standardized processing pipeline, a shared set of software steps that cleans each scan and measures brain connections and dynamic brain changes identically. According to the investigators, it is the first global effort to standardize how functional brain scans are analyzed in psychiatry.