Fifty Fellowships, Five a Year for a Decade, for Psychiatric Research at MIT

The Poitras family has launched a fellowship program for graduate students and postdocs studying major mental illness. The commitment establishes 50 two-year fellowships through the Poitras Center for Psychiatric Disorders Research at MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research, with five fellowships awarded every year for the next decade. MIT frames the arrangement as a long-term talent pipeline focused specifically on psychiatric disorders — funding for people at the start of their careers rather than for a single project, which is a different kind of bet on a field that tends to run on long, uncertain studies.