illiam L. McKnight, who founded The McKnight Foundation in 1953, had a personal interest in memory and its diseases. He set aside part of his legacy — in the form of the McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience, founded in 1986 — to bring hope to those suffering from brain injury or disease and cognitive impairment.

Since 1976, The McKnight Foundation has invested a total of over $70 million in the promising research of more than 400 young and mid-career neuroscientists. In late 2009, The McKnight Foundation committed $45 million to support the ongoing mission of the Endowment Fund for the next 11 years.

The Endowment Fund fulfills its mission by supporting innovative research in neuroscience through three competitive annual award programs:

• Scholar Awards support scientists in the early stages of setting up their independent laboratories and demonstrating an interest in solving important problems in relevant areas of neuroscience.
• Technological Innovations in Neuroscience Awards support scientists developing new technologies or using technology in new ways to expand neuroscience research.
• Memory and Cognitive Disorders Awards support scientists working to apply knowledge achieved through basic research to human brain disorders that affect memory or cognition. (Formerly known as the Brain Disorders Awards.)

"Those of us who steward the program today are still guided by the principles of its founders," explains Carla Shatz, president of The McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience, and professor of biological sciences and neurobiology and director of the Bio-X program at Stanford University. "Our goal is to support scientists who are willing to work at the frontiers to push the field of neuroscience forward."

Scientists who have received awards often say they were able to test a risky idea, get their career off the ground, or make a significant change in their career because of McKnight's flexible dollars. According to one award recipient, "By funding many investigators early in their careers and giving them the freedom to pursue their ideas, the Endowment Fund has had a major impact on brain research in the United States, an impact far beyond the monetary value of the funds that have been disbursed."

The Value of Evaluations

ntrusted with tax-privileged dollars, The McKnight Foundation is accountable both to our board and to the communities we support. To ensure we make the most of goal-focused investments, McKnight commits to periodic reviews of all programs. As a result, we regularly refine program objectives and grantmaking guidelines to make the most of our investments.

In late 2008, the Endowment Fund completed a comprehensive evaluation process, its first such review since 1999. We have similarly conducted recent evaluations in our arts and environment program areas. The outcomes of such evaluations can range from relatively minor tactical adjustments to fundamental reconsideration of overarching goals and strategies.

The Endowment Fund evaluation was conducted in 2008 by Susan Fitzpatrick, Ph.D., adjunct associate professor of Neurobiology and Anatomy at Washington University School of Medicine and vice president of the James S. McDonnell Foundation, one of a limited number of international grantmakers supporting university-based research in the biological and behavioral sciences.

In addition to overseeing a portion of the foundation's grantmaking to support science, Fitzpatrick lectures and writes on issues concerning the role of private philanthropy in the support of scientific research, and on issues related to the public understanding of science. To conduct the evaluation, Fitzpatrick assembled a team that included a neuroscientist, a clinical scientist, and two individuals from academia.

An Evaluation in Three Parts

he evaluation, and the reflective dialogue it created among staff and board of both the Foundation and the Endowment Fund, is represented by three discrete but interconnected parts: the grant proposal from the Endowment Fund, which serves as a summation of the evaluation as well as a plan for moving ahead, the executive summary of the evaluation itself, and finally a short response to the evaluation written by a separate team of neuroscientists.

Highlights follow; click to download any of the three pieces in its entirety.

I. Endowment Fund Board of Directors proposal to McKnight. Based on the evaluation's recommendations, the grant proposal submitted to McKnight's board in November 2009 to consider future funding reflects a number of changes to the award program and the annual conference:

• All three award programs will strive for institutional and geographic diversity, while maintaining creativity and excellence.
• Scholar Awards. This program will place a new emphasis on human memory whenever possible, while maintaining scientific rigor, through the support of research in the field and through the recruitment of committee members with expertise in the problems of memory.
• Technology Awards. This program will place an increased emphasis on identifying technically imaginative projects that focus, directly or indirectly, on problems of memory or cognition.
• Memory and Cognitive Disorders Awards. Formerly known as the Brain Disorders Award, this program is undergoing substantive changes. Going forward, the program will encourage projects which address mechanisms of memory or cognition at the synaptic, cellular, or behavioral level, especially those in humans.
• Annual conference. The conference schedule will be shifted so that the attendees have more opportunity to interact with guest speakers. In addition, a new policy to invite to the conference funders whose mission relates to the annual conference's disease workshop has been adopted.

II. Fitzpatrick evaluation executive summary. In her research on the Endowment Fund, Fitzpatrick reviewed its history and past accomplishments, considered its particular standing in the wider context of the field of neuroscience, and examined its impact and outcomes through the lens of McKnight's philanthropic mission and strategic goals. The Endowment Fund provided the following data for analysis: the previous evaluation; data from awardees and applicants, including letters of intent, proposals, and annual reports; award announcements and application guidelines; and conference programs. Members of the evaluation team also attended the Endowment Fund's annual conference and interacted with attendees.

Overall, the evaluation affirmed the accomplishments and direction of the Endowment Fund, while recommending strategies to make the program even more effective, including:

• Clarify the role of memory research and understanding memory disorders.
• Encourage collaborative efforts designed to advance knowledge through cooperative rather than competitive funding mechanisms.
• Recruit a neuroscience program officer, experienced with learning and memory, with primary reporting responsibility to the McKnight Foundation and its philanthropic vision.
• Shift the emphasis of the annual meeting from retrospective to prospective.
• Enhance the Scholar Awards program by increasing the number of awards and bringing diversity to the selection process.
• Diversify the institutional affiliations and expertise of the EFN leadership.
• Consider re-deploying the funds currently allocated for the Technology Awards and the Brain Disorders awards. Funds could initiate non-institutional, collaborative, cooperative research networks focused on solving difficult problems pertinent to human brain/cognitive function and ameliorating related disorders.

III. Reponse from neuroscientists. With an expressed interest in comprehensive program review, the Endowment Fund board requested that a panel of three neuroscientists contribute a response to Fitzpatrick's evaluation. This panel included Zach Hall, Ph.D., retired director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Strokes of the National Institutes of Health; Susan Iversen, Ph.D., University of Oxford; and James Patrick, Ph.D. Baylor College of Medicine (retired 12/31/2008).

The purpose of the formal response was to ensure that the evaluation of the science was thorough. The neuroscientists' findings are in agreement with several of Fitzpatrick's recommendations — such as recruiting Endowment Fund board members with a greater variety of backgrounds and academic affiliations, increasing the number of Scholar Awards, and waiving the Brain Disorders Award requirement that applicants occupy tenured or tenure-track positions — and they diverge from others — such as the recommendation to build a synergistic network of scientists within the Scholars Award program, arguing that programmatically defined groups and projects would hinder researchers' creativity.

Going Forward

ust as the field of neuroscience continues to evolve, so do all of the fields in which McKnight is involved, from literacy to art, the environment to regional growth. The only way to learn if we are reaching our goals is to ask the right questions and pay attention to the answers.

As our understanding of the human brain deepens, the field will continue to change. It would be impossible to argue that McKnight's philanthropic investments — past, present, or future — in this type of research are as strategic as possible without the insights of experts into the program's structure. Despite the fact that not all of the recommendations were implemented, final decisions made by McKnight and Endowment Fund board and staff were profoundly informed by the research and insights that the evaluation process generated.