Federal Project Grant Award Summary

The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development awarded The Leland Stanford Junior University a Project Grant totaling $127,926 (awarded June 9, 2026; completion date May 31, 2028) under the Child Health and Human Development Extramural Research program (CFDA 93.865). This research project, titled "Functional Brain Signatures of Learning Disabilities Across Development," will deliver advanced neuroimaging research and computational analysis to identify individualized neurobiological markers of reading disabilities (RD) and their comorbidity with mathematical disabilities (MD) in school-aged children. The research employs cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI)-based dynamic connectome models and large-scale open-source datasets to characterize functional brain heterogeneity across individual differences and developmental trajectories, addressing significant gaps in understanding the neurobiological mechanisms underlying these learning disabilities.

The project is structured in two phases: during the initial K99 phase, the research team will identify functional brain features distinguishing children with RD from typically-developing peers using explainable AI approaches and multisession datasets from the Healthy Brain Network; the subsequent R00 phase will investigate the neurobiological heterogeneity of comorbidity between RD and MD, as well as isolated presentations, and characterize the longitudinal stability and predictors of these neurobiological fingerprints. By advancing understanding of learning disability heterogeneity through individual-level neurobiological insights rather than group-level analysis, this research directly addresses the socioeconomic and health impacts of learning disabilities affecting up to 17 percent of school-aged children.