University of Iowa graduate students Narges Firouzshahi and Chris Hunter have won the 2026 Kwak-Ferguson Fellowship from the Iowa Neuroscience Institute. This award goes to upper-level graduate students working in the area of neurodegenerative diseases. Each will receive $5,000.

Firouzshahi is a 5th-year student in the UI Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Neuroscience. Under the mentorship of Marco Hefti, MD, associate professor of pathology, her research focuses on how astrocytes take up, process, and degrade potentially toxic tau in the developing brain. Her long-term goal is to identify therapeutic targets to prevent failure of these mechanisms later in life, which leads to neurodegenerative diseases.

A winner of the neuroscience graduate program’s 2025 Young Investigator Award, Firouzshahi is “an exceptionally hardworking, intellectually independent, and highly capable scientist…(with) strong potential as a future leader in the field,” Hefti said.

Hunter is student in the combined MD/PhD Medical Scientist Training Program, entering his 4th year in the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Neuroscience. Under the mentorship of Kumar Narayanan, MD, PhD, professor of neurology, his research focuses on mapping the neurophysiology of cognitive control and human creativity to better understand how these processes are affected by neurodegenerative disease. 

Hunter serves as the Chair of the UI MSTP Student Advisory Committee and represents his peers as an Alternate Senator in the Graduate Student Senate. He volunteers in the UI Free Neurology Clinic and the Free Mobile Clinic. “Chris Hunter has the drive, the computational capabilities, and the clinical grounding required to become a definitive leader in translational neuroscience,” Narayanan said.

Both Firouzshahi and Hunter plan to use the fellowship to support their travel to the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Washington, D.C., in November. Firouzshahi will present “Tau Phosphorylation State Determines Astrocytic Fate: Uptake, Degradation, and Toxicity of Monomeric Tau,” and Hunter will present “Insight problem solving in Parkinson's disease.”

The Kwak-Ferguson Fellowship was established by Donald Timm, a Muscatine native and graduate of the UI College of Law who spent more than 30 years working for the U.S. Department of Defense as an expert on international law. He created the fellowship in honor of two individuals—his friend and mentor, Mr. Myung-Duk Kwak, a Korean attorney and statesman, and his aunt, Louise A.M. (Amelia Marie) Brown Ferguson, an educator and missionary—both of whom died due to complications from Parkinson’s disease.