Gnadt of NINDS Retires

Dr. James Gnadt

Dr. James Gnadt, a program director in the Neurotechnology and Integrated Systems Cluster of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) Division of Extramural Research, retired on December 31. His science career spanned more than four decades and included 16 years of federal service.

“I’ve been doing this ‘science thing’ for almost 45 years. It’s time for others to fill in where I leave off,” Gnadt said. “I will miss working with a great cohort of colleagues across NIH.”

Although his career as a scientist began 45 years ago, Gnadt’s interest in the field goes back even further—to his high school years when he entertained the idea of becoming a high school science teacher. He cultivated that idea in college, where he developed an interest in neuroscience.

“In college, I became interested in the biology of how the brain thinks,” Gnadt explained. “I got my Ph.D. in physiology but specialized in the neurobiology of sleep—a behavior for which the neural mechanisms were unknown at that time. As a postdoc, I switched to recording neurons in high-order parts of the brain (such as the frontal, temporal and parietal lobes) during cognitive behaviors and was one of the early developers of approaches to interpret dynamic neural signals as ‘the brain thinks.’”

Gnadt earned his undergraduate degree in psychobiology from Rhodes College in Memphis, Tenn., and his Ph.D. in physiology and biophysics from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). He did postdoctoral training at the Salk Institute and UAB.

Beginning in 1986, he built an NIH-funded bench-side research career in systems and quantitative neurophysiology that included an Alfred P. Sloan research fellowship and appointments at Stony Brook University in New York, and at Howard and Georgetown universities—both in Washington, D.C. He joined NINDS in 2008.

“I actually came to NIH by accident,” he recounted. “I was moving my faculty appointment from one medical school to another and the department chair said she did not have sufficient departmental resources to offer a proper start-up package. I said I would seek another job offer and suggested she take that to the dean to argue for resources. The other job offer was to join the NINDS extramural program. So, I had a choice of two quite different paths in neuroscience. The rest is history. The opportunity to impact neuroscience at a scale larger than one’s own lab convinced me to leave the bench.”

Throughout his NIH career, Gnadt worked in a variety of areas including helping to develop NINDS’s diversity programs, lending his expertise on research with animals, and helping to develop what would later become The BRAIN Initiative®. His work garnered him numerous accolades and honors along the way including NINDS group merit awards; NIH Director’s awards; OD Honor Awards, and a NINDS peer recognition award. He also received an NCCIH Director’s Merit Award in 2021 for helping to develop a research agenda in the field of interoception.

“While I am proud of my impacts in research academics, I think the BRAIN Initiative is my fondest accomplishment. Not too long after joining NINDS, the NIH BRAIN Initiative® came along as an opportunity to promote investigative neuroscience as an experiment in how to fund systems and computational neuroscience in bold and adventurous ways,” Gnadt said. “It has turned out to be a fantastic opportunity to achieve that aspiration in ways larger than one’s own endeavors.

“With our funding programs for the 10 years of the BRAIN Initiative, we have changed the culture of investigative systems and computational neuroscience. We have promoted discovery with more adventurous approaches, with combined experimental and quantitative approaches, and with multi-discipline approaches at a team-research scale, and we have enabled a human neuroscience discovery program that is unique in clinical research.”

In retirement, Gnadt plans to work on his travel bucket list, pursue his interest in art and drawing and arrange his “new normal” routine to accommodate afternoon naps.

In parting, he shared a few words of wisdom. “If there is one important thing I have learned as a science administrator, it is never let an administrative hurdle get in the way of a good idea,” he said. “At NIH, we sit in a position to truly improve the human condition. We should feel good about that.”