Patricia and James Poitras, longtime MIT benefactors, have created a fellowship program for graduate students and postdoctoral researchers studying major mental illnesses. The program, housed in MIT’s McGovern Institute as the Poitras Center for Psychiatric Disorders Research, establishes 50 two‑year fellowships, awarding five each year for a decade, funded by a $10 million gift that brings the family’s total support for MIT to over $100 million.\ \ In 2007 the Poitras family contributed $20 million to launch the center, linking basic neuroscience, clinical psychiatry and molecular biology to build a unified blueprint from molecular mechanisms to whole‑brain systems and to guide novel therapy development. Subsequent investments have enabled work ranging from genome engineering to ketamine’s synaptic effects and schizophrenia’s inner‑speech distortions, yielding breakthroughs such as an AI‑powered risk calculator for bipolar disorder, precise molecular carriers, and brain‑activity‑guided treatment matching.\ \ The latest gift targets PhD students and postdocs at a time when federal funding is increasingly precarious. James Poitras notes that advancing global mental health requires supporting both transformative research and the young people driving it. The inaugural cohort of five Poitras Center Fellows includes: Amrita Lamba (Saxe lab) who will test a two‑player economic game to differentiate generalized anxiety from social anxiety; Hoonwon Lee (Jasanoff lab) who will trace fear‑memory formation across brain networks to identify new PTSD targets; Karen Pang (Anikeeva lab) who studies gut‑brain communication in anxiety and depression to develop tools that address both digestive and mental health; Smriti Saini (Gabrieli lab) who combines brain imaging and computational models to predict which severe social‑anxiety patients will benefit from cognitive‑behavioral therapy; and Linghua Zhang (Wang lab) who investigates the circuit‑level mechanisms by which exercise improves mood.\ \ The Poitras family’s cumulative investment now exceeds $100 million, reflecting their belief that nurturing the next generation of researchers will accelerate powerful discoveries and deliver life‑changing treatments. The next application window opens in May 2027.\ \ Review