Marissa McGilvrey, Ph.D., a post-doctoral researcher at Johns Hopkins All Children’s in the lab of Martin Trapecar, Ph.D., has been selected as a 2026 Toffler Scholar.

McGilvrey is one of 15 scholars selected from among 105 applicants to the program, which supports early-career researchers pursuing bold questions across neuroscience and neurodegenerative disease.

McGilvrey joined the Trapecar lab in the Johns Hopkins All Children’s Institute for Fundamental Biomedical Research in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 2024. In the Toffler program, she will investigate whether disease-like metabolic signals can trigger early changes in brain energy production and mitochondrial function before neurodegeneration begins.

“I am incredibly grateful to the Karen Toffler Charitable Trust for supporting this work,” McGilvrey says. “Developing complex human models that connect metabolism in peripheral organs to changes in the brain is inherently ambitious and can be difficult to support through traditional funding mechanisms.

“The Toffler Scholar award gives us the opportunity to pursue that riskier question and ask not only whether metabolic disease affects the brain, but how signals from individual organs may begin shaping brain biology long before neurodegeneration is evident. I’m especially excited to bring a systems biology perspective to the Toffler Scholar community and learn from researchers approaching neurological disease from very different directions.”

Trapecar, an assistant professor in the Department of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, specializes in innovative organ-on-a-chip technologies to gain better understanding of how fundamental disruption in tissue-tissue and tissue-immune crosstalk leads to the early emergence of autoimmune and neurodegenerative disorders.

The Toffler funding will allow McGilvrey to build on a multi-organ model developed in the Trapecar lab. She will extend that work toward the brain and investigate the directional influence that different metabolic organs and their secreted signals may have on brain organoids, with a particular focus on mitochondrial function and cellular energetics.

The Toffler funding also will provide McGilvrey support in traveling to events and other labs to exchange ideas, encounter different perspectives, and explore potential collaborations.

“This is a big honor,” Trapecar says. “We’re proud of Marissa and look forward to the discoveries she will make and the growth she will experience with the support of the Toffler program.”