Health
Upasna Sharma wins McKnight Foundation neurobiology award to study how paternal stress impacts offspring health
Just four research projects nationwide won the 2025 award
Upasna Sharma, assistant professor of molecular, cell, and developmental biology
Upasna Sharma, assistant professor of molecular, cell, and developmental biology, will receive a total of $300,000 over the next three years from the McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience to advance her pioneering research on how a father’s life experiences and environment can influence the health and wellbeing of his future children.
The McKnight Foundation announced today that Sharma’s project is just one of four chosen to receive its Neurobiology of Brain Disorders Award, which support innovative research by U.S. scientists who study neurological and psychiatric diseases. The awards also support research like Sharma’s, which is revealing the influence of environmental factors on brain function and disorders.
Specifically, Sharma studies how a father’s exposure to stress shapes the biology of his children. “Epidemiological studies link paternal stress and adverse life experiences to increased risk of neuropsychiatric disorders in offspring, yet the mechanisms remain poorly understood,” Sharma said. “My research aims to address this gap by investigating how chronic stress in male mice alters sperm, and how it programs stress dysregulation in offspring.”
Ongoing studies in Sharma’s lab revealed that male—but not female—offspring of male mice exposed to chronic stress exhibit blunted stress responses, a trait associated with certain psychiatric disorders. Sharma aims to uncover the molecular signals behind such inheritance, focusing on small RNA molecules in sperm.
The award will support her lab’s work to dissect how stress signals are communicated from the brain to sperm, and how these signals influence early development to affect offspring health. Sharma said this research aims to offer new insight into the biological roots of stress-related disease risk.
Founded in 1953 and based in Minneapolis, Minn., the McKnight Foundation awarded a total of $1.2 million across the four winning projects for 2025. The organization has supported neuroscience research since 1977, and states that the awards are intended to encourage collaboration between basic and clinical neuroscience to translate laboratory discoveries about the brain and nervous system into diagnoses and therapies to improve human health.