Imagine you’re an infant. Just a few months in the world, trying to gather your faculties, testing gravity — you’re pretty helpless and fully reliant on the people around you. As a result, one of your primary tasks as a new person — even before hand-eye coordination and responding to your own name — is to figure out how the people you’ve just met are connected to each other.

Neeraj Lal, PhD, Assistant Member of the Monell Center, has been awarded the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s New Innovator Award, which recognizes exceptionally creative early-career investigators pursuing bold research with the potential to make a major impact on biomedical and behavioral science. Dr. Lal's research with Arctic ground squirrels offers new insights for developing novel treatments for multiple chronic diseases.

War can take a toll not only on mental health, but also on financial stability, and the two may reinforce each other over time. A yearlong study following Israelis after October 7 found that early depression and anxiety predicted later economic hardship, while financial strain went on to predict worsening depression, anxiety and PTSD. The findings suggest that recovery from prolonged conflict may depend on addressing both psychological distress and economic pressure together.