The Center for Nutrition, Learning & Memory, a collaboration between Abbott’s nutrition businesses and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), has announced the inaugural funding recipients of the Center’s annual research challenge. Thirteen research projects involving nutrition, the brain and cognition received approximately $10 million in funding for research to be conducted in the next one to three years. Recipients were selected as part of a research challenge aimed at elevating nutrition’s role in learning and memory through interdisciplinary research. The connections between nutrition and cognition across the lifespan are at the center of the research. All primary investigators have their primary appointments at UIUC. The project teams include a diverse group of more than 45 UIUC faculty researchers, associates from seven Illinois colleges, and collaborators from eight national and international research facilities. Research will be conducted across 16 departments on the UIUC campus, along with two research institutes: the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology and the Institute for Genomic Biology.