In November 2025, voters approved the regular handful of Texas Constitutional amendments that typically follow a legislative session in the Lone Star State. Most concerned various changes to the state’s ever-evolving tax law, while a few approved investments in public goods like water infrastructure and technical colleges. But one amendment on the ballot particularly caught the attention of dementia and public health researchers at universities across Texas: Proposition 14, which would allocate an unprecedented $3 billion to create the Dementia Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, or DPRIT. In a state where almost half a million people currently live with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia, it passed with an easy majority.
Modeled on an earlier statewide program known as CPRIT — swap “cancer” for “dementia” and you’ll see the connection — DPRIT is designed to fund up to $300 million in competitive grants annually to Texas institutions in support of research on Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and other forms of dementia. While the specifics of those grants have yet to be released, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin are hopeful that some of the funding will be awarded to the interdisciplinary and potentially life-changing research already happening across the institution.
“DPRIT is really energizing the entire campus,” says Karen Fingerman, a scholar of human development and family sciences at UT Austin. She is also the director of the Texas Institute on Dementia, Aging, and Longevity (TIDAL), a joint endeavor of the Colleges of Liberal Arts and Natural Sciences. “For those of us who are in the field, it’s the most exciting moment of our careers to see an entire state coalescing and saying, ‘We are going to do this together.’”
That coalescence is something TIDAL and the College of Liberal Arts’ NIH-funded Center for Aging and Population Sciences (CAPS) have been working towards for years. Together, they represent the best of collaborative, interdisciplinary research into the causes and challenges of aging and dementia, and leaders at both TIDAL and CAPS say DPRIT is likely to push their work even further. That could look like deeper collaboration amongst UT researchers working in such disparate fields as sociology, psychology, genetics, neuroscience, and engineering. It could also mean more projects linking UT researchers with other experts and everyday Texans living and working across the state.
“Dementia is a very interdisciplinary problem,” Fingerman says. “It’s not a virus. It’s something that comes out of your lifestyle, but it’s also biological, and it’s your brain. You can’t solve it without bringing people in all of those fields together.”
In recent years, TIDAL and CAPS have been proactive in building the research relationships necessary to tackle such a complex and layered problem. They’ve hosted a series of talks and roundtables, for example, and built connections that break through the often-siloed nature of university research. Now that season of preparation is beginning to bear fruit.
“One of the things we’ve been thinking about has been how to better do AI-informed predictive modeling of cognitive outcomes, because we have a lot of data that could be used to better understand what factors in the state of Texas are most predictive of cognitive decline,” says Audrey Duarte, a professor of psychology and member of both TIDAL and CAPS. “That’s an idea we were already working on, and then DPRIT came along. Now we’re thinking this could be a great opportunity to pursue that as a proposal, which would really enhance our collaborations.”
If DPRIT funding becomes available in the way researchers expect, it could help fill the gap left by recent cuts to federal research support. It’s also well-timed to impact the lives of generations of Texans. In a populous and aging state, the need for a better understanding of cognitive aging — and for better interventions to prevent or delay dementia onset — has never been greater. Neither has the opportunity for the world-class researchers already hard at work across the Forty Acres.
“We have some of the best scholars in the world on these different areas, and one of the purposes of having a center like CAPS is to bring these groups together to spark new ideas,” says Debra Umberson, professor of sociology and director of CAPS. “The hope and the dream behind DPRIT is focused on incredible breakthroughs, and that could actually happen. If you throw a lot of resources at this problem and you throw a lot of brilliant minds into it, and you have collaboration and competition, those ingredients really have a lot of potential.”
“And of course,” she adds, “it’s so Texas. We’re the best, the biggest, the brightest. We can do anything.”