Inaugural Bridge Builder Award Goes to Sally Gottesman

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The Bridge Builder Award recognizes a member of the NF Community whose leadership reflects exceptional commitment to connection, inclusion, mentorship, and field-building. Created in honor of Patrice Pancza, whose leadership helped shape the NF Conference into a global forum for connection and progress, this award celebrates a scientist, advocate, or leader who brings people together, opens doors for emerging investigators, and helps support the next generation of NF researchers.

The inaugural Bridge Builder Award is presented to Sally Gottesman in recognition of her extraordinary leadership, generosity of spirit, and deep commitment to building a stronger future for everyone affected by NF.

This award honors the legacy of Patrice Pancza, whose leadership helped make the NF Conference more than an annual scientific meeting. She shaped it into a global forum for connection, collaboration, mentorship, and progress. In that same spirit, Sally has spent years doing the quiet, essential work that makes a field stronger: bringing people together, opening doors, asking the right questions, supporting new leaders, and helping turn good ideas into lasting systems.

Sally's impact on the NF field has been both strategic and tangible. Through her work with the Children's Tumor Foundation and the Neurofibromatosis Therapeutic Acceleration Program (NTAP) at Johns Hopkins, she has been a master connector- attracting new talent, supporting emerging investigators, connecting institutions, and helping strengthen the infrastructure the field needs to move faster.

One of Sally's most defining contributions is the way she brings people and organizations together collaboratively rather than competitively. She helped build NTAP and CTF with that spirit at the center-creating models designed to expand the field, connect expertise, and accelerate progress by aligning people around a shared goal. Across her work, Sally sees opportunities to make the NF field bigger and stronger by bringing together researchers, institutions, funders, advocates, and leaders who might otherwise work in parallel.

At CTF, Sally has been a vital board leader during a period of significant growth and transformation. She has helped shape the Foundation's strategy, strengthen its development and growth efforts, and support the resources needed to expand CTF's role in ending NF.

Sally has also helped keep CTF focused on two of the most important questions in rare disease research: how do we bring more people into the field and give them a reason to stay? And what can we contribute to ending NF that nobody else can? Her work reflects a deep understanding that progress in NF depends not only on individual discoveries, but on the people, networks, and systems that make discovery possible. Sally works tirelessly to raise people's sights about what is possible in NF and what can be accomplished when the field moves together. She has consistently championed the kind of field-building that creates more shots on goal-more researchers, more ideas, more partners, and more pathways toward treatments.

Her commitment to the next generation of NF researchers is especially evident in the Francis S. Collins Scholars Program, which has become one of the field's most important engines for developing incoming clinician-scientists. The program does more than provide research support. It creates a community of mentorship, collaboration, and shared urgency-bringing talented investigators into NF and giving them the resources, relationships, and encouragement to stay in the field and lead it forward.

Sally's work extends beyond NF, but across every arena, her leadership is defined by the same qualities this award was created to honor: connection, inclusion, mentorship, courage, and a belief that real progress depends on building bridges between people, ideas, institutions, and generations.

For her lasting contributions to the NF scientific community, for helping build the systems that carry science forward, and for her unwavering commitment to a future with better treatments and cures for NF, CTF is proud to present Sally Gottesman with the first Bridge Builder Award.