2026 ALS TDI Leadership Award Winners
The ALS Therapy Development Institute (ALS TDI) Leadership Awards recognize individuals nominated by the ALS community for their exceptional leadership in the fight against ALS. This year’s recipients will be honored at the ALS TDI Summit on Friday, October 9, in Boston, Massachusetts.
ALS TDI is proud to announce the 2026 Leadership Award recipients: Caroline Tredway, Katie Rixman, PJ Murphy, The ALS 100 (Alex Litt, Cory Sullivan, and Zach Zangl), Dr. Yentli Soto Albrecht, Gwen Petersen, Doug & Lisa Downing, Logan Brunner, and Skyler Rodriguez.
We are thrilled to share that many of this year’s honorees will join us in Boston for the ALS TDI Summit and White Coat Affair Gala on October 9-10. Attend in person or register for the Summit virtually to see the recipients recognized.
You can read the descriptions of the awards and see the past award winners here.
2026 Leadership Award Winner List:
Alexander Heywood Award
Logan Brunner 
Logan (8) has grown up alongside ALS. He was only 2 years old when his father, Eric, was diagnosed, and he cannot remember a time before ALS was part of their lives. Yet throughout the nearly six years since his father's diagnosis, Logan has shown remarkable bravery, hope, emotional maturity, and an incredible desire to help others understand this devastating disease.
At his elementary school, Logan makes sure people know what ALS is and why finding a cure matters. He is constantly educating his classmates and teachers, and has even created a website with educational videos about ALS for his fellow students. His passion has inspired friends who have no personal connection to ALS to become advocates and take an interest in raising awareness alongside him.
Logan has also played an important role in his father's creative work. He helped construct Eric's Flickering Souls: Illuminating ALS installation by taking portraits off the printer, carefully laying them out and organizing them, and helping place them onto the installation before its first opening.
Logan shows up in this fight day after day—with patience, sincerity, compassion, and a determination that is remarkable for a child his age. While we wish he never had to grow up knowing ALS, we are incredibly proud of the human being he is becoming. His voice, his curiosity, and his willingness to educate others are a powerful reminder that children affected by ALS are not simply bystanders in this fight, they can be some of its most meaningful advocates.
Skyler Rodriguez
Skyler is a nine-year-old author, storyteller, and deep thinker growing up with an early understanding that life can be hard, beautiful, funny, and surprising (sometimes all on the very same day). Growing up alongside his dad’s experience with ALS has given him an unusually thoughtful perspective on change, uncertainty, and what it means to keep finding joy when life gets hard. He is equal parts tenderhearted, wise, and wonderfully silly.
His first book grew from a simple but meaningful idea: that something he has learned along the way might help another kid going through a difficult time. With the honesty, imagination, and hope that belong uniquely to childhood, Skyler offers young readers a gentle reminder that hard things can be part of our story without becoming the whole story.
In turning what he has learned into something that might comfort another child, Skyler shows the same generous instinct the Alexander Heywood Award was created to honor: that no one is too young to make a difference for the families facing ALS.
Fran Delaney Challenge & Respect Award
Doug & Lisa Downing
This year, ALS TDI is proud to honor Doug and Lisa Downing with the Fran Delaney Challenge & Respect Award for their extraordinary leadership in taking the helm of Toledo Takes on ALS. The fourth annual event raised $260K, bringing its total to more than $1 million for critical research. It's an incredible milestone, and it wouldn't have happened without their commitment.
Doug and Lisa are more than organizers — they are advocates, community pillars, and supporters of every family living with ALS in the Toledo community. Their support for the Schinharl family and others affected by ALS shows the kind of leadership, compassion, and commitment that the Fran Delaney Award represents. Year after year, they show up, rally their community, and prove what's possible when compassion meets determination.
Toledo Takes on ALS continues to grow because Doug and Lisa continue to believe and continue to act. We are endlessly grateful for their partnership and inspired by their heart.
Mary Lou Krauseneck Courage & Love Award
Caroline Tredway
Caroline Tredway’s entry into the ALS community came when her younger sister Nell received the dreaded diagnosis in May 2009. She was 51. For eight years, Caroline was by her side as much as possible, whether at home or on one of their adventures. Early in her ALS battle, Nell was on record saying that she wanted to make a difference in the ALS community. And before she passed away in July of 2017, she absolutely did (started a support group for pALS in Erie, PA, wrote newspaper columns on living with ALS, and more).
Through her advocacy, older sister Caroline takes those words to heart. She has embraced the I AM ALS Tim Lowrey ALS Panel Series, which provides virtual education to the next generation of healthcare practitioners with two goals: more prompt diagnosis of ALS and better care for those living with the disease. Since its inception in 2021, the program has reached more than 8,400 audience members through more than 300 panels. Caroline appears as moderator and also panelist, develops editorial content for the program, and helps produce poster presentations about the series that are displayed at conferences.
Caroline is a six-year attendee of the ALS TDI Tri-State Trek, first as a crew member for four years, and as a member of the "Antiques Roadshow for ALS" cycling team for the last two years. To date, the team of fun-loving cyclists has raised $68,499! She is also one of the founding members of the Honey Badgers, a fierce group of advocates that meets weekly to report on projects in the ALS community and map out others that need support.
Whether moderating a panel, participating in the Trek, or checking in on a fellow advocate, Caroline carries her sister's wish to make a difference into everything she does, leading with exactly the strength, optimism, and love the Mary Lou Krauseneck Courage & Love Award was created to recognize.
Katie Rixman
Katie Rixman has dedicated herself to supporting the ALS community since losing her sister, Susanna Dennis, to ALS in 2012. Since then, she has become a strong advocate for ALS research and for the families affected by this disease.
As the person behind the Dance ALS Away event in Louisville, Kentucky, Katie has brought people together year after year to raise critical funds and awareness for ALS research. In three years, she has raised $150,000 for ALS TDI, but her involvement goes well beyond the event itself. Katie makes a personal commitment to the people and families affected by ALS. She visits them, checks in, supports their personal fundraisers, and is there for important moments along the way. She is always willing to lend a hand, make a connection, or simply be there when someone needs her.
Katie leads not only through what she accomplishes, but through the way she shows up for others, with a compassion and steadiness the ALS community feels long after the music stops. She is a perfect example of the Mary Lou Krauseneck Courage & Love Award.
Stephen Milne Adventurous Spirit Award
PJ Murphy
PJ Murphy's introduction to ALS came in 2019, when his brother Andy was diagnosed with the disease. The two shared a lifelong love of basketball, and when a former teammate of Andy's used his coaching platform to raise awareness and nearly $80,000 for Andy's care, PJ saw a blueprint: the game they loved could help carry the fight against ALS.
A chance encounter at a 2021 Lou Gehrig Day game in Cincinnati turned that idea into Hoops4ALS, which PJ co-founded with fellow advocate Tom Haberstroh. The organization held its first games in January 2024 between Pitt and Duke and has grown every season since, with more than 30 games played to date. Annual March Madness fundraisers draw new teams each year, warming up on the court in Hoops4ALS and ALS TDI gear before tip-off. PJ's ambitions run further still: NBA games, an annual college invitational, and a day that means as much in basketball as Lou Gehrig Day does in baseball.
PJ built something that did not exist before, out of a chance handshake and a conviction that basketball could carry the cause to end ALS further. That willingness to open an entirely new avenue for ALS awareness is exactly what the Stephen Milne Adventurous Spirit Award was created to recognize.
Stephen Heywood Patients Today Award
Dr. Yentli Soto Albrecht
Every family touched by ALS knows the wait — for a diagnosis, a trial, a treatment that comes in time. Yentli Soto Albrecht, PhD, is racing against that wait with her own life on the line.
An MD-PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania, Yentli lost her father, Frank Albrecht, to C9orf72 ALS in 2024. Testing revealed she carries the same genetic mutation — the leading known cause of both ALS and frontotemporal dementia (FTD) — putting her at a 95% lifetime risk. Rather than wait, she redirected her entire research career toward defeating it.
Since early 2025, Yentli has launched 11 collaborative projects across eight countries, joined End the Legacy as a community science liaison, and helped lead the Penn Medicine Against ALS/FTD team to a Longitude Prize Discovery Award. She secured $150,000 in additional funding for novel ALS biomarker research at Memorial Sloan Kettering, and co-founded CureC9 within EverythingALS — driving a gene therapy delivery atlas at UCSF and a prevention trial for genetic ALS/FTD. She also launched the first commercial C9orf72 stem cell biorepository, starting with her own cells and her father's, and shares the science of the fight with families through her series Search for a Self Cure.
Yentli's work answers the question at the heart of the Stephen Heywood Patients Today Award: how do we get treatments to the people waiting right now? She is turning her own genetic risk into research that the entire ALS and FTD community will benefit from.
In her words: "I am leveraging everything that I have — science, medicine, and patient advocacy — to eliminate ALS and FTD before these diseases eliminate me."
Gwen Petersen
Following an ALS diagnosis at the age of 32, Gwen Petersen turned her focus into rare disease advocacy. Today, she advances the field by helping pharmaceutical companies develop patient-centric therapies, participating in research (clinical and observational) to push scientific boundaries, and driving media campaigns to challenge the stereotype that ALS only impacts older men. Gwen’s motivation behind participating in advocacy is to be a voice for the voiceless.
Eight years after her ALS diagnosis, Gwen still communicates verbally, albeit slowly, and she refuses to stop elevating patient voices. Gwen is not the stereotypical ALS face; she engages in media work alongside her beloved group, Her ALS Story, to show that ALS can’t take away our desire to live wholly and to the fullest.
Gwen is married to her best friend, Nathan, and they are parents of an exuberant Goldendoodle named Annabelle. Gwen, Nathan, and Annabelle live in Connecticut. Prior to her diagnosis, Gwen worked as a Recruiter for one of the top ten medical centers in the U.S.
Eight years after her diagnosis, Gwen continues to push researchers and the public alike to see ALS clearly and act with urgency; making her precisely the kind of advocate and role model the Stephen Heywood Patients Today Award was created to celebrate.
Augie Nieto Legacy Award
The ALS 100 (Alex Litt, Cory Sullivan, and Zach Zangl)
(Left to right: Cory Sullivan, Zach Zangl, and Alex Litt)
The ALS 100 began with a chance reunion. Friends Alex Litt and Cory Sullivan met in their early 20s in New York City, bonding over golf, as Cory was grieving his father's death from ALS. They lost touch for nearly a decade, until fate brought them back together in 2023, just after Alex's own father was diagnosed with ALS. Reconnected by shared loss, they turned their grief into a golf challenge built to raise funds and awareness for a cure.
Their idea was a golf endurance event, in which they would swing through 100 holes of golf in one day to honor their fathers and raise funds to end ALS. This year, 32 players joined the challenge.
In 2025, the group welcomed Zach Zangl, a person living with ALS, to its board as Chief Inspiration Officer; a role that reflects ALS 100's commitment to centering the voices of those living with the disease. "ALS does not define what is possible," Zangl said. "It only sharpens your sense of purpose." Zach’s involvement in the event truly took it to a new level.
In 2026, the ALS 100 raised a record-smashing $1,000,000. It has become one of the community’s largest charitable golf fundraisers, raising more than $2 million to date. Funds raised advance ALS research at ALS TDI, provide care and support to people living with ALS through Team Gleason, and help children coping with grief through Experience Camps.
By turning grief into a multimillion-dollar endurance challenge, and by putting a person living with ALS at the center of it, Alex, Cory, Zach, and The ALS 100 are building the kind of durable, community-powered impact Augie spent his life creating.
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