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ealth
care at Emory is getting a major face-lift. The Robert W. Woodruff
Foundation is contributing $261.5 million to support Emory's
strategic plan and construct a model patient-centered health care
system, including $240 million to modernize and transform The
Emory Clinic's outpatient care facilities and its related
research. A proposed new Emory Clinic complex will be constructed
on land occupied by the current clinic. Plans call for integrating
research and clinical care to create an "ideal patient experience,"
from parking, arrival, and check-in to examination, treatment,
and patient discharge.
"These new facilities will
support patient care, medical training, and research in a new
and more nimble way that sets the standards for health care systems
everywhere," says Michael Johns, executive vice president
for health affairs and CEO of the Woodruff Health Sciences Center.
The Woodruff Foundation gift also
provides $12.5 million to establish The Presidential Fund, which
will be invested selectively
for initiatives related to the university's strategic plan,
and $9 million for other building renovation.
The Woodruff Foundation bears the
name of the late legendary leader of The Coca-Cola Company. His
first donation to Emory in 1937 gave rise to the Winship Cancer
Institute and subsequent gifts made creation of The Emory Clinic
possible. In 1979, Robert and his brother George Woodruff gave
Emory the then-record sum of $105 million, which galvanized Emory's
advance into the front rank of American research universities.
The Woodruff Foundation's latest gift to Emory is exceeded
only by its $295 million endowment of the Woodruff Fund in 1996.
Proceeds from this fund benefit the Woodruff Health Sciences Center,
including the Winship Cancer Institute and the School of Medicine.
Both gifts rank among the top 10 given to any institution of higher
education in the past 40 years.
"Robert Woodruff helped establish
The Emory Clinic more than 50 years ago," says P. Russell
Hardin, president of the Woodruff Foundation. "The original
clinic facilities are now inadequate for modern, first-class care
and medical training. The Woodruff Foundation is pleased to invest
in Emory's current leadership and its continuing ambition
to provide world-class patient care and medical training."
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J.
REX FUQUA WATCHED
his father suffer with depression. Despite major achievements in
business and philanthropy, the late J.B. Fuqua endured a 50-year
battle with the disease, though he revealed it publicly only a few
years before his death in April 2006.
J.B. endowed Emory's Fuqua Center for Late-Life Depression
in 1999. Rex, who believes that mood disorders in children and adolescents
need further study as well, donated $2 million to endow a chair
to lead the Childhood and Adolescent Mood Disorders Program.
"We now know that mood disorders
are disorders of the life span," says Fuqua. "But while
we do know a healthy percentage of children have mood disorders,
there is a tremendous gap in our knowledge about what causes these
disorders and the most effective treatments for children and adolescents."
Edward Craighead has been recruited
to the J. Rex Fuqua Chair in Child Psychiatry. Craighead and his
wife Linda come to Emory from the University of Colorado, where
Edward chaired the psychology department and co-directed a treatment
center for bipolar disorder. For the past several years, he co-directed
a
clinical research program in Iceland to prevent initial episodes
of depression among adolescents. Linda, an expert on eating disorders,
plans to establish a center for such disorders in Emory's
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.
"Not only did Rex Fuqua's
gift allow us to successfully recruit Ed to direct this exciting
new program, but Rex's willingness to chair our department's
board of external advisers has helped attract other business and
community leaders to support our clinical, training, and research
programs," says psychiatry chair Charles Nemeroff.
Like Nemeroff, Fuqua's family
believes the Craigheads will enhance Emory's reputation for
helping those with mood disorders. The family lives in Atlanta,
where Fuqua serves as president and CEO of Fuqua Capital Corporation
and managing director of Fuqua Ventures. In addition to chairing
the psychiatry department's external advisory board, he serves
on the board of the George West Mental Health Foundation. |
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mory
medical alumni can help students have a worry-free start in medicine
by joining the 1915 Society—named after the year the school
got its name—with a gift of $1,915. Gifts at this level or
higher will be recognized with an engraved paving stone placed around
the fountain of the new medical education building.
"Gifts to the 1915 Society provide
scholarships to help the School of Medicine continue attracting
the brightest and most committed students," says J. Maxwell
White, 73C, 77M, president of the Emory Medical Alumni Association.
That includes former students like
Stephen Law, 71C, 76M. Reared in Sumatra, Law apprenticed to be
a locksmith like his father. When his dad became ill, local doctors
said his father was old and couldn't be helped. Then a visiting
professor at a nearby medical school prescribed tetracycline, and
in two weeks, the elder Law recovered.
"I was so impressed with his
skill," remembers Stephen. "I decided I should be a
doctor just like him one day. But there was no way I could have
financed my education by myself. I just could not afford it."
Law credits the generosity of others
with his ability to move to the United States, study medicine at
Emory, and deliver more than 5,000 babies before retiring from a
distinguished career in obstetrics. In return, Law and his wife
Jane have funded scholarships for Emory medical students.
Shenita Spencer, 09M is among them.
As a Jane and Stephen Law Scholar, Spencer has put her financial
worries aside to become a physician. She set her sights on a medical
career at age 12, when her father developed heart disease. "Dad,"
she told him, "I'm going to medical school and become
a great doctor and fix your heart."
To learn more about the 1915 Society, contact Heather Pharris
(404-727-5932 or heather.pharris@emory.edu)
or Rachel Donnelly (404-727-3127 or rachel.donnelly@emory.edu). |
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DAVID ALLEN KNOWS THE EXACT DATE AND
TIME he became an oral surgeon: Tuesday morning,
July 1, 1975. Before that day, he graduated from Emory College and
the School of Dentistry and trained at Grady Memorial Hospital.
"I was fortunate enough to do
my residency and internship at Grady, so I need to return to them
what they gave me in the opportunity to achieve," says Allen.
In that vein, the Dr. J. David and
Beverly Allen Family Foundation donated $500,000 to the oral and
maxillofacial surgery division in the medical school's Department
of Surgery. With this
gift, Allen hopes the department will continue to intertwine the
specialties of plastic surgery, oral and maxillofacial surgery,
and surgical critical care, just as his residency showed him.
"At Grady we were on trauma
call every third night, and we got to do facial trauma," he
says. "I got to do things that a lot of people could not do
at other institutions."
The exposure to all three areas was
invaluable in treating patients from rural areas who did not have
easy access to plastic or emergency surgeons when Allen opened his
practice east of Atlanta in 1975. He built the practice to include
seven other surgeons in multiple offices throughout metro Atlanta
and in Athens. He retired from Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery Associates
in 2006 and started a health care consulting firm.
Allen also serves on the boards of
Emory University, Emory Healthcare, the Woodruff Health Sciences
Center, Yerkes National Primate Research Center, and The Emory Clinic.
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n
anonymous donor has given $3 million to support the Emory/Georgia
Tech Predictive Health Initiative, a new model of health care that
redirects the focus of medicine on health maintenance and prevention
rather than treatment of disease. The funds will be used to help
launch new programs that define and measure health and apply this
new knowledge to individuals and populations.
As it evolves, the initiative will
combine a research core with a clinical testing ground for new discoveries
aimed at keeping people healthy. It will launch a major effort to
develop and validate predictive biomarkers of health, disease risk,
and prognosis that are generic to all diseases or specific to diseases
such as cancer,
neurodegenerative diseases, and atherosclerosis.
Emory plans to lead the reinvention
of biomedicine by combining research discoveries in prediction,
prevention, and health maintenance with investigations in anthropology,
ethics, behavior, health policy, law, business, and religion.
"Existing and emerging science
and technology make it possible for us to understand health and
how to maintain it at a level that we could not imagine even a decade
ago," says Kenneth Brigham, director of the initiative. "Although
we are learning how to live longer and better, translating that
knowledge into practice poses challenges that will require major
changes in biomedical practice by physicians and scientists and
behavioral changes by all individuals. This gift brings us closer
to our goal."
To learn more, visit The
Predictive Health Initiative and Momentum magazine's
Ponce's
Dream. |
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A
DIAGNOSIS OF BREAST CANCER
can be devastating in itself, but for younger women with a particularly
aggressive form called triple negative breast cancer, the outlook
is even more challenging. The most effective drugs target the three
receptors known to fuel most breast cancers—human epidermal
growth factor receptor 2 (HER2), estrogen, and progesterone. But
women with triple negatives lack all three receptors, and most often,
they are African American under age 50.
Why triple negatives target this subset
of women is the focus of research at the Winship Cancer Institute,
made possible by an anonymous $2.25 million endowment by the Jean
Sindab Project for Breast Cancer Research. The project is seeking
additional funds
for research that one day may lead to drug treatment for this baffling
form of breast cancer.
Winship researchers Mary Jo Lund,
Ruth O'Regan, and Otis Brawley are examining triple negative
breast tumors among African American women who live in Fulton and
DeKalb counties. These two Atlanta metropolitan counties have the
majority of breast cancers diagnosed among black women in the state.
Researchers hope to find common protein markers among triple negative
breast tumors. |
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