The Chase Foundation continues to provide for the social, emotional and mental needs of hospitalized children, their siblings and other family members. It recently made a $120,000 pledge, payable over three years, to enhance play services in the Chase Child Life Program at Mattel Children’s Hospital UCLA. The gift will be used to expand accessible playroom hours for patients and their families and better address the therapeutic-play needs of children in isolation, restoring a sense of normalcy to the hospital environment and encouraging family bonding.
The David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA has received a distribution of $200,000 from the Estate of Roman Colbert, a three-time Bruin (BA ’66, MA ’67 and PhD ’70). One-hundred-thousand dollars will be directed to medical-student scholarships, and $100,000 will support research on cardiovascular disease.
Howard Levine (Anderson ’67) and Irene Levine made a three-year commitment from the Howard and Irene Levine Family Foundation to support the research work of Dr. Jeff Bronstein, a professor of neurology and director of the Movement Disorders Program at UCLA, which assists primary-care physicians and neurologists in maximizing the quality of life of their patients and patients’ families. Dr. Bronstein is conducting groundbreaking research in the treatment and cure of Parkinson’s disease.
Thanks to a $4-million gift from Lockheed Martin, UCLA Health’s Operation Mend now has a state-of-the-art telehealth suite and a unit of renovated post-op recovery suites for the wounded warriors who undergo surgery at the Westwood facility. The Lockheed Martin UCLA TeleHealth Suite will enable improved communication between the program’s personnel, patents and partners from multiple national and global locations. The upgraded surgical recovery area will enhance the patient experience during multiple surgeries and help the program better accommodate patients’ family members. Operation Mend provides reconstructive surgeries and other healthcare services to U.S. military personnel severely wounded and disfigured in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Pettit Foundation has pledged $2 million to establish the C. G. Jung Professorial Endowment in Analytical Psychology in the Jane and Terry Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA. The purpose is to celebrate, perpetuate and advance the work of C. G. Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology. This investment in scholarship, education and research provides a significant and meaningful way to embrace and expand Jung’s writings and teaching at the interface of neuroscience, mind, body and society.
The John Templeton Foundation has awarded $600,278 over three years to support the Big C Project, led by Dr. Robert Bilder in the Tennenbaum Center for the Biology of Creativity at the Jane and Terry Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA. The Big C Project will examine whether exceptional Creativity (Big C) shows extensive overlap with everyday creativity (little c), or if Big-C individuals are “outliers” marked by unique features of brain and behavior that are rare within the little-c population.
A donation of $1 million was received by the Division of Cardiology to benefit innovative research and patient care in interventional cardiology. The gift supports the work of Dr. Jon Tobis, director of both the Cardiac Catheterization Laboratory at UCLA and the Interventional Cardiology Fellowship Program. His research is at the forefront of novel therapies in interventional cardiology that lead the trend in clinical practice toward increasingly less-invasive and lower-cost cardiovascular procedures, with increasingly optimal outcomes.
