Foundation News

Sarah Persily, our Program Director, was invited to participate in this year’s #RealCollege Convening in Houston, TX. #RealCollege is a national movement, focused on the struggles of modern-day students, seeking to change the landscape of higher education to ensure all students can afford their studies and complete their degrees. The movement is led by Sara Goldrick-Rab and her colleagues at the Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice. Their two-day annual convening assembles students, practitioners, policymakers, researchers, and activists to raise awareness, develop strategies and take action to secure students' basic needs. In addition to attending a number of illuminating and powerful sessions addressing student experiences and the overall struggles they face, Sarah spoke on a panel highlighting the impact of emergency aid for college students, where she discussed the benefits and challenges of our student emergency fund programs. Sarah also got to hear directly from staff currently administering or who are interested in implementing emergency grant programs at their college to better understand the challenges that they encounter. Video of the Emergency Aid panel, along with video of many of the other informative sessions, are available at the Hope Center’s vimeo page: https://vimeo.com/hope4college/videos

Columbia University's Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons have selected this year's cohort of Louis V. Gerstner Jr. Scholars. The group includes four physician-scientists at the college and a fifth physician-scientist has been named a 2019 Louis V. Gerstner Jr. Merit Awardee. The Louis V. Gerstner Jr. Scholars Program annually supports tenure-track physicians who conduct research that has the promise to bring new treatments to patients. The fund provides a stipend of $75,000 per year, for up to three years, to support the awardees’ research projects. Scholars are nominated by a committee of distinguished research faculty and selected by the VP&S dean. The program has named scholars every year since 2008. The program also presents the Gerstner Merit Award to an outstanding third-year Louis V. Gerstner Jr. Scholar who has made great strides in research.

The annual American Museum of Natural History Gerstner Scholars meeting was held on May 16th, 2019. Mr. Gerstner and Foundation staff received updates on the career progress of past award recipients, and met with the latest cohort of Gerstner Scholars, who presented on their research projects. The Gerstner Scholars Fellowship Program provides support for postdoctoral researchers in the fields of comparative biology, bioinformatics, and computational biology. Recent alumni of the program have gone on to receive tenure-track professorships at Rutgers University, Montclair State University, and the California Institute of Technology, and competitive postdoctoral positions at Duke University, University of Washington, University of California–Davis, and the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris.

The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard have announced a new $15 million commitment by Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. to create the Gerstner Center for Cancer Diagnostics at the Broad Institute. The Gerstner Center aims to advance blood-based biopsies for tracking disease progression and pursue other cancer diagnostics that have the potential to benefit millions of patients worldwide. The new Center builds upon a major effort at Broad focused on elucidating the mechanisms of cancer drug resistance, launched by a $10 million commitment from the Gerstner Family Foundation in 2015.

The grant will support five initiatives across Mayo Clinic’s Arizona, Florida and Minnesota sites, and continues a long relationship with Mayo Clinic that includes the Gerstner Family Career Development Awards in Mayo Clinic’s Center for Individualized Medicine. The grant advances research in the use of augmented human intelligence in cardiovascular care, and advances care for arthritis and spine pain using regenerative medicine and data analytics. Also, the grant provides specialized education opportunities for nurse practitioners and physician assistants.