Foundation News

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.

The Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. Scholars Program celebrated its 10th anniversary on June 20th at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUIMC). To date, 44 promising young physicians have been awarded over $7 million to promote the next generation of physician-scientists in medicine and research. Each scholar receives two years of early-stage funding that is essential to generate sufficient data to apply for larger government grants. This investment by the Foundation has been leveraged to secure nearly $100 million in additional funding from the NIH. Gerstner Scholars’ research interests are broad and include cardiovascular disease, respiratory illness, substance abuse disorders, and pre-term labor to name a few. The ultimate goal of each award is to bridge the gap between scientific research in the lab to new therapies for patients. For more details on the Gerstner Scholars Program and its awardees, please see the attached report.

The Gerstner Family Foundation renewed its support for scholarships for top students attending high schools in the Diocese of Palm Beach. The Foundation began its support of scholarships in the Diocese in 2005 and is pleased to continue the Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. Distinguished High School Scholars Program with this new gift of $1.584 million.