Foundation News

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.

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.