$600,000 Pledged : South Korean Firm to Endow UCI Chair
A South Korean industrial conglomerate has pledged $600,000 to UC Irvine to give the campus its 10th endowed chair, the university announced Wednesday.
An endowed chair is a continuing source of private money that helps pay a scientist or academic specialist more than a university’s budget would allow. The South Korean endowment will be used for a research chair in UCI’s department of radiological sciences.
In a letter to UCI Chancellor Jack W. Peltason, Chong Yum Lim, president of Gold Star Telecommunications Co. Ltd., said the firm hopes that the endowment will “expand mankind’s ability to diagnose and treat disease.” The company is a division of Lucky Gold Star, a $14-billion-a-year conglomerate based in Seoul, South Korea.
Radiological science, once limited to X-rays, in recent years has expanded to include ultrasonic waves and magnetic resonance as means of forming images of the body’s interior. UCI’s department of radiological sciences is interested in expanding research into magnetic resonance imaging, said Dr. Richard Friedenberg, chairman of the department.
Friedenberg said research under the endowed chair might involve magnetic resonance as a way of telling physicians “the actual health of living tissues.” Such imaging would allow a doctor to determine the health or sickness of a part of the body by analyzing the tissue elements, he said.
“This has already been done with body tissue in vitro (test tube situations),” he said. “What we could try to do is have a live body that could be so analyzed.”
Friedenberg said that while radiological science is an expanding field of medicine, few departments of radiological science in the nation have received endowments. The endowment by Gold Star will be the first endowed chair for UCI’s radiological sciences department.
Friedenberg, asked why the South Korean company picked UCI for its endowment, said UCI has “a lot of people from Korea who are graduate students.”
Lim, in his joint letter to Peltason and Edward Quilligan, dean of UCI’s College of Medicine, declared the field of imaging “one of the most rapidly emerging new sciences.”
“We are most excited about this new opportunity for the joint research and promotion of science and technology of (the United States and South Korea),” Lim wrote.
UCI spokeswoman Cynthia Morris said the endowment will be presented for approval to the UC Board of Regents. At their March meeting, regents approved the eighth and ninth endowed chairs at UCI. Those endowments are formally named the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Chair in Laser Biomedicine and the Walter B. Gerken Endowed Chair in Enterprise and Society in the Graduate School of Management.
Gold Star Telecommunications expressed no preference for the name of its endowment to the department of radiological sciences.
