Anonymous Donors Give $1.35 Million to UCI Medical College

UC Irvine’s College of Medicine announced Tuesday that it recently received $1.35 million in anonymous donations, bringing to $3 million the total in gifts given to the college in recent weeks.

The new money will pay for varied research projects and start two endowed chairs--positions to be filled by nationally prominent researchers, said Wade Rose, assistant dean of the College of Medicine.

“Getting so many donations at one time in anonymous gifts is unusual,” he said. “We’ve received anonymous donations in the past, of course, but to have four come in so closely together is unusual.”

Identities of Donors Known

Rose said the College of Medicine knows the identity of all four donors but is keeping their names anonymous at their request.

Two of the gifts will be used to establish endowed chairs, Rose said. If approved by the UC Board of Regents, the chairs would become the eighth and ninth for UCI’s College of Medicine.

“We received $500,000 from an anonymous donor who wanted to establish a research chair in the College of Medicine’s department of neurology,” he said. “This would be the first chair for that department. The donor had a relative who suffered from brain disease and wanted to support research in areas of brain science.”

Rose said the second donor pledged $250,000 to establish an endowed chair in pharmacology. “This would be a research chair for the study of the chemistry of the brain--the study of chemicals which treat the brain,” Rose said.

A third donor gave $500,000 for research in neurology, Rose said. “This donor had a family member who had problems with strokes and wanted to support research concerned with strokes.”

The fourth donor gave $100,000 for cancer research, Rose said.

Other Recent Donations

Other recent donations to the college included $100,000 for research in gastroenterology, a gift from Mr. and Mrs. Bram Goldsmith of Newport Beach, and $50,000 from Dr. Edward Shanbrom of Santa Ana for virus research, Rose said.

UCI earlier this week announced that it had received $1.5 million from the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation of Corona del Mar. That money is to be used by the Beckman Laser Institute & Medical Clinic to attract research scientists, university officials said.

Rose said the millions of dollars flowing into UCI medical research in recent years “shows the national reputation our research is getting and also demonstrates that the people of Orange County are increasingly validating UCI’s importance to the community.”