The Mt. Sinai Health Care Foundation-continuing Mt. Sinai Medical Center's century-old tradition of caring for Northeast Ohio-has expanded its commitment to the region through a $1 million challenge grant to the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. With this grant, the Mt. Sinai Health Care Foundation has provided over $31 million in lifetime support for Case Western Reserve.
The grant will benefit the Dean's Catalytic Fund, designed to provide resources for the school's leader to invest in new opportunities to advance medicine, such as emergency student scholarship support, bridge funding to advance promising early-stage research, and recruitment and retention of exceptional faculty.
In this instance, Interim Dean Stan Gerson will use Mt. Sinai's support to inspire additional philanthropic commitments for recruitment of the next chair of the school's department of pharmacology.
Within the school, the Department of Pharmacology is a core basic science department which historically and currently houses some of the schools most accomplished scientists, investigators, and educators of both graduate students and medical students. Expertise within the department ranges from basic pathway discovery of physiologic, organelle and disease processes to the discovery of interventions in diseases, from drugs to peptides to gene correction strategies, and across a wide spectrum of diseases. Technology expertise from structural biology, CRYOEM, imaging technologies, DNA and energy metabolism, cell biology and drug metabolism all reflect the wide range of capabilities that will be expanded with the recruitment of the new department chair.
"Funds generated through this new challenge will help us expand on existing strengths in pharmacology," Gerson said, "and help ensure our continued success as a leader in research, medical and graduate education. Expansion of the department will enhance coordination with our hospital affiliates, to improving the health of our community."
That dedication to improving care for the people of Cleveland and beyond is a core principle of the Mt. Sinai Health Care Foundation. It's the same commitment to people and partnerships that earned the former medical center a national reputation.
"For 25 years, the Case Western Reserve School of Medicine has been among Mt. Sinai Health Care Foundation's highest-performing grantee partners," said Mitchell Balk, president of The Mt. Sinai Health Care Foundation, the philanthropic legacy of the former nonprofit health care center. "We know that when we invest in the School of Medicine, our investments will increase many fold and that the dividends paid will benefit not only Case Western Reserve, not only Cleveland's bioscience sector, but indeed, all of humankind."
Gerson is grateful to the foundation and its shared vision for bolstering Northeast Ohio's reputation as a global biomedical leader. "On behalf of the School of Medicine," he said, "I cannot thank Mitch and the Mt. Sinai Health Care Foundation enough for their incredible support."
