< 1 min read
“It’s a blast for a good cause” is probably the only reason you need to attend the White Coat Gala: Honoring Heroes and Healers, UConn Health’s premiere event of the year. But just in case, we prepped this list to give you a few more reasons to get your tickets now.
Get your tickets to the White Coat Gala now!
3 min read
Q. What has been decided regarding the UConn Law School Foundation?
A. Following more than a year of careful deliberation and analysis, the UConn Law School Foundation Board of Trustees made the strategic decision to transfer assets and operations to the UConn Foundation. The UConn Foundation’s Board of Directors approved this transfer, which is expected to be effective as of June 30, 2017.
Q. Why was this decision made?
A. This decision was not made lightly. Since 1974, the UConn Law School Foundation has been grateful for the long tradition of strong support and commitment from its alumni and benefactors. However, new operational and compliance obligations have significantly increased the burden on the Law School Foundation’s current Trustees, volunteers, and staff. Meeting these obligations not only would have distracted Trustees from their primary mission to help grow the law school endowment, but would also have necessitated increasing staff to a level that would consume an unreasonable portion of funds. The Law School Foundation determined that maintaining a separate existence was neither cost-effective nor in the best interest of growing its endowment and enhancing its relationship with alumni and donors.
Q. I’ve made gifts to the Law School Foundation. How does this change impact me?
A. Nothing will change for UConn School of Law donors. These administrative and operational changes will have no effect whatsoever on the dedication of funds to the School of Law. All transferred funds will continue to be controlled per donor intent and designation.
Q. How does this change benefit me as a donor?
A. With enhanced administrative oversight provided by the UConn Foundation, donors will now receive more robust reporting of investment returns and a better illustration of the beneficial impact of distributions; reporting that the Law School Foundation was historically unable to provide for donors.
Q. How does this change impact me as an alumnus/alumna?
A. Individual contact with alumni will continue as it has for the last 25 years. It’s important to recognize the positive track record already in place with the UConn Foundation. All of the Law School Foundation’s development efforts have been carried out by UConn Foundation employees, and the staff knows from this experience that those employees have always served the School of Law’s interests in their communication with law alumni. In fact, with a deeper alumni engagement staff, alumni will benefit from enhanced communications. Additionally, the UConn Foundation will hire, at its expense, a Director of Alumni Relations whose office will be at the School of Law and will work directly with the Dean and staff on alumni matters.
Q. How does this change benefit the School of Law?
A. There are several measurable benefits to this decision. First, the School of Law will be able to make better use of the tremendous volunteer support of its alumni and Board of Trustees. Frequently, those volunteers have had to focus on governance functions of the Law School Foundation rather than fundraising.
Second, with the Law School Foundation’s assets now part of the UConn Foundation’s larger, sound endowment investment strategy, the potential to grow the School of Law endowment is greater than could previously be achieved given the scale of those assets in isolation. As the School of Law looks ahead to its centennial in 2021, this is an important opportunity to bring the school’s endowment up to the level of its peers.
Last, the School of Law team will be able to draw upon the staff and support of the larger alumni relations, development, and communications teams at the UConn Foundation.
Q. Who do I contact with any additional questions?
A. You may contact Ron Fleury, Senior Director of Development, at (860) 570-5270.
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There’s much to celebrate this spring with UConn women’s basketball winning an unprecedented 100 games in a row! Check out the Geno Unfiltered video with Coach Geno Auriemma.
This spring, the UConn Parents Fund is helping to enrich your student’s experience by bringing in guest speakers like civil rights lawyer and legal commentator Charles Coleman Jr.
With graduation right around the corner, we’re starting a new tradition of giving Legacy Medals to graduating seniors who have a parent, grandparent, or sibling who graduated from UConn. Find out more about graduation and move-out dates and other UConn events.
Get involved by donating to the Parents Fund, which brings in exciting guest speakers for students and helps fund programs that support student learning, personal development, and academic success.
Thanks for being the proud parent of a UConn Husky!
All the best,
Rachel Marshall
Director of Development, Parent & Family Giving
UConn Foundation
< 1 min read
March is here and we are proud that our women’s basketball team is once again getting ready to compete in the NCAA Tournament, again putting UConn in the national spotlight.
Thank you for helping to fuel excellence at UConn. Your leadership and support plays a critical role in sustaining our international reputation—not just on the court, but in the classroom and in the lab.
In appreciation of your generosity, we’re pleased to share an early edition of our Inside UConn Nation newsletter with you. This time, you’ll find an exclusive video interview with women’s basketball coach Geno Auriemma, a profile of oral surgeon Jeff Carter ’76 MD, and much more.
Thank you for enabling greatness here at UConn. Go Huskies!
Joshua R. Newton
President & CEO
UConn Foundation
5 min read
Deep in the woods behind Horsebarn Hill, UConn has its own forest lab.
There, you’ll see sensors on trees of different species shifting and swaying under ice, snow, wind and torrential rain. It’s all about the biomechanics in a carefully cultivated forest to glean state-of-the-art data on how trees sway and bend with the wind and develop wind-firmness.
Across campus, expert scientists and engineers combine laser technology images from planes to create 3-D computer models of a neighborhood’s trees and phone, cable and power lines. The outcome – a real-life snapshot of tree growth rates that can impact utilities.
A dedicated UConn and Eversource Energy Center team works daily with these and other state-of-the-art tools to improve electric reliability, enhance emergency preparedness during storms, and reduce and shorten outages during storms. Leveraging the expertise of UConn’s faculty, post-doctoral and graduate researchers, and industry partners, the Center is building the electric grid of the future, today, together with federal and state agencies.
This academia-utility partnership represents an expanding direction for UConn. Industry partnerships like these fund researchers and teach graduate students research skills while leveraging the research capabilities of the state’s flagship public university. Together, they support economic growth in Connecticut and lead to innovative discoveries.
“With our partnership with UConn, our vision for the Eversource Energy Center as a scientific, research, and operational hub is a reality,” said Ken Bowes, Eversource Energy Vice President – Transmission Performance. “The grid of the future will be unlike anything we’ve encountered, with smart homes, smart cities, and an intelligent, interactive, automated grid. Our Center is ready to lead these important conversations, driving the innovations and advances that will create the grid of the future.”
Another sponsored research collaboration focuses on the targeted cellular repair platform work of Catherine Wu, PhD, and George Wu, MD, PhD, Director, Hepatology Section, Division of Gastroenterology-Hepatology at UConn Health have been pioneers in the field of targeted restoration of damaged cells. The husband-and-wife team’s innovative technology is being used in collaborative research to determine if normal cell function can be restored in defective cells that cause rare diseases.
The $9 million grant from Eversource contributed to a record year in fiscal 2016 for the UConn Foundation’s philanthropic gifts and grants for research, more than doubling its prior record year. The Eversource grant, along with a $5.7 million award from the John Templeton Foundation to study how to balance humility and conviction in public life, and other gifts, funneled $25.3 million from the UConn Foundation into research.
The Foundation’s fundraising through philanthropic gifts and grants have grown dramatically from $7.1 million in 2014 and $9.6 million in 2015, to $25.3 million in 2016.
These philanthropic gifts and grants are just a fraction of UConn’s nearly $250 million annual research enterprise, which includes federal grants. But in an era when state and federal research funds are shrinking, these industry partnerships pay for research and much more.
“The partnerships provide valuable research for companies, as well as scholarships and fellowships for the students and faculty doing the research,” said Joshua Newton, president and CEO of the UConn Foundation. “They are helping to build the next generation workforce by training researchers and scientists and often hiring them.”
UConn is committed to supporting existing industries and growing new entrepreneurial ventures. To help foster these partnerships, UConn has hired an executive director of venture development, has launched early-stage funding programs to advance promising technologies, and has taken other steps to help bring UConn’s research and innovation to the community.
The University uses its in-house expertise to transform UConn discoveries into products and services that benefit society. A team of technology commercialization experts in the Office of the Vice President for Research helps faculty and students with patent protection, licensing, business mentorship, startup formation, and connections with industry partners.
The goal of this support is to move life-saving technologies from the lab to the marketplace. One such technology in development is a new drug to treat and cure patients with advanced heart failure. Dr. Bruce Liang, Dean of the School of Medicine and a clinical cardiologist, is developing a treatment that can help patients with advanced heart failure.
“Due to advanced age or coexisting conditions, we can’t try to help these patients with a cardiac transplant or ventricular-assist device,” said Dr. Liang. “I formed Cornovus Pharmaceuticals Inc. in 2011 with UConn’s support to pursue a treatment for this critical unmet need and to give these patients a chance to survive and thrive.”
Cornovus has already secured funding from the SMARTT (Science Moving towards Research Translation and Therapy) program from the National Institutes of Health and has raised an additional $3.5 million for preclinical testing to gain FDA approval for an investigational new drug (IND). At that point, Cornovus would be in a position to carry out first-in-human testing and will need to raise another $20 million to conduct advanced human clinical trials.
“A critical part of UConn’s research mission is to support the development of innovative technologies coming out of University labs that could benefit Connecticut’s citizens and grow the state’s economy,” said UConn Vice President for Research, Jeff Seemann, PhD. “We’ve seen very positive growth in the area of technology commercialization over the last several years, and we’re confident the trend will continue as UConn supports University startups and fosters new and existing relationships with our industry partners,” he said.
New UConn startups and external technology ventures can find the physical space and the business support they need in UConn’s Technology Incubation Program (TIP). Industry leaders can collaborate with faculty through corporate-sponsored research agreements. This has led to innovations in several fields, including: precision medicine, sustainable technology, diagnostics, advanced materials and additive manufacturing, software, polymers and composites, bioinformatics, drug development and delivery, biomedical devices, nanotechnology, and cybersecurity.
Emerging immunotherapy company CaroGen Corp. is located at TIP in Farmington and is currently collaborating with UConn Health researchers to develop a vaccine to treat patients with colon cancer.
CaroGen’s proprietary technology platform is being applied to several diseases, including a specific target studied by UConn Health researchers Kepeng Wang, assistant professor of immunology, and Anthony T. Vella, professor and Boehringer Ingelheim Chair in Immunology.
“We are thrilled to have the opportunity to work so closely with UConn’s internationally-recognized faculty,” said CaroGen CEO Bijan Almassian. “Working with UConn lets us aggressively pursue our vaccine technology for several devastating diseases, like colon cancer, so that we can more quickly reach the market and provide a solution for patients.”
The UConn Technology Incubation Program has already generated:
To help support these ventures and established industry leaders, the University is building the Innovation Partnership Building at the UConn Tech Park in Storrs, which will provide physical space and state-of-the-art equipment to encourage collaboration between the University and industry. At the same time, UConn is constructing a five-story engineering and science building in Storrs that will house labs for its growing research programs in genomics, biomedical, chemical engineering, and cyber systems.
These innovations also extend to UConn Health in Farmington, Conn. Five years after state lawmakers made a massive investment to grow bioscience sectors in Connecticut, the UConn Health campus has become a thriving hub for bioscience R&D activities. The Bioscience CT initiative has included major renovations to research and hospital facilities and the relocation of The Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine to the UConn Health campus.