What your gift will really do
Whatever your interest, there is a way to help, to do something wonderful for the future of humankind.
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(l to r): Leo Moschouris, Mark Hoeltzel, Eduardo Miller, Malcolm Sickels and Denise Zao Photo: Martin Vloet |
Our needs fall into three basic categories related to the missions of the Health System: patient care, medical education and medical research. A fourth category is capital projects, the actual facilities in which patients are treated, students learn, researchers do their work.
Support for Students
The cost of a medical education, for a variety of reasons, is considerably
higher than it was a generation ago. For many highly promising students,
scholarship support is absolutely essential to their attending medical
school. Because of the importance to their education of scholarship support,
students often must, whether they want to or not, choose the school which
will offer them the most support.
Some of Michigan's peer institutions like Harvard and Hopkins, being private, have a much older tradition of significant benefactor support than Michigan does, and thus have much larger endowed scholarship funds from which to draw annual distributions. To be competitive in attracting the top students, the Medical School must increase the size of its endowed scholarship funds.
Click here for a free video on how you can help support our promising students.
Support for Faculty
Faculty, like students, are attracted to those institutions best equipped
to help them reach their professional goals and where they are most likely
to be associated with top-caliber colleagues and peers.
Endowed professorships, are, of course, an enormous advantage for a medical school attempting to attract the best faculty in the nation and the world across a broad range of disciplines. A named professorship conveys prestige and attainment of high levels of achievement, and provides secure funds for research and scholarship that cannot otherwise be guaranteed by an institution.
Endowed research funds in a similar manner benefit faculty by guaranteeing significant, long-term support for research in a major area of study; they can also be extremely valuable in providing "seed money" for high-risk new initiatives with not yet enough proven potential to merit awards from such institutions as the National Institutes of Health. They are also enormously valuable when "gap funding" is needed to carry a research project along after grant money has run out and new funding is not yet in place.
Endowed lectureships benefit both faculty and students by making possible visits to campus by leading physicians and medical scientists.
Support for Patient Care
In an academic medical institution, the excellence of the physicians,
residents and other staff attending patients is of paramount importance
to the care they receive. The ability to move research as quickly as possible
from bench to bedside, i.e., translating research successes into applicable
treatments, also results in great advantages to the patients who are able
to benefit from the latest findings that can make a difference in their
recoveries.
Thus support for faculty and students, support for research as well as support for various programs and facilities all have a positive and often immediate effect on enriching the quality of the experience that patients have in the University of Michigan Health System.
Support for Capital Projects
While outstanding people make an institution, the places in which
they do their work also have a profound effect on their ability to be
outstanding. Several new structures are needed at the University of Michigan
Health System in order to provide the best possible patient care environment
and to support related teaching and research activities.