SUPPORTING FACILITIES THAT SUPPORT EDUCATION

Within the crowded, expensive confines of our Boston neighborhood, the Chobanian & Avedisian School works hard to provide appropriate facilities to support medical education, in terms of both living and learning. With the help of our donors, we invest strategically in the spaces and places that promise practical benefits to our community.

In 2012, for example, thanks in large part to philanthropic support, we opened our Medical Student Residence (MSR)—a state-of-the-art, nine-story building that today houses more than 200 students. Safe, convenient, and attractive, it is a vibrant hub of student life on the Medical Campus. Our students save meaningful sums they otherwise would likely have had to borrow, since the rent is significantly below market rates. The MSR has had such a transformative effect on our campus and our community that we aspire to create more space just like it, as our students’ need for affordable housing remains urgently high.

More recently, again with help from our donors, we have made substantial improvements to the Gross Anatomy Lab. A generous estate gift from the Miselis family supported the renovation of the Alumni Medical Library, including the creation of extensive new study areas for students.

More remains to be done to upgrade our living, learning, and study areas, and more philanthropic support is welcome. Such gifts—which the school recognizes through prominent naming opportunities—help us modernize the school. They enable us to reduce our commitment of operating dollars to bricks and mortar and instead direct those funds to other areas of pressing need—scholarships, research, and other investments.

A top priority today is to create more and better space for our Clinical Skills and Simulation Center, which will help perpetuate our proud tradition of educating doctors who are particularly humanistic and caring. Today we have 12 small examining rooms—not nearly enough space for the 400 students using the facilities each year—as well as dated simulation technology and a lack of team learning space. This is a place where students can practice basic procedures safely—safe for their learning and their patients. Expanding and upgrading it is a key need.

AN ESSENTIAL TEACHING AND LEARNING SPACE, UPGRADED

Recent and generous donor support has brought many enhancements to the school’s Gross Anatomy Lab, including LED lighting, improved ventilation systems, and several state-of-the-art teaching tools. An ultrasound system enables teaching on both live subjects and cadavers, and a virtual dissection table lets students visualize human anatomy without the chemicals and other drawbacks of traditional cadavers. “Taken together, the enhancements to the Gross Anatomy Lab made possible by this very generous gift will greatly facilitate medical education across all four years of education,” says Waterhouse Professor and Anatomy & Neurobiology Chair Jennifer I. Luebke, PhD (GRS’90).

Bridging The Funding Divide

Peter Paul (Questrom’71) found his philanthropic calling at Boston University in creating Career Development Professorships in support of junior faculty across the University—many of them at the Chobanian & Avedisian School. Awarded to the most promising assistant professors, these professorships provide funding when time invested in research is most critical. With this invaluable boost, they are “bridged” on their way to acquiring careertransforming funding (from the National Institutes of Health, for instance) for their longer-term research projects. Some use their funding from the professorship to temporarily opt out of teaching to spend more time in the lab and hire research assistants.

From Paul’s perspective, these professorships allow him to direct his giving where it’s most needed. “Incremental giving on the margins can make a big impact,” he says. He’s also happy to build relationships with recipients. One of the first Peter Paul Career Development Professors was John H. Connor, a current associate professor of microbiology at Boston University. Paul continues to follow his career and even joined Connor for a tour of the NEIDL facility. For nearly two decades, Paul has celebrated new cohorts of recipients with a dinner party and the sharing of wine from his own label.

Though Paul gives generously within Boston University and elsewhere, he says he has a special place in his heart for the medical school Career Development Professorships, in part because recipients tend to stay and develop their careers here, and because BU—in his words and informed by his past service on the Board of Trustees—“has really launched itself in the world.” The recipients of his generous giving have also had the opportunity to do just that.

A Debt Of Gratitude

In 1954, when Lou Sullivan arrived from Georgia as a student at BU’s medical school, it was his first experience in a nonsegregated environment. Would his classmates see him as a peer? But he quickly bonded with others—soon friends—and three weeks in, received one of the class’s highest grades on his first exam. By his second year, he was class president. Boston University opened the door, but Lou Sullivan walked through it prepared.

In Georgia, Dr. Sullivan had seen health inequality firsthand—where the only doctor willing to see African American patients for miles around was among his first heroes. In his nearly 65 years in medicine, academia, and public service since receiving his BU degree, Dr. Sullivan (CAMED’58, Hon.’90) has never forgotten his wish to bring equity to healthcare. His storied career includes founding the Boston University hematology lab, founding the Morehouse School of Medicine, serving on George H.W. Bush’s cabinet as Health & Human Services secretary, and much more. He continues to be an influential advocate for equitable healthcare in this country.

Dr. Sullivan has given back to Boston University in what he calls “paying down a debt of gratitude.” With his gift, and additional support, the Chobanian & Avedisian School endowed the Louis W. Sullivan, MD, Professorship in Medicine and named Dr. Sabrina Assoumou as its inaugural incumbent. Dr. Assoumou was moved that Boston University thought to set up the professorship in honor of Dr. Sullivan. “It is an honor to be named after someone who is so transformational,” she says.

Dr. Assoumou is a clinician-investigator who conducts research at the Chobanian & Avedisian School and cares for patients at the Boston Medical Center for Infectious Diseases. She says the professorship has allowed her to be more creative in her research—toward which she now devotes 75% of her time while also on an NIH career development award. Endowing a professorship, she says, “enables support critical to the development of researchers and the freedom to explore uncharted territory.” One of her larger goals, she adds, is “to open doors for people who look like me.” She remembers those first semesters as a student observing a physician at work and knowing, “I want to be just like you.”

Dr. Assoumou carries forward Dr. Sullivan’s legacy in her clinical work, her teaching, and her research—all advanced by generous gifts.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

The late Edward Avedisian (CFA’59’61, Hon.’22) marked his $100 million gift to BU’s medical school in a way that honored his lifelong friendship with renowned cardiologist and BU’s ninth president, Aram V. Chobanian (Hon.’06), who navigated the merger of Boston City Hospital with Boston University Medical Center Hospital. Today, both men’s names are forever linked in the newly designated Boston University Aram V. Chobanian & Edward Avedisian School of Medicine.

In fact, this naming was a “grand compromise” BU President Robert A. Brown helped them reach when, in humility, both men demurred the honor. Avedisian’s connections to Boston University run deep—from studying clarinet, and later teaching it, at the College of Fine Arts, and a 20-year history of philanthropic giving. His career in music included playing for both the Boston Pops and the Boston Ballet Orchestra, and his philanthropy included gifts to the College of Fine Arts and several Armenian causes.

The import of Avedisian’s gift cannot be overstated. Dean Karen Antman says it will do no less than “transform the medical school.” The endowed fund will include $50 million to support scholarships for medical students and $25 million to support endowed professorships, one of which honors Richard K. Babayan, professor and chair emeritus of urology and former chief of urology at Boston Medical Center. An additional $25 million will endow the Avedisian Fund for Excellence to keep the school at the forefront of research and teaching. Pictured left to right, below, are Edward Avedisian and Aram Chobanian at the School of Medicine naming ceremony.