To Advance the Healing Community Supporting Sargent College
The hospital gave me my health back. Sargent College gave me my life back.
It’s true: our work can make life worth living again.
Accidents happen—and injuries left unhealed can harden into disabilities. On a larger scale, as the global population ages, chronic conditions grow in commonality and scope. For all these reasons, the world needs effective and efficient rehabilitation services more than ever before
The mission of Sargent College is to advance, preserve, disseminate, and apply knowledge in the health and rehabilitation sciences. We combine outstanding faculty, challenging academic curricula, and state-of-the-art facilities to provide rigorous education and exemplary clinical experiences to our students.
We are a small but intensely focused healing community. We innovate in health- and rehabilitation-related research, transform clinical practice through applied science, and offer distinctive educational experiences at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. We teach the healers of tomorrow
Today, we require resources to advance our mission. We seek philanthropic partners to support our faculty in their innovative teaching and research, help provide financial aid and other kinds of student assistance, and underwrite selected projects to upgrade our educational infrastructure.
Tomorrow, with your help, we will do more
2
Sargent by the numbers
What is Sargent, and why does it merit your support?
The Sargent community now includes more than 1,000 undergraduate and nearly 800 graduate students. According to U.S. News & World Report, our graduate programs rank in the top 20 nationally— the occupational therapy program at No. 1 out of 198 programs; the speech-language pathology program at No. 10 out of 261; and the physical therapy program at No. 20 out of 239.
Our approach to research and teaching is purposefully interdisciplinary, bringing together all of our clinical programs under one roof. This not only helps promote a deep appreciation for work across the professions, among all the members of our intellectual community; it also reflects the future of quality healthcare.
Today, the college has 79 full-time and 31 part-time faculty, who last year received nearly $20 million in federal and grant funding—an average of $700,000 per tenure-track faculty member. Our students and faculty work together on interdisciplinary research, and provide patient care, at more than 30 on-campus clinical education centers, research labs, and research centers. We also have a robust clinical program that includes more than 1,200 clinical sites, comprising all 50 U.S. states and giving our students the opportunity to develop practical skills in a diverse range of real-world, interdisciplinary settings.
And finally, we are proud to count over 20,000 alumni in 72 countries—skilled professionals who support our work through their example and their generosity to Sargent.
3
Supporting our faculty and their research
Sargent is Sargent because of our faculty.
They are thought leaders, who lead by turning intellectual capital—ideas, concepts, and data—into action. By combining interdisciplinary research, cross-disciplinary education, and their experience from clinical care, they discover the causes and best therapies for some of today’s most pressing health concerns—dementia, stroke, brain trauma, mental illness, and many others. Their understanding of the health and rehabilitation sciences shapes how we research, discover, educate, and treat.
You can support our faculty directly—for example, by establishing an endowed chair at one of several gift levels. The academic health and rehabilitation sciences field is very competitive, which means that recruiting and retaining the most talented faculty requires significant resources—and endowed chairs can make the difference.
With the support of visionary partners, we have established several much-needed endowed professorships. To keep advancing in our many related fields, we need more such donations and partnerships.
You can also endow a fellowship at the graduate level to support a young researcher working in an area of interest to you. We are happy to discuss a range of giving opportunities that will help us develop the health and rehabilitation sciences experts of tomorrow.
What kinds of research are we doing?
Supported by nearly $20 million in external funding and conducted in three dozen specialized labs and centers, our research covers the full range of biological and behavioral research
relating to human health, disease, and disorders. The complexity of most of the urgent issues in healthcare—from resolving health inequities to speeding recovery from traumatic brain injuries— requires effective cross-disciplinary approaches. This kind of creative collaboration characterizes our work at Sargent.
Our work within health data sciences, for example, combines mathematics, statistics, epidemiology, and informatics. We are harnessing the potential of this emerging discipline in part by forging deeper partnerships and relationships with Boston University’s new Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences (CDS). Our undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty work side by side with CDS researchers at the new 19-story Center for Computing & Data Sciences, adjacent to our building.
Beyond the CDS partnership, we collaborate with faculty and programs across the BU campuses, looking deeper into the role that data sets and new technologies can play in helping us generate new knowledge—and understand how to apply this knowledge. By mastering new skills and tools to analyze and interpret huge data sets, we increase our ability to innovate both in the policy realm and in treatment modalities, providing indirect and direct benefits to the populations we serve.
The global COVID-19 pandemic underscored the need for increased awareness of health equity and access-related issues—and of the need for concrete actions to promote such equity. Sargent advances health equity in part by preparing our students to recognize and address injustice in their fields. For example, a new minor in health equity has deepened our collaboration with the BU Center for Antiracist Research to support
4
these efforts across Sargent. This initiative and others prompt our students—tomorrow’s practitioners— to embrace and act on the belief that every person deserves access to quality healthcare
In all of our work, we seek to help faculty translate research findings into effective and adaptable clinical applications. This plays to our strengths, because our depth of expertise allows us to conduct interdisciplinary and collaborative efforts within the Sargent College clinical centers and across the broader BU campus. We take seriously the obligation to translate the knowledge we generate into applications that not only treat patients but also help shape the next generation of practitioners in the health and rehabilitative professions.
We are happy to discuss ways that you can support research within—and across—these core areas of Sargent research.
A global leader in brain injury recovery
Swathi Kiran, James and Cecilia Tse Ying Professor in Neurorehabilitation, works with large data sets and collaborates with scientists across BU to help unlock the mysteries of brain injuries in an ambitious effort to better understand and treat these debilitating conditions. She focuses on developing personalized therapies that treat patients early in their recovery.
Philanthropy helps move research forward in a legendary alum and advocate’s
name
Left paralyzed by a crash during his first BU hockey game, Travis Roy (COM’00, Hon.’16) devoted his life to helping those with similar injuries. Before Roy died in 2020, a group of anonymous donors came together to endow a professorship in his name. The inaugural holder of that chair is LaDora Thompson, a professor in Sargent’s department of physical therapy and athletic training.
Thompson is an expert in sarcopenia, muscle dysfunction with aging. Her team seeks to translate basic science discoveries into potential therapeutic strategies to combat sarcopenia and frailty. While Professor Thompson’s work holds promise for everyone, as all people will experience age-related decline in muscle function, she seeks to understand why some experience it sooner and how to help those who live with muscle atrophy due to spinal cord injuries—as Roy did—and other conditions.
Roy’s legacy will expand further through another recent gift from his Travis Roy Foundation, which gave $1 million to create the Travis M. Roy Endowed Graduate Scholarship Fund. The fund will provide annual scholarships to one or more Sargent graduate students studying occupational or physical therapy.
5
Learning in the field
Recently, Sargent students in the Doctor of Occupational Therapy (OTD) program spent two weeks in Brazil learning about the country’s healthcare system and its model of occupational therapy.
Led by Pedro Almeida, a clinical assistant professor, and Tatiana Pontes, a clinical associate professor and the Entry-Level OTD program director, students worked alongside occupational therapists practicing in settings such as oncology, rheumatology, mental health, NICU, and maternity care.
Concurrently, Almeida led a workshop on orthoses for Sargent students and occupational therapists at the Hospital Universitário de Brasília. The group learned how to make orthoses, shared experiences and discussed current clinical cases at the hospital, and used their clinical reasoning to identify the mosteffective interventions.
Donor generosity helps make these kinds of distinctive learning experiences possible.
6
From left: OTD student Darya Nemati (’24) and a Brazilian occupational therapist participate in a workshop on orthoses taught by Pedro Almeida (center).
Supporting our students
Our students need and deserve your support for several reasons.
First, earning a Sargent degree is an intensive and expensive process. Most of our students receive aid in the form of scholarships or loans. Because salaries upon graduation tend to be relatively modest, we make every effort to maximize scholarships and minimize loans, thereby keeping our young graduates’ debt burdens as low as possible. But we need to do more, especially for our students from financially disadvantaged backgrounds.
You can provide scholarship support either through current-use giving or the creation of a named endowed fund, which at BU requires a minimum investment of $100,000. Undergraduate scholarships are awarded centrally and—in the case of endowments— may be matched by the University’s Century Challenge program. Graduate-level scholarships
are awarded at the school and college level and can reflect donor preferences regarding field of study.
Finally, your support can help expand experiential, field-based, and international service-learning opportunities. You can make it possible for students to gain valuable realworld experience in their fields of study—and at the same time, make a real difference in the communities they are serving. At our affiliated clinical sites, students sharpen their skills and broaden their perspectives. And this life-changing experience can happen almost anywhere in the world. In the last decade, for example, students have traveled to Thailand, India, Peru, Ghana, Costa Rica, Brazil, and Belize.
These experiences—available to both undergraduate and graduate students at Sargent—are made possible in part by donor generosity.
7
Upgrading our educational facilities
The health and rehabilitation sciences field is fast-moving—and so is the education that informs it. This, in turn, means that Sargent College must continually invest in its facilities to help students stay abreast of advances in knowledge and technology.
For example, our new Gross Anatomy Lab will provide a state-of-the-science space for all Sargent College students and faculty to interact and learn in the only cadaveric dissection laboratory on the Charles River Campus. The lab will feature more than 1,000 square feet of new and improved, best-in-class space, with enhanced teaching and learning tools, as well as a dedicated classroom.
Another example is our recently completed Simulation Lab: a multipurpose simulated learning space designed to strengthen our students’ clinical training and experiential learning focused on the health professions. The space, known informally as the Sim Lab, provides a realistic representation of a healthcare setting in which students can practice a variety of clinical and behavioral skills. It supports simulated patient interactions and collaborative learning to to bridge the space between the classroom and real-life clinical experiences.
We have prepared separate informational packages on these and other facility-related giving opportunities, which we are happy to share with you upon request.
8
A December 2022 ribbon-cutting ceremony at the Sim Lab
Clinical education centers: Discovering, teaching, and healing
Working in our on-campus clinical settings, students gain the experience and confidence needed to translate emerging theory into effective practice. And our clinical education centers look outward, as well. They provide a wide variety of services to the BU and Greater Boston communities, ranging from physical rehabilitation to occupational therapy to nutritional counseling—and generally at a lower cost than competing clinics. They include:
• The Aphasia Resource Center
• The Aphasia Research Laboratory
• The Ryan Center for Sports Medicine and Rehabilitation
• The Sargent Choice Nutrition Center
• The Intensive Cognitive and Communication Center
• The Academic Speech, Language & Hearing Center
• The Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation
• The Center for Neurorehabilitation
• The Center for Brain Recovery
Support for our centers—either in the form of endowment or current-use funds—will help provide innovative educational experiences for our students. It will also advance our basic and clinical research, and help us deliver enhanced services in our community.
9
10
A cause and a journey
At Sargent, we are proud to serve as a healing community.
It’s a distinctive kind of healing that we provide—complementary to, but different from, conventional medical practice.
We are team-based and collaborative. We combine science and clinical insights, data sets and empathy, rigor and compassion. We generate and sharpen ideas from the broadest possible range of healthrelated fields and bring them to bear on some of the most intractable health challenges facing society today. And given the very nature of rehabilitation, we work with our patients and clients for weeks, months, even years—as long as they can benefit.
We look at society today and ask, How can we help? At the same time, we look to the future, educating not only tomorrow’s rehabilitation experts but also the intellectual leaders who will prepare future generations.
It’s an important cause, and an exciting journey. We hope you will join us.
11
For further information, please contact:
Lindsay Allen Assistant Dean, Development & Alumni Relations, Sargent College 617-358-8141 allenl2@bu.edu Kristina Lentz Capano Assistant Vice President, School Development 617-312-5109 klcapano@bu.edu “Sargent Spirit means a true commitment to improving humankind.” —Carolyn Cohen (Sargent’65) (1943–2023)
