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 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.