The David Geffen School of Medicine will receive $1 million from The Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation to fund an endowed chair in clinical pharmacology.
Dr. Barbara Levey, assistant vice chancellor for biomedical affairs at UCLA, will be named the chair when the funding goes through, said Martin Blank, one of two directors for the foundation.
Levey is also the director of UCLA’s Interdepartmental Clinical Pharmacology Training Program, in which she has promoted research through training medical students and fellows, Levey said.
The chair will help establish the program’s future, Levey said. If a person is a clinical pharmacologist at another university and UCLA wants to recruit them, they would be more likely to accept if there is a secure endowed position.
While a clinical pharmacology program already exists at UCLA, an endowed chair will play a crucial role in the recruitment and retention of some of the best university faculty, according to a UCLA Newsroom press release. It will also provide needed funds to support research on how prescription drugs react to different people as well as to each other, according to the release.
For example, if a man with a heart condition takes a blood thinning medication, other prescriptions could cause the further thinning of the blood and cause inappropriate bleeding, Levey said.
The Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation was created to support humanitarian and philanthropic causes, Blank said.
The foundation chose to fund the clinical pharmacology chair because it believes it is a critical area of study in which extensive amounts of research are needed, Blank said.
“UCLA has meant a lot to the Gilberts, the foundation and (I),” Blank said.
Although Levey is unsure of how the chair will be used, she hopes that it will promote more research and advancement in the training program.