Columbia University in New York City has received a $175 gift to establish the Vagelos Institute for Biomedical Research.
The gift from Roy and Diana Vagelos will be used to support PhD students in biomedical science and physician-scientists in their research, according to a March 6 news release.
The university will use $125 million of the gift to establish an endowment to fund PhD students, while another $50 million will be used to support physician-scientist research in clinical medicine and fundamental biology.
The institute will be guided by an external scientific advisory board, which currently includes William Kaelin Jr., MD, from Boston-based Dana-Farber Cancer Institute; Enrique De La Cruz, PhD, from New Haven, Conn.-based Yale School of Medicine; Tracy Johnson, PhD, from the University of California Los Angeles; and Shirley Tilghman, PhD, from Princeton (N.J.) University.