Norman Prince Neurosciences Institute Brings in Major Gifts for Neuroscience Research and Teaching

Posted Thursday, October 11, 2012

Three philanthropic gifts made to the Norman Prince Neurosciences Institute (NPNI) at Rhode Island Hospital, totaling nearly $600,000, will improve brain science in the state by supporting innovative research and establishing an annual lecture.

The gifts are the first major donations to the NPNI since its founding. The institute was established in 2010 with a $15 million gift from the Frederick Henry Prince 1932 Trust, and brings together for the first time experts from Rhode Island Hospital and its Hasbro Children’s Hospital, The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University and the Brown Institute for Brain Science, Butler Hospital, Bradley Hospital and the Providence VA Medical Center.

Physicians and scientists at the NPNI are committed to making scientific breakthroughs, developing them into effective tests and treatments, and quickly delivering these new models of medical care to patients with diseases and disorders of the brain and nervous system, including autism, Alzheimer’s disease, and stroke.

The institute has created a research seed fund, a bench-to-bedside lecture series, and a fellowship program to cross-train the next generation of neuroscientists in the clinic and on the Brown campus. This year, the NPNI launched a website, www.npniri.org, and formed an external advisory council to help guide its future directions in clinical care, research, and teaching.

“The NPNI has major momentum, and these gifts are testament to that growth,” said Timothy J. Babineau, MD, president and chief executive officer of Lifespan and president of Rhode Island Hospital. “We have an opportunity to create a world-class neurosciences program here in Rhode Island, and are making good progress toward that goal.”

“These gifts will significantly boost our research and teaching capacity in the areas of epilepsy, brain cancer, and traumatic brain injury,” said G. Rees Cosgrove, MD, FRCS, chief of neurosurgery at Rhode Island Hospital and The Miriam Hospital and clinical director of the NPNI. “They also encourage collaboration among our hospital partners and with Brown.”

The gifts to NPNI include:

• A total gift of $224,000, through their respective private foundations, from the founding family of the NPNI – Elizabeth J.M. Prince of Newport, Guillaume de Ramel of Newport, Diana Oehrli of Switzerland, and Régis de Ramel of Delaware – to make possible the purchase of the NeuroPort system. The machine will allow a collaborative research team to record and measure human brain activity before, during, and after epileptic seizures. Data collected will be used, for the first time, to identify patterns of brain activity that predict seizures. The team from Rhode Island Hospital and Brown includes neurologists, neurosurgeons, and neuroscientists with expertise in engineering and computation.

• A gift of $125,000 from Scott E. Wang, MD, to establish an annual lecture in brain and spine cancers at Rhode Island Hospital. This endowment gift for the Scott E. Wang, MD Lecture in Neuro-Oncology will bring leading experts to Providence to present the best clinical practices and cutting-edge research to the NPNI community of clinicians and patients, and to meet with neuroscience faculty, staff, and medical students and residents as part of this educational program. Wang, a Jamestown resident, is the former chairman of the Department of Pathology at Newport Hospital.

• A gift of $250,000 from an anonymous donor to support the Neurotrauma and Brain Barriers Research Laboratory in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Rhode Island Hospital and Alpert Medical School. The research funds will improve understanding of, and treatments for, traumatic brain injuries, which significantly affect members of the military. The Florida donor is a member of the NPNI advisory council, a governor of Rhode Island Hospital, a member of the executive committee of the Rhode Island Hospital Foundation, and sits on the Brown Advisory Council for Biology and Medicine.

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