Stories of Giving

The Department of Family Medicine & Community Health at UMass Chan Medical School is celebrating its 50th anniversary—and an impactful legacy in family medicine education and patient-centered primary care. Illuminating the milestone year is a new fund honoring the department’s former chair, Daniel H. Lasser, MD, MPH, which will boost efforts to train the next generation of family physicians and pursue innovations in medical education and practice. 

As executive director of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver Center at UMass Chan Medical School, Jean A. Frazier, MD, led the center’s innovative work to improve the quality of life for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, autism spectrum disorder and/or behavioral health disorders, and their families, for nearly a decade. 

On March 28, second-year students in the T.H. Chan School of Medicine at UMass Chan Medical School packed the multipurpose room in the Albert Sherman Center and got a crash course in leadership from Gerard R. (Gerry) Cox, MD’83, MHA, who led a distinguished medical career in government and military service. 

As a veteran critical care nurse and dean of the Tan Chingfen Graduate School of Nursing, Joan Vitello-Cicciu, PhD, is passionate about the role of nurses as leaders and transformational change agents in health care settings. It’s a belief she shared with her late husband, Gerald (Jerry) Cicciu, an innovator in medical device sales and development who worked closely with hospitals and medical practices for close to 50 years. 

While a devastating diagnosis, the outlook for Duchenne muscular dystrophy—including quality of life and hope for a cure—has improved dramatically over the last two decades, thanks in large part to fierce advocacy and philanthropy from the patient community. 

Melissa Harris and John Harris, MD, PhD'05, have endowed a scholarship at UMass Chan Medical School to bring more opportunity to aspiring physicians. Established in both of their names, it honors the couple’s shared life, a joint dedication to John’s prolific career as a dermatologist and physician-scientist, and their belief that a student’s financial situation should never prevent them from pursuing a medical degree. 

For Mark Eastham, MD'82, the course to a fulfilling medical career took a somewhat unusual route. It was first set on a summer day in the waters off Cape Cod, after a preliminary stop at the Hyannis Port estate of a rather well-known Massachusetts family. Many years later, the Lowell native is funding a scholarship at UMass Chan Medical School to help aspiring physicians launch their own careers in medicine.

Inspired by Dennis Murphy III’s remarkable recovery from a stroke, Dennis’ mother, Julie Murphy, has established a fund named in memory of her husband and Dennis’ father, Dennis F. Murphy Jr., to advance stroke rehabilitation education at UMass Chan Medical School.

A gift from the Hall family, including Kimberly Hall, FNP, DNP’19, her husband Bruce Hall, and their children, will make international clinical nursing experiences more accessible to students at the Tan Chingfen Graduate School of Nursing through the establishment of the Hall Family Global Nursing Fund.

More than 2,000 participants descended on Polar Park in Worcester for the 26th annual UMass Cancer Walk presented by Harr Toyota on Sunday, Sept. 29. This year, more than $650,000 was raised.