Longtime supporters of the school Shari and Bob Thorell have created a new faculty award intended to support faculty scientists of all levels at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, especially senior faculty members.
Shari, chair of the Davis School’s Board of Councilors and daughter of former chair Al Hanson, has had longstanding ties with the school. She served as the school’s director of development in the 1970s and helped form a business advisory group.
After many years of consideration, Shari and Bob recently established the Thorell Endowed Faculty Award Fund with a gift of $1,000,000. They chose to make a pledge that could be paid both in cash over time and/or via their estate—whatever is most advantageous to them. The new award, once fully funded, provides annual research support for Leonard Davis School faculty members at all levels of seniority.
The family also created the Hanson-Thorell Family Research Award, which provides annual support for junior faculty members. This funding supports the exploration of bold, often untested research questions to generate pilot data that faculty can later leverage for larger, more traditional mechanisms of funding, including National Institutes of Health grants.
“We are grateful to Shari and Bob and the whole Thorell family for their decades of generosity, leadership and service to the school,” said USC Leonard Davis School Dean Pinchas Cohen.
“For more than 3 decades, we have been honored to provide seed money to support junior faculty and their ideas for research projects,” Shari said. “Now, those faculty are older and we want to continue to support them. Truly, the faculty members are the heart and soul of the Leonard Davis School. We are so proud of them and all their contributions to advance healthy aging, and we feel blessed to have helped along the way.”
If you are interested in making a legacy gift like the Thorell Endowed Faculty Award (either outright or via your estate), please contact the Development Office at (213) 740-1361.
