USC and the W. M. Keck Foundation: A Historic Partnership
USC's longstanding partnership with the W. M. Keck Foundation dates back many decades. The partnership achieved new significance in 1999, when the Keck Foundation made a historic $110 million gift, the largest philanthropic gift to a U.S. medical school at the time. In recognition of this remarkable commitment, the medical school was renamed the Keck School of Medicine of USC.
The gift sparked many advances, including the following:
- recruitment of many new, world-class faculty members;
- major expansion of sponsored research support; and
- creation of new, leading-edge programs, including
- the Zilkha Neurogenetic Institute,
- the Institute for Global Health, and
- the Eli and Edythe Broad CIRM Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC.
In 2010, the National Institutes of Health awarded a Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) grant to USC—the first institution in Los Angeles to receive such an honor. This support was a ringing endorsement of the highly collaborative culture among the schools at USC and the overall excellence of USC’s medical enterprise.
Keck Medicine of USC
In 2011, the Keck Foundation extended its support with a second transformative gift of $150 million to further accelerate USC's groundbreaking education, medical, clinical and translational research. In acknowledgement, USC’s academic medical enterprise was named Keck Medicine of USC. Integrating the activities of the Keck School of Medicine of USC—which includes the USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center—with the Keck Medical Center of USC—which includes Keck Hospital of USC, USC Norris Cancer Hospital, and 500 faculty physicians—Keck Medicine of USC will deliver the latest and highest-quality patient care, generate life-altering research breakthroughs, and hasten those discoveries into clinical applications.
The gift is already enhancing the activities of the medical school and USC's academic medical center, extending cross-disciplinary collaborations among medical faculty and their colleagues in the physical, life and social sciences, as well as engineering and other disciplines. Together we are making important strides toward advancing the health care revolution.
With this gift, the W. M. Keck Foundation and members of the extended Keck family have donated nearly $300 million to USC, placing them among the university’s most generous and visionary benefactors. Their support lays the foundation for the ambitious goals of the Keck Medicine Initiative and serves to inspire widespread support from throughout the community and world to ensure its success.