News

Transferring from a community college to a four-year institution can present challenges. If units don’t transfer, students find themselves needing to repeat courses in order to complete degree requirements. Support services for transfer students at their new campus tend to be under-resourced. Many transfer students are first-generation college attendees. They are often from lower-income families […]

Improving access to higher education is central to Koret’s core priority of enhancing the quality of life in the Bay Area. Earning a college degree provides a critical pathway for the next generation to productive employment, financial stability, and social mobility. In 2020, Koret announced a new five-year $50 million Higher Education Initiative. Grants have […]

Gladstone Senior Investigator Jennifer Doudna, PhD, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her transformative discovery of the CRISPR-Cas9 system, along with Emmanuelle Charpentier, PhD. The gene-editing tool allows researchers to cut DNA in order to remove, replace, or add genes to a sequence, and has been adopted around the world to identify therapeutic targets, diagnose viral infection, and repair genetic mutations. Doudna joined Gladstone in 2018 to apply her technology to biomedical problems, while continuing her lab at UC Berkeley, where she has been a professor since 2002.

With classes canceled and teaching labs empty, two Cal graduate students are using an idle biology lab to produce home-made hand sanitizer. Over the past four weeks, they have made 400 gallons of home brew to distribute to homeless shelters, senior centers, and nursing homes around the Bay Area.

Santa Clara University’s School of Engineering recently launched the “Rapid Response to Acute Humanitarian Crises” project and started manufacturing key parts of medical face shields for local hospitals. In coordination with local maker groups, faculty, staff, and students are using 11 3D printers in the School’s Maker Lab at a capacity of 100 sets of face shield parts each week.

Ron E. Hassner, the Helen Diller Family Chair of Israel Studies at UC Berkeley, shares how Israel scholarship and Jewish life has progressed at the campus in recent years. Today, the Berkeley Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies, Magnes Museum, and Center for Jewish Studies contribute to a campus environment where Israel and Judaism are studied rigorously, carefully, and enthusiastically. (Photo credit: Tikvah: Students for Israel)

The UCSF has announced that its patient care facilities at the Wayne and Gladys Valley Center for Vision will be named the Koret Vision Clinics, in recognition of a $10 million grant to the department, which houses one of the top 10 eye centers in the country. The new clinics will open in summer of 2020 and will substantially increase the number of patients seen each year and increase accessible, innovative vision care for the Bay Area and the world.

Former US ambassador to Israel and the Israel Institute’s new board chair Daniel B. Shapiro promotes the importance of accessible, high-level courses about Israel to university campuses. In-depth academic engagement about Israel is a critical way to ensure that students are educated and well-prepared for sophisticated discourse on Israel. (Photo credit: The Israel Institute)

The Stanford ChEM-H Building and the Stanford Neurosciences Building are opening this month as part of a new research complex dedicated to improving human health. The interconnecting buildings will allow teams of scientists, engineers, and clinicians from across Stanford’s campus to join forces, share expertise, and work together in community labs, such as the Koret Human Neurosciences Community Laboratory. (Photo credit: Farrin Abbott)

Supporting institutions of higher learning is central to the mission of the Koret Foundation. We believe that a college education has become more important than ever for individual success and mobility. We also believe that, collectively, these individual successes strengthen the community as a whole. Recently, the Foundation has heightened our focus on increasing access […]