By Eileen Conrad

UC Santa Barbara has received a $3 million gift from William K. Bowes, Jr. to establish an endowed chair for the director of the campus’s planned Center for Stem Cell Biology and Engineering.

The professorship will be named in memory of Bowes’s mother, Ruth Garland, a physician who was one of the first women to graduate from the Stanford School of Medicine, where she later taught.

“Mr. Bowes’s generous gift provides UCSB with the flexibility to build on our existing strength as a leading center for collaborative interdisciplinary stem cell research,” said Chancellor Henry T. Yang. “In my meetings with him I have been impressed and personally touched not only by his vision for the future of science, but also by his dedication to the memory of his late mother.”

Michael Witherell, vice chancellor for research, said, “UCSB is bringing to stem cell research its characteristic approach of integrating science and engineering in a single center. The Ruth Garland Chair is central to this approach, because it allows us to attract a researcher of national stature to lead the new center.”

The interdisciplinary Center for Stem Cell Biology and Engineering, which is pending formal approval by UCSB’s Academic Senate, will help expand existing stem cell studies already under way on campus and stimulate new investigations of stem cell biology and engineering. Embryonic stem cells are among the first cells to form after an egg is fertilized and exist for a few days before changing into specialized cells.

Earlier this year, UCSB was awarded $2.26 million by the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine to construct new research facilities dedicated to collaborative research in the emerging field. More than 20 researchers from UCSB, Sansum Diabetes Research Institute, and Cottage Hospital plan to use the new laboratory facility on the UCSB campus.

“The Ruth Garland Chair will allow the Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology to build upon its research and teaching in the area of developmental biology, with an emphasis on the basic mechanisms that underlie proliferation and differentiation of cells,” said Dennis Clegg, professor and chair of MCDB. UCSB now has a total of 70 chairs.

Ruth Garland’s grandparents settled in Santa Barbara in 1855, and she was born there in 1897. Garland earned both a B.A. in bacteriology and a medical degree from Stanford University. While in medical school she participated in a groundbreaking diabetes study with Dr. William Sansum in Santa Barbara.