Giving

In 2025, the support of alumni, grateful patients, faculty, staff, and community partners fueled innovation and excellence across the Heersink School of Medicine, expanding educational opportunities, advancing transformative research, and enhancing healthcare across Alabama and beyond. Here we highlight just a few of these gifts and the meaningful progress made possible by our donors’ extraordinary generosity and vision.

$10 million endowment to support Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s and ALS research and education.

Burleson Foundation gift creates historic endowment for Department of Medical Education

Barber Companies’ gift accelerates innovation and training in vascular surgery

Artist with a passion for travel commits bequest to establish scholarship. Gerda Carmichael believed the world was meant to be explored. Born in 1930 to French and German immigrant parents in the heart of New York City, Carmichael knew the importance of hard work. 

The Beard family extends their legacy of compassion and care. How do you celebrate an extraordinary family? One that has devoted themselves to bringing skilled nursing into thousands of homes across Alabama? One that has given generously in support of hospice and palliative care for decades?

Gift from UAB Urology leaders establishes endowed professorship. In 2012, urology care, research, and training at UAB entered a new era when the Division of Urology became a department. 

Honoring the O’Neal family for investing in cancer care and research. The UAB O’Neal Comprehensive Cancer Center recognized the O’Neal family this past February as the ArtBLINK Gala honorees for their transformative gift to name the O’Neal Comprehensive Cancer Center in 2018. 

Families of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) face complex and often overwhelming challenges—understanding how the condition impacts their child, accessing support services, and coping with the financial strain of therapies and interventions that health insurance may not cover. Birmingham business owner and CEO Sheila Benson and her family experienced many of these struggles when her grandson, now 16, was diagnosed with ASD at age 2.

Throughout her career as a young physician, the late Priya Nagar, M.D., had a special understanding of her patients’ challenges because of her own experiences with pain, serious illness, and healing.

Once a year, when Gabrielle Rocque, M.D., an associate professor in the Division of Hematology and Oncology, enters the Kirklin Clinic on the night of the annual ArtBLINK gala, she sees the space where she normally cares for breast-cancer patients reimagined as the site of a lively, black-tie celebration. “It blows me away,” she said. “It’s completely transformed.”