Spring 2005
Stress Fractures
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Terry S. Semel and his wife, Jane Bovington Semel

Since his arrival at NPI in 1997 from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was chair of psychiatry, Whybrow has been collaborating with leadership from UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, consulting with Los Angeles community members engaged in thinking about NPI’s future, and working with a team of 370 full-time physicians and research-scientist faculty members, 700 clinical faculty, 1,300 staff members and 350 graduate students to formulate a vision for the new NPI.

Last June, their plans received a substantial boost — a $25-million endowment from Terry S. Semel, chairman and chief executive officer of Yahoo! Inc., and his wife, Jane Bovington Semel, founder of ijane inc., a nonprofit production company that works to address public-health issues through entertainment. In recognition of their generous gift, the institute will be renamed the Jane and Terry Semel Institute of Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA.

“We want our gift to instill an even greater commitment on the part of UCLA and other universities to strive to match scientific excellence with humanistic care, compassion and the development and dissemination of self-care tools,” the Semels say. “We hope to build a stronger bridge between academic research and community outreach to promote emotional well-being among individuals, families and communities.”

The Semel Institute will reflect NPI’s tremendous growth since its beginnings in 1957, when the California Senate passed a bill to establish the institute to work with the state’s Department of Mental Health. Today, the institute is comprised of laboratories and research centers that last year received $140 million in grants, a bustling outpatient department and the Neuropsychiatric Hospital, which for 12 consecutive years has been named by U.S. News & World Report as the best psychiatric hospital in the West.

NPI has established a reputation as one of the world’s most comprehensive and innovative neuroscience centers. In recent years, faculty members have made significant contributions to the understanding and treatment of such diverse illnesses as autism, anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorders, schizophrenia, manic depression, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, addiction, Alzheimer’s disease and a variety of eating disorders.

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