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To ensure that talented students from diverse backgrounds can receive a great education regardless of their means, Tufts President Anthony P. Monaco, who was a financial aid student during his undergraduate career, issued a challenge in 2012. Tufts would match donations of $100,000 or more to create new endowed scholarships, or gifts of $100,000 or more to existing scholarships, thereby doubling their value and impact.

The Financial Aid Initiative, which officially wrapped on June 30, raised $95 million. “This was a really important priority for me,” Monaco says. “Having students who come from different backgrounds with different perspectives enriches everyone in our community.”

Simin Nikbin Meydani, known for her groundbreaking work on nutrition and the immune system, has been appointed the university’s vice provost for research. She had been director of the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts since 2009.

In her new role, Meydani says she will continue to foster collaborative work by researchers across the university. “Working in silos will only get you so far,” she says. “In order to be able to make big strides and tackle key public health challenges, you need to bring different disciplines together.”

Since the time of the Greeks, an understanding of anatomy has been basic to the practice of medicine. Now, the outdated anatomy lab at Tufts University School of Medicine, which has remained largely unchanged since the early Fifties, is being expanded and technically upgraded, thanks to a $15 million gift from the Jaharis Family Foundation Inc.

“I know firsthand that the gross anatomy lab needs to be completely redone to bring it up to today’s standards,” says Steven Jaharis, M87. “It’s the one laboratory that basically hasn’t changed since I was a student thirty years ago.”

In addition, $2 million of the Jaharis gift will be used to encourage students to pursue a career in family medicine by alleviating some of their indebtedness before graduation. “The need for primary care physicians in America is growing,” says Jaharis, a longtime family medicine practitioner in the Chicago area. “I hope that this scholarship will help students who go into family medicine graduate with less loan debt.”

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