Our Donors' Stories
Planned gifts play an important role in keeping a Berkeley education accessible to talented students, enabling cutting-edge research, and in other ways supporting the University's all-around excellence. Here are a few stories illustrating how different types of planned gifts are directly benefiting and furthering the work of a Cal undergraduate, graduate student, and senior professor. We are delighted to be able to introduce you not only to these three exceptional individuals, but also to the equally exceptional donors whose generosity has made these success stories possible.
Undergraduate Education
Ashley Gayles
Phyllis Epstien Friedman Achievement Award Scholar
Ashley Gayles almost didn't apply to Berkeley at all.
She went to an inner-city Sacramento high school whose graduates didn't typically go on to Cal. In addition, personal challenges — including growing up in a single-parent family dependent on welfare, and the death of her father before she was born — didn't put her on the fast track to academic success. Still, her mother always impressed upon her the importance of school, so Ashley worked hard, earned good grades, and, when the time came, mailed an application anyway.
Her response when she received the letter welcoming her as a member of the 2006 freshman class? “I was so shocked when I found out I was accepted by Berkeley. It really boosted my confidence that a school like this wanted me.”
Now in her second semester, Gayles is thriving at Cal. The first in her family to go to college, she loves the diversity of students and ideas at Berkeley, as well as the natural beauty of the campus. She has decided to double-major in German and political science, and this summer, she plans to study or travel in Germany.
Gayles gives much of the credit for her positive experience at Berkeley to her California Alumni Association Achievement Award Scholarship, which recognizes her academic distinction in the face of major life obstacles. Thanks to her scholarship — which was made possible by generous planned gifts from Phyllis Epstein Friedman — Gayles receives four years of tuition and fees, as well as an invaluable support system to help with academic and career issues such as how to get into graduate school, and how to write an effective resume.
Having her scholarship “takes away a lot of stress,” Gayles says, freeing her from money worries and allowing her to concentrate on her studies and prepare for a career. It also allows her to tutor middle school and high school students who are confronting some of the same challenges she faced. “I really like working with underprivileged students to help them get an education,” she explains, “because I've seen what's possible.”
Gayles's own words show what a good match she is with the university to which she almost didn't apply: “I'm really passionate about life. Despite all of the obstacles, I still have dreams and goals, and I have a lot of confidence in myself that I will attain those goals. And Berkeley most likely will be very instrumental in my getting there.”
Phyllis Epstein Friedman
Scholarship Donor
A Bay Area native and a motivated student, Phyllis Friedman attended UC Berkeley as a member of the Class of 1940 for two years. “I thought it was wonderful,” she says of her Cal experience. Her strong interest was journalism, but, discovering limited opportunities for women journalists in those days, she left college to join her parents in their Oakland-based insurance brokerage, the Chas. Epstein Company. Friedman helped run the highly successful firm for two decades until the family closed the business in 1960. In 1962, she married Henry Friedman, a career employee at Pacific Gas and Electric Company. The two shared their lives and an enthusiasm for ballroom dancing until Henry's death in 1999.
Showing her commitment to education and her love for UC Berkeley, Friedman created a gift annuity and two charitable remainder trusts at Cal to establish the Phyllis Epstein Friedman Achievement Award Scholarship that currently provides support to Ashley Gayles.
“She's so sweet!” says Gayles, who was delighted to meet and talk with her benefactor at last year's Fall Feast, the California Alumni Association's annual dinner for scholarship recipients and donors. “I was glad to have the opportunity to thank her in person. She's willing to help someone she doesn't even know get an education. I wish there were more people like that.”
Graduate Education
Leslie Hsu
Anselmo Macchi Graduate Fellow in the
Physical Sciences
Leslie Hsu remembers with excitement a recent trip she took to a special location in Switzerland.
“I was lucky enough to see a debris flow actually occurring. They happen several times a year in that spot. It started raining, so we ran out to look. From the bridge over the debris flow channel, we were lucky enough to see one during daylight. My friend said I looked like a little kid on Christmas morning.”
A fifth-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science, Hsu is currently completing a dissertation on — what else? — debris flows. As she explains, the term refers to a “natural hazard that occurs in mountainous areas. It can be thought of as something between a mudflow and a rock avalanche.”
With a laugh, Hsu traces her enthusiasm for the phenomenon to an unlikely source — the depiction of the prehistoric world in the film Jurassic Park, which she saw as a child. Originally fascinated by the dinosaurs, she eventually turned her attention to the earth itself. From there, it was a natural progression to two degrees in geosciences — a B.A. from Harvard and an M.S. from the University of Arizona — and her acceptance to Berkeley for doctoral study.
“Now I'm more interested in rocks than living things,” she says, only half-jokingly. “In geomorphology, you get to be very quantitative, and can apply math and physics to what you see in the landscape. I like to be quantitative.”
While Hsu's topic may sound like an esoteric one to the nonspecialist, she is quick to point out its great importance for earth scientists — and everyone else concerned with the effects of catastrophic earthquakes and floods on landscapes and their human and animal populations.
Hsu is extremely grateful for being able to pursue her research at Berkeley — she cites the national preeminence of the Department of Earth and Planetary Science, as well as the University's proximity to so many earthquakes. She is also grateful for the Anselmo Macchi Graduate Fellowship in the Physical Sciences that will pay her tuition and fees this year. Besides freeing her from financial worries, her fellowship means she will have a break from working as a teaching assistant, allowing her greater freedom to pursue related avenues of research that may yield important insights into her topic.
Hsu is well on her way to finishing her degree and, if her past achievements are any indication, embarking on a distinguished career in university teaching and research. Where she will pursue that career, she can't predict. But she hopes it will be “someplace with lots of natural hazards.”
Anselmo John Macchi
Fellowship Donor
Anselmo Macchi '36 went from Hell's Kitchen in New York City to UC Berkeley. While at Cal, his father died, and he couldn't afford a ticket home. One of his professors gave him the money for a ticket in exchange for Macchi's promise that he would return and finish his education. He did, and went on to serve as a Seabee in the Navy and then a civil engineer, in which occupation he worked on the San Francisco Bay Bridge as well as bridges in South America. Subsequently, he borrowed $3,000 and started his own successful business, Macchi Engineers.
Macchi never forgot the kindness of the professor who bought his ticket home, and he never lost his fondness for Cal, to which he returned every year to watch the Big Game. He also remembered how, though he grew up poor, hard work and education helped him to accomplish more than he'd dreamed he could. For all of these reasons, when he passed away in 2000, he left a large bequest to support deserving undergraduate and graduate students at Berkeley — including doctoral student Leslie Hsu.
Faculty Endowments
Stanley A. Berger
Montford G. Cook Professor of Engineering
Listening to Professor Stanley Berger talk about his work is like the best kind of doctor's visit — fascinating, humane, and carrying the promise of improved health.
Like the physicians with whom he works, Berger focuses on arteries and blood flow to more effectively detect and treat the dangerous accumulation of plaque — a condition that can result in heart attack or stroke. But Berger — an engineer who is a leading expert in the application of fluid mechanics to biology and medicine — brings something to the effort that doctors can't: complex mathematical equations and sophisticated, custom-designed computer software.
It was a decade-and-a-half ago that a senior investigator at the University of California, San Francisco told him about a problem he and his colleagues were having with the MRI images of their patients' arteries. The MRIs — which, unlike x-rays, are images constructed from digital data through the use of sophisticated software — weren't providing the clarity needed for accurate diagnoses. The investigators were especially interested in getting better images of stroke-threatening deposits in carotid arteries.
Berger started with specifications for a “standard” carotid artery and made fluid dynamic calculations for blood flow; his results were then “built” into the MRI software. The outcome: dramatically improved images that allowed doctors to clearly see occlusions due to accumulated plaque.
Since then, Berger has been kept busy applying “biofluiddynamics” to other life-saving tasks. These include using information about plaque composition garnered from MRIs to carry out calculations to identify those plaques particularly susceptible to rupture (leading to vessel blockage); calculating the force exerted by blood flow on a specific patient's plaque, a contributor to rupture; and modeling blood flow through arterial “stents,” the metal scaffolding inserted to keep a diseased artery open. He is also currently working with Berkeley professor Luke Lee, an internationally acclaimed expert on biomedical micro-electromechanical systems (bio-MEMS), on the investigation of sickle-cell disease.
It is in large part because Berger holds the Montford G. Cook Endowed Chair in Engineering that he is able to make such important contributions to his field. By providing crucial research funding on an annual basis, the Cook Professorship allows him to explore new avenues of investigation, support research assistants, and purchase state-of-the-art equipment — the necessities for cutting-edge work in the 21st century.
When Berger points out that we all develop plaque in our arteries beginning in our early years, or that serious arterial disease can be present without symptoms, or that plaque accumulation need not be severe for it to rupture and cause a devastating or fatal arterial blockage — we can see how vital are this bioengineer's unique contributions to medical science.
Montford and Thelma Cook
Endowed Chair Donors
Monty Cook M.P.H. '52 grew up during the '20s and '30s on “dirt farms” in Colorado and then Oregon, and facing the tough realities of the Dust Bowl and the Depression.
“I was training to be a printer and work in a print shop,” he remembers, but after he served three years in the Navy at the end of World War II, the G.I. Bill gave him the opportunity to continue with his education. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees in sanitary sciences at Denver University and UC Berkeley, and then went on to a career as a health inspector for Alameda County.
Thelma Cook '52, M.P.H. '64 came from a similar background, growing up in Visalia, California, where her father vied with the many Dust Bowl immigrants for farm work. She, too, found her way to the University, earning a B.S. in nursing and a master's in public health. “I was very proud to be accepted at Berkeley,” she says. “I met all their high standards at the time and graduated with honors in nursing.” She became a public health nurse, meeting her future husband when they both worked at the Alameda County Health Department.
By combining an outright gift to Cal and a living trust gift, the Cooks established the Montford G. Cook Endowed Chair in Engineering currently held by Professor Stanley Berger. They did this partly because they both feel they owe so much to their Cal education. They also want, in Monty's words, to help a leading researcher “come up with something that keeps people healthy and happy.”
