While Frank LaFerla, middle left, was director of UCI MIND from 2008 to 2018, Carla Liggett (middle) saw the institute grow exponentially in terms of both impact and recognition.
While Frank LaFerla, middle left, was director of UCI MIND from 2008 to 2018, Carla Liggett (middle) saw the institute grow exponentially in terms of both impact and recognition.
As Carla Liggett grew older, she worried about two things: losing her sight and losing her mind.
A sharp dresser with impeccable taste, Liggett’s firecracker personality made her the life of the party. She grew up in the Netherlands during the German occupation, then immigrated to the U.S., married Dr. Arthur Liggett and eventually settled in Orange County. After her husband passed away, she moved to a retirement community, where friends called her “the flying Dutch woman,” as she proudly regaled them with stories of her international travels.
In the past 15 years, she regularly attended lectures and events hosted by UCI’s Institute for Memory Impairments and Neurological Disorders (UCI MIND). Liggett was fascinated by UCI’s brain research, and especially the work of Frank LaFerla, who is now dean of the School of Biological Sciences. She arranged for LaFerla to give a lecture in the community and to ensure her neighbors knew about the resources and services provided by UCI MIND, which is the only federally funded Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center in Orange County.
While LaFerla was director of UCI MIND from 2008 to 2018, Liggett saw the institute grow exponentially in terms of both impact and recognition. It became home to the nation’s first induced pluripotent stem cell bank devoted to Alzheimer’s disease research, and established one of two U.S. groups working on late-onset Alzheimer’s mouse models, known as MODEL-AD. Additionally, a hiring spree brought in a number of top-notch researchers to the institute, including the current director, Joshua Grill.
Liggett made several gifts to support UCI MIND’s research during her lifetime, but she also made plans to ensure that when she passed away, her estate would establish a significant gift for UCI MIND – one that would cement her legacy as a supporter of brain research and perhaps help make dementia something that future generations would not need to fear as much as she did.
“It takes a special type of person to commit to making such a large planned gift to support research, and we are forever grateful for Carla Liggett’s trust and recognition of the importance of our work,” says Grill.
“It takes a special type of person to commit to making such a large planned gift to support research, and we are forever grateful for Carla Liggett’s trust and recognition of the importance of our work.”
Liggett funded several charitable gift annuities, which allow donors to receive annual income during their lifetime. When she passed away in 2021, the remainder of her annuity, combined with her estate gifts, was used to support UCI MIND by establishing the Carla Liggett and Arthur S. Liggett, M.D., Endowed Chair in Honor of Frank M. LaFerla in UCI MIND, as well as to provide $600,000 for current support of high-priority projects at UCI MIND.
“This endowment will allow the chairholder to lead innovative science for years to come,” says LaFerla. “Granting agencies usually support incremental next steps in science, whereas this kind of philanthropic support unshackles creativity, enabling researchers to take big, bold risks.”
For example, a UCI project that uses mice to study Alzheimer’s recently garnered $47 million in federal funding – but it started with a $70,000 philanthropic gift.
“Philanthropic funding for high risk/high reward science gives our researchers the opportunity to collect preliminary data that makes them competitive for large grants from the National Institutes of Health,” explains Grill.
The additional $600,000 of Liggett’s gift will fund individual researchers, seed promising new projects, and support ongoing research that was impacted by increasing costs during the pandemic.
“Simply put,” says Grill, “her gift accelerates our pace of discovery and our timeline to achieving our ultimate goal of finding solutions for Alzheimer’s disease and other causes of dementia.”
