By Sydney Clark Ballenger
Investing in children’s health means investing in people who have the ideas, determination and expertise to move medicine forward.
Just as strong communities are built by investing in people, endowed chairs help Nationwide Children's Hospital attract, retain and empower world-class leaders whose expertise can shape the future of pediatric healthcare. Through these long-term investments, the Nationwide Foundation helps create lasting capacity for discovery and innovation, enabling researchers and clinicians to advance new ideas, mentor future generations and expand their impact on children and families for years to come.
“When organizations share a vision and commit to it over time, their impact reaches far beyond what any one organization can achieve alone," said Chad Jester, president of the Nationwide Foundation. "For nearly seven decades, Nationwide and Nationwide Children's have worked together to improve the lives of children and families. This investment extends that commitment by supporting groundbreaking research and innovation while helping create stronger, healthier communities."
The Pediatric Innovation Fund has established a new endowed chair, bringing the total number of Nationwide Foundation-supported endowed chairs at Nationwide Children’s to 19. The 2026 Nationwide Foundation Endowed Chair in Genetic Medicine has been awarded to Beth Kozel, MD, PhD, chief of the division of Genetics and Genomic Medicine and the director of Constitutional Genomics Translational Research in the Steve and Cindy Rasmussen Institute for Genomic Medicine.
“Being named an endowed chair is an extraordinary honor. It recognizes not only my work but also what our entire team has built across clinical care, genomic medicine and research,” said Dr. Kozel. “An endowed chair provides flexible support for promising work that may be too early, too interdisciplinary or too unconventional for traditional funding.”
For Dr. Kozel, that support comes at a pivotal time in genomic medicine, as advances in the field increasingly allow clinicians to move beyond identifying the cause of a condition to exploring what can be done about it.
“Earlier in my career, much of our work focused on giving families an answer and explaining why a condition occurred,” said Dr. Kozel. “That remains enormously important, but today we can increasingly ask the next question: Now that we understand the cause, what can we do about it?”
Dr. Kozel hopes the investment will help make the path from genomic diagnosis to treatment more systematic in the coming years.
“When a child receives a genetic diagnosis, I want our clinicians to have tools that can rapidly evaluate what is known about that gene and biological pathway, identify relevant existing or investigational treatments, and determine what additional work would be needed to develop a new therapy,” said Dr. Kozel.
Since its launch, the Pediatric Innovation Fund has fueled the continued growth of the Institute for Genomic Medicine, a national leader in pediatric genomic medicine, where researchers and clinicians use genetic information to improve diagnoses and personalize care.
In pediatric brain cancer, researchers use genomic and molecular tests to compare healthy developing brain tissue with cancer cells to identify the genetic changes that drive tumor growth, work that could ultimately lead to more targeted, less toxic treatments. For Elaine Mardis, PhD, co-executive director of The Steve and Cindy Rasmussen Institute for Genomic Medicine, philanthropic support has bolstered her work in cancer genomics. Philanthropic support gives researchers the flexibility to pursue promising ideas that may be too early for traditional funding but have the potential to change how childhood diseases or conditions are treated, she said.
“To me, innovation in pediatric medicine means approaching existing challenges with new ideas, technology and collaborative research,” said Dr. Mardis, who holds Nationwide’s Steve and Cindy Rasmussen Endowed Chair in Genomic Medicine. “It’s important because we make new discoveries that can be brought to the patients, improving their outcomes, quality of life and ability to lead normal lives.”
For Vidu Garg, MD, director of the Center for Cardiovascular Research, philanthropic investments have been vital to helping researchers translate advances in science and technology into improvements in patient care. Dr. Garg’s research focuses on understanding the genetic causes of congenital heart defects.
“Innovation in pediatric medicine means translating fundamental discoveries and scientific knowledge to the clinical setting where it can improve the medical care and health of infants and children,” said Dr. Garg, who holds the Nationwide Foundation Endowed Chair in Cardiovascular Research. “New advances in genetic testing now allow us to study a child’s DNA in much greater detail than was possible in the past. These technologies are beginning to be used in infants and children with congenital heart defects to help doctors better understand why the heart defect occurred and how it impacts clinical outcomes. This is an important first step toward precision medicine, where a child’s individual genetic information may one day help guide care, treatment and follow-up in ways that improve health outcomes.”
Other programs benefiting from this year’s $10 million gift include Biomedical Data Sciences, Nationwide Children’s Healthy Neighborhoods Healthy Families affordable housing initiatives, ProjectDRIVE (Driving Risk Intervention and Virtual Education), and The Kids Mental Health Foundation. Because of this continued investment in pediatric healthcare by Nationwide Foundation, clinicians and researchers from across Nationwide Children’s campus can continue making strides toward their most important goal: improving and achieving best outcomes for every single child.
For more information about Nationwide Foundation Endowed Chairs at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, visit Endowed Chairs.