The Jeseph F, Kennedy, Jr. Foundation has given a grant of $1,450, 000 to Yeshiva University to help establish a center for the study of mental retardation and human development at the University’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
Plans for the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Center for Research in Maternal and Child Health and Human Development, the first of its kind in the United States, were announced today by Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, Sargent Shriver, director of the Peace Corps and the Office of Economic Opportunity and Yeshiva University officials at a press conference at the College, Mrs. Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy was guest of honor at a luncheon.
It was also announced that the U. S. Public Health Service had made a grant of $3, 750, 000 for the project and New York City has allocated the land on which the Cnter will be built. Sen. Kennedy said that $1, 000, 000 of the Foundation grant will be used to help build the Center and the other $450,000 will be paid to the University at the rate of $90, 000 a year over a five-year period to provide an associate director of the Center and to support Kennedy Fellows or Scholars in the Center,
Sen. Kennedy said the Center would represent amajor step forward in research in the field, adding that the key aspect would be the emphasis on “multi-disciplinary research training which has been largely missing up till now.”
The ten-story Center will be linked to the Jacobi Hospital on the grounds of the Bronx Municipal Hospital Center, affiliated with Einstein College. Research will study how the mind and body develop from conception to maturity, encompassing programs from the molecular to the community level. The research will deal with the genetic, prenatal, biochemical, psychological and environmental aspects of the problems. Medical and social research will be combined in the Center with clinical applications of the research to patients.
Dr. Grover F. Powers, professor of pediatrics of the National Association for Retarded Children, was named to direct the new program.
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