Campus News - Philanthropy

UW scientist enters uncharted territory to understand positive qualities.

Richard J. Davidson, as a neuroscientist and professor of psychology and psychiatry, knows that most scientists leave the measure of love and forgiveness to others. But then the UW-Madison researcher — who is best known for his work with the Dalai Lama and Tibetan monks to study the effects of meditation — is not most scientists.

With a $2.5 million, five-year grant, the Fetzer Institute is betting that Davidson, director of the UW’s Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior, can unearth the neurological hallmarks of love, compassion, and forgiveness.

The institute, founded by the late business leader and radio pioneer John Fetzer, believes that understanding the science related to how these human qualities affect the brain is critical to developing tools to encourage them.

“This has never been done in a serious way,” Davidson says. Most neuroscience work has concentrated on illness, not the study of positive qualities, because funding is most often available for disease-focused research.

An important starting point, he says, is realizing that health is not just the absence of illness — that, in fact, sound mental health can benefit from the flourishing of positive emotions. Davidson’s latest work represents the first time that long-term studies dedicated to these qualities have been funded.

“They’re not easy constructs to get one’s arms around scientifically,” Davidson says. “Fetzer is taking a big risk.”

Fetzer, who lived in Kalamazoo, Michigan, created the institute to provide support and partnership where very few people were willing to go, says Wayne Ramsey, the organization’s program officer. In the 1980s and 1990s, the institute supported mind-body health, which has evolved into contemplative and meditation research and the role of spirituality in health. The institute, Ramsey says, has always recognized that neuroscience research should be part of the understanding of love, compassion, and forgiveness.

The world benefits from this scientific inquiry, Ramsey adds. Learning to understand how these positive qualities affect the brain will allow scientists to create tools to encourage the development and capacity for people to have these traits. The work could inform programs and policies to “make this a
better world,” he says.

“This is totally uncharted territory,” Davidson says of the Fetzer project. “This grant is really meant to launch a new field where the wisdom of the contemplative traditions can intersect with hard-nosed mainstream science to understand how the brain can be transformed, through certain exercises, to strengthen these kinds of positive qualities.”

The Fetzer initiative is the first component in Davidson’s new interdisciplinary Center for Creating a Healthy Mind, which will open in about a year in space at the Waisman Center. The center will serve as a vehicle to expand research in positive qualities, to determine ways to create healthy minds throughout the world, and to develop outreach programs to benefit the community, gather data, and tweak interventions. It also will expand the range of ages studied, allowing meditation work with children, including those with autism or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

— Ann Grauvogl

Matching gift motivates couple to fund need-based scholarships.

Ted ’61 and Nancy Johnson ’61 Martens of San Diego, California, are Wisconsin natives who studied, met, and married while at UW-Madison. “We really enjoyed our time at Wisconsin, and it got us started on the right foot,” says Ted.

To ensure that future students also start off on the right foot, the couple have established the Ted and Nancy Martens Endowed Great People Scholarship.

The need-based scholarship will benefit students of any major, and will be matched by the UW Foundation as part of the “Great people. Great place.” initiative, which incorporates two primary campuswide priorities. The focus is on support for the university’s “great people” — undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty — and the “great place,” which refers to the East Campus Gateway, a vibrant corridor that includes the Chazen Museum of Art, the School of Music, and Memorial Union.

“You used to be able to work all summer and make enough for the next year’s tuition,” says Martens. “That’s not a possibility now.”

The couple, along with their son, lived in five states during Ted’s manufacturing career with Procter & Gamble. They value higher education and, over the years, they have drawn on Procter & Gamble’s generous matching gift program to increase their support of the UW.

“Our society can’t afford to educate only those who can afford to be educated,” says Martens. “There are too many people being left out. When we found out about the [UW] Foundation match for ‘great people’ gifts, it tipped us into doing this now.”

— Sue Zyhowski