How a 1990 gift enables today's breakthrough research

An endowed professorship is a catalyst for breakthrough research, unlocking innovations that transform what is possible in science and education.  

Nowhere is this clearer than in the work of Giulio Menciotti. He creates stunning three-dimensional images of cats’ hearts beating in real time—a sight that makes his students gasp, “Oh, wow.” Their reactions highlight the remarkable progress that strategic funding can achieve. 
 
This freedom to innovate comes directly from the Anne Hunter Endowed Professorship in Veterinary Medicine, established in 1990. While Hunter could not have imagined 3D cardiac imaging in cats, her support ensured a permanent capacity to pursue ideas before anyone knew they would work.

After thirty-five years, Anne Hunter’s gift remains a driving force behind today’s innovations.  

How permanent funding works  

An endowed professorship is a permanent academic position funded by the returns on an invested donation. The original donation, called the principal, remains untouched and continues to earn money. The annual returns from the investment, typically 4 to 5 percent of the principal, provide ongoing financial support for the professor’s work.  
 
"Endowed professorships help us recruit and retain exceptional faculty in areas like infectious disease research and clinical specialties. They also provide the flexibility for faculty to pursue preliminary work that can lead to major grant applications—breaking the cycle where you need funding to get data, but need data to get funding,” said Dean Givens.  

For the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine, this kind of permanence directly addresses challenges that grants alone cannot solve, like a national specialist shortage and rising student debt.  

It helps attract top talent

When Mohamed Seleem was considering positions at multiple universities, he focused specifically on opportunities with endowed support.  

“I was really focused on endowed professorships,” said Seleem, who now holds the Tyler J. and Frances F. Young Chair in Bacteriology. “When I was applying, there were only two I was interested in.”  

An endowed position signals stability and provides resources beyond federal grants, ensuring security even amid budget changes.  

“In a very competitive environment now, this is how you can hire and attract exceptional faculty,” Seleem said. “Moving is very difficult for established faculty. The one way to attract them is to have the ability to offer an endowment.”  

Seleem’s lab focuses on infections caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria, a major cause of death worldwide. He holds 21 U.S. patents for repurposing medications—meaning he investigates new ways to use drugs already approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat these hard-to-kill infections more quickly and at lower cost than developing new drugs from scratch.

Two of Seleem’s patented technologies have been licensed to companies and are advancing toward real-world use. He has also been named a 2025 fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.  

The support compounds over time

John Rossmeisl holds the Dorsey Taylor Mahin Professorship of Neurology and Neurosurgery—the same chair his mentor, Greg Troy, held before him.

“That means something,” Rossmeisl said. “It’s not just funding. It’s carrying forward someone’s legacy who believed in you.”  

His endowment helps pay for his laboratory manager, an essential staff member who federal grants typically do not cover. It also funded preliminary data for his Maryland collaboration —work that led to a major grant that would not have happened without that initial support.  

Creates opportunities for innovative research 

Menciotti’s research into three-dimensional evaluation of feline hearts didn’t come from a safe bet. Federal grants favor established methods. Corporate partnerships favor marketable outcomes.  

“Endowed professorships give you access to unrestricted, uncommitted funding,” Menciotti said. “Unrestricted means you can use the money for any research needs you determine, with no specific limitations. If you need this money, you do you. We trust you. You don’t have to write a grant and wait for that to come through.”  

Preliminary data often determine whether a major grant application succeeds or fails. Endowed professorships break the trap where you cannot get preliminary data without funding, or funding without preliminary data.  

The Menciotti story  

When Menciotti received the Anne Hunter Endowed Professorship this fall, he had been at Virginia Tech since 2013, first as a Ph.D. student from Italy, then as a resident, and finally as faculty in 2020.  

“I didn’t want to be a veterinarian,” he said. “I wanted to be a human doctor. When I started vet school, I really enjoyed it, and I stuck with it. I was sure that I didn’t want to do research. And then as soon as I started doing it, I loved it. I thought, ‘I can do this, but I don’t want to teach.’ And then sure enough, as I was teaching during my Ph.D., I loved it.”  

His career followed discovery, not a plan. Each exposure to something new changed what he thought was possible.  

The 3D echocardiography work followed the same pattern. “It’s definitely a challenge,” he said. “That’s why it hasn’t been done before.”  

The challenges come from biology. Pets are smaller than humans. Their hearts beat faster. Both create technological barriers for 3D imaging.  

“We started with feasibility. Let’s see if this is possible,” Menciotti said. “That worked out very well and put us in a unique spot as experts in three-dimensional echocardiography in veterinary medicine. So that was a good challenge. Let’s bring it up a notch and try even smaller animals with even faster heart rates. And that would be cats.”  

The current study, led by resident physician Lezith Desiree Chavez, is recruiting 120 cats. They are about 70 percent finished signing up participants. After analyzing the data, they expect to have a full, three-dimensional picture of cat heart anatomy, offering more detail than the two-dimensional images veterinarians have used for decades.  

“You look at a three-dimensional object, and if you cut a slice through it, all you see is the shape within that single flat layer—kind of like looking at just one piece of a puzzle. For example, if you slice a cylinder at an angle, the flat surface you see might look like an oval, making it hard to know the true shape. With three-dimensional echocardiography—a technique that uses ultrasound to build a complete 3D image of the heart’s chambers—you get to see the entire heart structure, not just the slice.  

That complete picture matters for diagnosis, treatment decisions, and cats whose heart disease might be caught earlier and managed better.  

The Anne Hunter Endowed Professorship enables Menciotti to start this work without waiting for a federal grant. He does not have to spend a year writing an application, then hope a review panel sees value in an unproven approach.  

“Not having to wait for a grant to come through — that takes usually like a year between writing it and getting it funded — and you cannot even start collecting data in the meantime,” he said. “That impact is seen and really appreciated.”  

The endowment also covers the unglamorous essentials, such as paying students to organize medical records, comb through data, and perform measurements. The time-intensive work frees him to think about the next project.  

The credibility factor  

When Seleem talks about his endowed chair, he uses business language.  

The endowment “comes with huge rewards,” provides “credibility,” and signals achievement. When he submits grant applications, reviewers see the endowed title after his name.  

“Having an endowment name associated with you gives credibility,” he said. “I always recognize people with endowed names. You see their names, and you see their endowment, you always feel they achieved something.”  

Credibility creates opportunity. Opportunity attracts more funding. Funding produces discoveries. Discoveries attract better students and collaborators.  

For Seleem, the endowment meant he could hire a manager. His research group expanded beyond what he could manage on his own. But hiring a manager isn’t something you can typically fund through NIH grants.  

The endowments maintain accountability, too. Every five years, Seleem must document his productivity and undergo a review to maintain his endowed chair.  

“You have to really be productive,” he said. “Every five years, they review what you did and renew your appointment. Otherwise, you’re not really worthy of that endowment.”  

The new donors  

Support for veterinary endowed professorships comes from people with urgent reasons to give. Pet owners whose animals received exceptional care at teaching hospitals. Alumni who want the next generation to have what they had. Breeders who see critical expertise disappearing.  

What’s changed is that donors aren’t writing general checks. They’re solving specific problems they’ve seen firsthand, and they’re bringing different expectations.  

Take Karen Waldron. She has been working with the veterinary college since it opened. Over the decades, she has brought hundreds of horses, llamas, and nearly 100 pets through the Veterinary Teaching Hospital’s doors—mostly for emergency care.

When she watched regional equine emergency services disappear, she faced a choice: relocate her horse operations to North Carolina, where emergency care was available, or help build the capacity here.  

She and her partner, Shawn Ricci, chose to invest $4 million to create dedicated equine emergency positions at the hospital.  

"Without the veterinarian support required, equine business people are not going to be able to stay in the region," Waldron said.  

Her gift was a strategic investment, ensuring the infrastructure on which her business, community, and the region’s horse owners depend remains strong.  

That's the modern donor archetype: They've seen the problem up close, they understand the solution, and they're willing to fund it if it solves something that matters to them.  

"There are so many donors now, billions of dollars, that are business-oriented or investment-oriented," Seleem said. "They would like to have a product at the end. They would like to invest in something where you’re not just doing research, but solving a problem, having an impact on society."  

When Seleem was at Purdue during their $200 million veterinary hospital expansion, he spent time explaining his research to potential donors.  

“Explaining what we do, sharing stories of how we impact animals, humans, and the environment — all those things help attract the money,” he said.  

Rossmeisl has noticed the same evolution. Modern donors do their homework before walking through the door.  

“Most donors I’ve worked with are very savvy and understand what you’re actually doing,” he said.  

Rossmeisl stays ready. “I always try to be prepared for the elevator talk. A donor walks in and says, ‘I’m going to give you $30 million, what are you going to do with it?’ I’ve got a big chunk of that ready.”  

This shift makes the endowed professorship the perfect vehicle for the modern donor. It is specific. It is permanent. It is tied to a person and tangible outcomes.  

What it takes  

At the veterinary college, establishing an endowed professorship requires a gift of $1 million to $3 million. These amounts are calculated to generate enough annual income to meaningfully support a professor’s work — research expenses, equipment, laboratory personnel, travel, and professional development. The resources beyond salary that federal grants often can’t or won’t cover.  

Both the Young Chair that recruited Seleem and the Anne Hunter Professorship that supports Menciotti’s work were established in the 1990s. The discoveries these gifts enable decades later would have been impossible to predict.  

"Additional endowments would strengthen our ability to address workforce shortages in food animal medicine and rural practice—areas where Virginia communities have urgent needs,” said Dean Givens. “Each endowment supports not just one faculty member's research and teaching, but also the students and residents they mentor who will serve animals and communities for decades to come."  

That’s the point. Permanent funding creates possibilities that short-term thinking can’t imagine.  

The honest answer  

When asked what he wants donors to understand about endowed professorships, Menciotti didn’t give the polished pitch.  

“It’s more practical than I thought it was going to be,” he said. “I want donors to know that their support is unbelievable. Not only is it practical, but the effect of receiving it sparks new ideas and a refreshing of the field or the mindset.”  

Freedom matters as much as money. Knowing you don’t have to wait a year for grant approval changes how you think about research. It changes what questions you’re willing to ask.  

Seleem frames it as institutional trust. “We trust you in this field. We give you these things so that you don’t have to write a grant and wait. If you need this money, you do you.”  

The return  

When asked what Anne Hunter would think if she could see the 3D imaging work enabled by her 1990 gift, Menciotti hopes she’d be impressed.  

“She would be very much like one of our students,” he said. “I hope she will be wowed by how far we have come. If you think about the capabilities we had, particularly in cardiology for cats in the ‘90s, compared to what we have now and how far we have come in understanding diseases, it's great. We haven’t cracked the code quite yet, but we're getting closer. I hope she will be proud. I hope she would trust me with this endowment.”  
 
Rural areas can't find food animal veterinarians. Shelters can't staff their clinics. Pet owners are skipping necessary care. Young veterinarians are burning out and leaving the profession. These problems won't be solved by grants that run out in three years.  

An endowed professorship is a multiplier. It recruits faculty like Seleem. It enables research like Menciotti’s. It provides stability like Rossmeisl’s. That’s not just giving money to a professor to spend. That’s building the future of veterinary medicine.