The new chair is in addition to four others in the sciences that she and the estate of her late husband, Steve Bepler, FCRH ’64, funded in 2017. To be titled the Kim B. and Stephen E. Bepler Chair in the Natural and Applied Sciences, the new position is expected to advance the University’s vision for excellence in science education by fueling new interdisciplinary research into today’s most pressing scientific challenges.

“I want to thank Kim Bepler on behalf of the generations of Fordham students who will benefit from her extraordinary generosity,” said Tania Tetlow, president of Fordham. “Kim understands the University’s needs as well as anyone, and has long been committed to high-impact philanthropy that furthers academic excellence and our Jesuit, Catholic mission. We are deeply grateful for her gift, and for her ongoing engagement with Fordham.”

The gift comes as Fordham is seeking to expand its STEM programs in response to students’ growing interest in the sciences. It will advance the University’s $350 million fundraising campaign, Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student, and its goal of supporting student-faculty research, cross-disciplinary problem solving, and other facets of academic excellence.

The new Bepler chair will enable the University to recruit an intellectual leader and well-established scholar and teacher and provide this person with robust research support, said Dennis Jacobs, Ph.D., provost of the University and senior vice president for academic affairs. The right chair holder could help attract other talent to the University while providing leadership on important scientific questions that bring multiple fields together, he said.

“Many of the most promising scientific discoveries of our day emerge in the interstitial spaces between disciplines—between biology and physics or between chemistry and math or computer science. Addressing the most complex and consequential problems facing society really requires an interdisciplinary approach,” he said, giving the examples of mitigating climate change, combatting infectious diseases, and reducing the devastating impact of neurological disorders.

For instance, he said, “when we initially fill the endowed chair, our greatest priority may be to recruit somebody who works on next-generation renewable sources of energy. Well into the future, Fordham may choose to recruit a Bepler chair who applies artificial intelligence to identify novel therapeutics or addresses other important issues and problems.”

Philanthropic Impact

The Beplers were already among the University’s most generous donors at the time of Steve Bepler’s untimely passing in 2016. They funded endowed chairs in theology and poetics and gave in support of the Fordham Founder’s Undergraduate Scholarship, the restoration of the University Church, a new organ for the church, deans’ discretionary funds, and many other areas.

Kim Bepler also recently made a major gift in support of the Joseph M. McShane, S.J. Campus Center project, another critical piece of the Cura Personalis campaign, and created the Fordham Ukraine Crisis Student Support Fund to help the University’s Ukrainian and Russian students facing financial peril because of the Russian invasion.

“With this bold and generous investment, Kim helps set the pace for leadership support,” said Roger A. Milici, Jr., vice president for development and University relations at Fordham. “Our Trustees have strongly supported all of Fordham’s recent fundraising campaigns: their gifts have accounted for 35% or more of each effort. Fordham’s philanthropic culture is dynamic, and we are committed to helping our mission partners use their wealth and generosity to improve the human condition.”

The four other Bepler chairs in the sciences—established as part of a $10.5 million gift—include a chair in biology, held by Silvia Finnemann, Ph.D., who studies the neurobiology of the human retina, and one in chemistry, held by Joshua Schrier, Ph.D., who is pursuing possibilities for automated scientific research.

The University is seeking to fill the other two chairs—one previously held by the mathematician Hans-Joachim Hein, Ph.D., and one that will be directed towards biophysics, Jacobs said.

The gifts to establish these four chairs, as well as the new chair, reflect Steve Bepler’s desire to give back to the University by investing in world-class science programs that he felt any world-class university needs, Kim Bepler said.

“Steve deeply loved Fordham, and it’s a privilege to be able to help realize his vision for the University and cement his legacy like this,” she said. “I’m honored to be counted among those who are supporting our extraordinary science faculty, with their dedication that so clearly shows the Jesuit principle of magis at work, and I’m excited to see how this professorship will help our science programs grow in new directions.”

Building Connections

Schrier said he decided to come to Fordham as a Bepler chair because of the University’s Jesuit identity and because the position offered greater freedom to not only pursue research but also involve undergraduate students in it.

The endowed chair creates a few different benefits, he said—it expands the faculty and creates capacity for new types of classes that might not be offered otherwise. And by allowing for exploratory, proof-of-concept projects, “it really kind of serves as seed money for doing creative and exciting things and then taking those initial results and showing them to federal funders,” he said.

“There’s just tremendous value for interdisciplinary work” in the applied sciences, said Schrier, whose own research applies computer simulations and machine learning to the search for applications for perovskites, a crystalline mineral.

“I hope that the holder of this position will be able to build connections and ties with different departments here at Fordham and show students how all of this type of work is connected,” he said. “I know I have a lot of fun talking to colleagues in math, talking to and working with colleagues in computer science and physics. I think interdisciplinary [work]is great.”

He spoke of a number of such projects, including his work with chemistry and computer science professors to develop teaching labs that expose chemistry students to data science, a model they published last year in the Journal of Chemical Education.

“I’m really excited about [the new Bepler chair], and I look forward to meeting the holder of the chair,” Schrier said, “because it’s always great to add to and build our intellectual community here at Fordham.”

The Kim and Steve Bepler chairs have contributed to an increase of more than threefold in the number of endowed chairs at Fordham over the past two decades. The new chair in the natural and applied sciences will bring that number to 73.

Since she became the first Kim B. and Stephen E. Bepler Chair in Biology last fall, she has used her new position to pursue new or previously underfunded research projects and dedicate more time toward her student mentees in her Larkin Hall retina cell biology laboratory. And soon, she’ll be showcasing her research to scientists in Japan. 

Your lab specializes in retinal neurobiology. What does that mean? 

We study the long-term maintenance of the retina, the neural tissue in our eyes that allows us to see. How does our retina manage to function for life? What are the cellular and tissue mechanisms that are responsible for life-long visual function? 

What made you interested in studying the human eye? 

The eye is a particularly beautifully organized organ. Also, our visual sense is enormously important to most of us. If you ask people what they are afraid of when it comes to their health, they say cancer and blindness. To this day, even in developed countries, the risk of having visual impairment with age is very high. Diseases are not necessarily hereditary, and they affect a very large percentage of the elderly—age-related macular degeneration is diagnosed in about 25 percent of the U.S. population over 75. So there is a medical need. 

As a scientist, I also like the eye because unlike the brain, it’s easy to access. You can look at part of the central nervous system by shining light into the eye. You can’t use eye drops on brains. The accessibility of the eye, from an experimental point of view, is a huge advantage. There’s no other part of our central nervous system—brain, neural retina, spinal cord—that you can manipulate in real time and take a look at. 

What brought you to Fordham? 

When I came to Fordham in the fall of 2008, I was already an established principal investigator. I had been Assistant and Associate Professor at Weill Cornell Medical College for several years. The move to Fordham was really motivated by the opportunity to integrate research and science education at the immersion level, where students come into the lab, participate, and understand what professional lab research is really about. That is what makes my Fordham lab different, not only from my previous lab at the medical school but also from many other labs of my colleagues and competitors around the world.

How has the Bepler endowed chair changed your life as a scientist and professor? 

The Bepler endowment allows me to be more present in the lab and work on experiments directly on a daily basis and often with my mentees. For instance, I used to ask my students to email me their research results at night. Now I can actually be there in real time. 

I also have the opportunity to participate more often in international conferences. For instance, this fall, I’m invited to participate in a workshop called “The retina—Mechanism of photoreceptor degeneration and regeneration, and roles of immune system” hosted by the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University in Japan. I will teach budding retina cell biologists and physicians about the work in my lab, possibly recruit new investigators and collaborators, and spread the word about Fordham as an institution with a vibrant Ph.D. program, where graduate students join labs like mine. The flexibility that I have, supported by the Bepler endowment, makes that a lot easier. 

With funding from the endowment, I was also able to push an important project to completion. We found that by using biosensor eye drops alone—a non-toxic, gentle procedure—we can detect early-onset retinal degeneration in experimental models at a stage where rescue, and thus prevention of vision loss, may still be possible. Using these diagnostic eye drops, we can monitor blinding disease and maybe make decisions on therapy without having to do any kind of invasive testing. 

At the moment, what’s the most exciting thing happening in your lab? 

A second, new eye drop study. Unlike the first study, these aren’t diagnostic eye drops. This time, we’re actually providing therapy. We’re delaying blindness in an animal model that carries a mutation also found in human patients. The animal we are studying for this particular project is called the Royal College of Surgeons rat. It’s a very well characterized, classic animal model for retinitis pigmentosa, which is a hereditary form of blindness that is very frequent in the human population. The idea is that anything we give to the animal that is actually working will then be picked up by physicians and used to delay blindness in human patients.

What is the most rewarding part of working with young scientists? 

The students, for the very first time in their lives, are realizing how it feels to perform an experiment to the best of their abilities and to obtain a result that nobody else in the whole world has ever seen before. To make scientific progress means discovery at a very fundamental level. And that is a thrill—the thrill of discovery in and of itself. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.