Generous gift reflects philanthropist’s passionate interest in supporting biomedical research

Born in Charleston, South Carolina, Enid Claire Ives was the heiress of a family inheritance that could be traced back to the Civil War era. A highly intelligent and driven woman, she graduated from high school in Washington, D.C., at the age of 16, and by age 19 she was a graduate of Smith College. Ives and her husband, Joseph, were longtime residents of D.C. until moving to Boca Raton, Florida, in the 1980s.

Following her husband’s death in 2000 from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Ives became interested in philanthropy related to medical research, particularly in the areas of breast cancer, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and stem cells. She would ask her neighbor, Theodore Hahn, to provide her with medical literature on these topics. She read them over and over again, Hahn says, until she understood them clearly. Hahn, a retired physician who was one of the UM Miller School’s first residents in otolaryngology, informed Ives that leading-edge research at the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center aligned well with her interests.

Ives bequeathed her estate to Sylvester upon her death, which occurred in 2008. Her $7.6 million gift is helping to fund Sylvester’s Stem Cell Transplantation Program, directed by Krishna Komanduri, who is developing novel techniques to improve outcomes of bone marrow transplant following chemotherapy or radiation. Ives’s gift also supports groundbreaking work at the Miller School’s Braman Family Breast Cancer Institute and Hussman Institute for Human Genomics.

*Deceased

Member of Gables Giving Society