Phil Starr, Talmadge King, Jill Ostrem, Carlin Wiegner, Ellen Wiegner, Andy Josephson
Carlin Wiegner > Bio > Favorites > Charities
My largest commitment both in terms of duration and amount is to supporting Parkinson's research at the Movement Disorders Center in UCSF's Neurology department. The department is led by the incredible Jill Ostrem.
The photo below was taken on September 18, 2018 celebrating Jill's work with an endowment for her chair. The chair is now a Distinguished Professorship.
I also provide support to Phil Starr and his lab. They are doing breakthrough work with deep brain stimulation. Jill and Phil and others published a ground breaking new paper in Nature Magazine on Chronic adaptive deep brain stimulation versus conventional stimulation in Parkinson’s disease: a blinded randomized feasibility trial. Phil and his team performed my brain surgery and the results are astounding.
Many thanks also go to the head of neurology at UCSF, Andy Josephson. Andy is a big part of the reason UCSF is one of the top ranked hospitals in neurology in the US.
I regularly donate to Wikipedia. Although I wish they expanded their mission to include obvious product extensions such as audio, video and more learning content.
I had a great experience supporting Mary Heise and Saint Michael's Episcopal Day School, a PK-8 school in Sacramento. I have also provided small ongoing support to Vanderbilt University's Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth.
My donations in education have been generally a distaster. I did learn a lot from these disasters. My two biggest bits of advice are: 1) Do not give money if you don't completely trust the person you're giving the money to and 2) If you have to restrict the grant you don't trust the person. If the institution wants to restrict the grant to specific projects that's fine but if you find yourself negotiating don't do it.
I helped support Bret Victor's human-computer interaction lab DynamicLand.
I have previously donated to criminal justice reform.
Created: September 20 2024.
Modified: October 17 2024.