UCI Given $1.5 Million by Psychiatry Dept. Founder

IRVINE —  A neuroscientist and founding chairman of UC Irvine’s department of psychiatry has pledged $1.5 million to the university’s College of Medicine, UCI officials announced Tuesday.

Dr. Louis A. Gottschalk, an acclaimed scientist whose 30-year research and teaching career helped the college achieve national prominence, gained national renown with a test that concluded that ex-President Ronald Reagan suffered from cognitive impairment as early as 1980--14 years before he was found to have Alzheimer’s disease.

Gottschalk’s gift will create the Louis A. and Helen C. Gottschalk Endowed Fund in the College of Medicine. His late wife was a UCI professor of dermatology.

“I think the University of California is an outstanding school, and I want to see it benefited,” said Gottschalk, who remains active as an emeritus professor. “My wife and I were both very good students. . . . But I don’t think we’d have made it if we hadn’t had help along the way.”

UCI spokesman Tracy Childs said the UCI Medical Plaza will be renamed the Louis A. and Helen C. Gottschalk Medical Plaza in honor of the gift.

Childs called the gift “very generous and significant.” The endowment will be unrestricted, allowing the interest generated to be used at the discretion of the dean of the College of Medicine for research, teaching and public service, Childs said.

Before coming to UCI 30 years ago, Gottschalk was a research professor of psychiatry at the University of Cincinnati. The founding dean of the UCI’s medical school traveled there to lure Gottschalk to Irvine to be founding chairman of the department of psychiatry and human behavior, university officials said.

Helen Gottschalk died unexpectedly in 1993, Gottschalk said. The couple had been married 50 years and had four children.

“I miss her, but I think [the gift] will help memorialize her and the great donation she made,” Gottschalk said. Most of all, he said, the gift stemmed from his respect for the University of California system, where his son, daughter-in-law and several grandchildren have been educated.

“I just think it’s an outstanding university,” he said. “UC Irvine is going places, and I want to help it.”

Gottschalk’s study on Reagan’s cognitive abilities was one of many accomplishments, university officials said.

With the Gottschalk-Gleser scales, an internationally used diagnostic tool for charting impairments in brain function, Gottschalk and two colleagues studied Reagan’s speech patterns during his debates in 1980 and 1984, and concluded that he suffered a “significant increase” in impairment between the two dates, university officials said in a statement.

To prevent the study from being politicized, Gottschalk delayed announcing his findings until December 1987, near the end of Reagan’s second term.

University officials lauded the generous gift, but it was unclear Tuesday where it ranked next to other private donations.

The largest gift ever to the campus came to the College of Medicine in 1988 when Edra Brophy of Palm Desert donated an $8.5-million trust.