Professorship established for Parkinson's research

A Kansas City, Mo., woman whose mother battled Parkinson's disease has left a gift to establish a neurology professorship for the University of Kansas School of Medicine.

The late Joyce Rider, who died May 27, left the gift to the Kansas University Endowment Association to create the Laverne and Joyce Rider Professorship. The professorship will be named for Joyce and her mother, Laverne Stapp Rider. It will help the University attract and retain an outstanding clinician, teacher and researcher in Parkinson's disease for the KU department of neurology. Income from the fund will provide a salary stipend and may support additional researchers, graduate students, research and equipment.

School of Medicine Executive Dean Barbara Atkinson said:"The person chosen to hold this professorship will elevate the standards of teaching, scholarship and research in Parkinson's disease, and use newfound knowledge to help the care of patients. Nearly 2 million Americans are afflicted with essential tremor or Parkinson's disease, and it is our continuing hope to discover the cause and a cure. "

Atkinson said KU's Parkinson's Disease and Movement Disorders Center is designated by the National Parkinson Foundation as one of 52 centers of excellence. She noted that KU researchers and surgeons pioneered brain stimulation surgery, which is used to control tremor, slowness and stiffness in patients, and have performed more of these surgeries than those at any other institution in the United States.

Prior to her death, Joyce was interviewed about her mother. She said her mother was a school teacher before she married Joyce's father, the late Donald A. Rider, an engineer for the Rock Island Railroad. She remembered her mother's hard work as a bookkeeper on the family's jersey cattle farm in what is now Kansas City, Kan. Laverne was charged with hiring farm hands and tracking all business on the farm. When Donald died in 1946, Laverne sold the farm and moved into town with her daughter. Three decades later, Laverne was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease.

"We were so close, especially since my father died young," said Joyce, who was a retired travel agent and Kansas City Country Club Plaza hotel office manager. "My sister was long since married and gone, so Mother and I were together for the rest of her life."

Joyce said that helping her mother, who died in 1992, and knowing others with the disease inspired her to create the professorship.

"So many of my friends' parents have this disease," Joyce said. "My sister is in a nursing home, and there seems to be a high percentage of people there with the disease. It feels like it's becoming more prevalent to me, so I decided to do more to help people with the disease. I decided a professorship is most needed. I hope eventually they find a cure."

Rider's gift counts toward the goal of KU First: Invest in Excellence, the largest fund-raising campaign in KU history. KU Endowment is conducting KU First on behalf of KU through 2004 to raise in excess of $600 million for scholarships, fellowships, professorships, capital projects and program support. KU Endowment serves as the independent, non-profit fund-raising and fund-management organization for KU.