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Fall 2022 investiture to celebrate endowed professorships to Boes, Leira

Date: Tuesday, November 8, 2022

University of Iowa Health Care faculty, staff, and students are welcome to attend an investiture ceremony honoring two Carver College of Medicine faculty at 3:30 p.m. Friday, Nov. 18, in the Prem Sahai Auditorium at the Medical Education and Research Facility.  

The investiture will celebrate faculty appointments to an endowed professorship established by the Roy J. Carver Charitable Trust and an endowed professorship established in honor of Wayne H. Stoppelmoor and Leah and Harold Adams, MD.  

The Roy J. Carver Professorship in Neuroscience

Boes is an associate professor in the Stead Family Department of Pediatrics and serves as director of the department’s neurology division. He also holds faculty appointments in the Department of Neurology and the Department of Psychiatry, and he is director of the Iowa Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation. A member of the Iowa Neuroscience Institute, Boes’ research focuses on the functional organization of the human brain across the lifespan, particularly network-based localization of neurological and psychiatric symptoms. He also studies changes that occur with focal brain lesions and the therapeutic mechanisms of brain stimulation in treating depression. Boes provides clinical neurology services for patients, and he teaches medical students, resident physicians, and fellow physicians. 

The cross-disciplinary Iowa Neuroscience Institute was made possible by a $45 million gift from the Roy J. Carver Charitable Trust in Muscatine, Iowa. The gift extends an impressive history of giving by the Carver family to the UI, beginning with personal contributions from Roy J. Carver and his wife, Lucille, and continuing through grantmaking by the Carver Trust, which was founded in 1981 following Roy Carver’s death. As of October 2022, more than $205 million in Carver Trust funding has been awarded to the university in support of scholarships, professorships, research, and facilities. In addition to neuroscience, Carver Trust support has led to advances in cancer, cardiology, infection and immunity, metabolism and obesity, pulmonology, and other areas of biomedicine. 

The Stoppelmoor-Adams Professorship in Vascular Neurology

Leira is a professor in the Department of Neurology and serves as the director of the department’s cerebrovascular disease division. He also is head of the UI Comprehensive Stroke Center at UI Hospitals & Clinics. Leira completed a fellowship in cerebrovascular diseases at Iowa in 1998 under the mentorship of Harold Adams, an internationally recognized stroke expert who is professor emeritus in the Department of Neurology. Leira is a member of the Iowa Neuroscience Institute and serves as the principal investigator for one of 25 regional coordinating centers for the National Institutes of Health-funded national research network NIH StrokeNet. Leira focuses on interventions to improve the outcomes of patients with stroke who live in rural communities far from a tertiary medical center. 

Wayne Stoppelmoor is a native of Shell Rock, Iowa, and a UI graduate with a degree in business administration. He started his career at Interstate Power Company in 1960 and held several leadership positions, including president and chief executive officer. In 1998, when Interstate Power merged with Alliant Energy, Stoppelmoor became vice chair of the Alliant Energy board of directors. After his wife, Shirley, died from a stroke in 1992, the Stoppelmoor family used memorial gifts to establish a stroke research fund at Iowa. In 2015, the family and other donors turned this resource into a permanently endowed fund to support a UI Department of Neurology faculty member. Significant contributors to this fund include UI neurologist Harold Adams and his wife, Leah.