Where the Heart Is
C. Stephen Foster, T’65, MD’69, HS’70, spent 10 years at Duke. So much time that his West Virginia grandmother started joking with her quilting group that she worried Foster was a slow learner. In reality, he was anything but. He began his decade at Duke in 1960 as an undergraduate, then earned a medical degree and completed training in internal medicine, starting on a career path that eventually led him into the field of ocular immunology.
Foster, who now runs his own practice, The Massachusetts Eye Research and Surgery Institution, was on the faculty at Harvard for many years. But when it came time to think about philanthropy, his wife, Frances, who is a former ocular patient, told him, “Your heart is at Duke.”
The couple created an endowed professorship at Duke and have also launched and endowed a Center for Ocular Immunology, which will be directed by the Stephen and Frances Foster Professor. “This will be a unique academic center that can make advances with potentially blinding inflammatory disease,” Foster says.
Stephen Foster credits his Duke training with helping to inspire his career. During his Duke training in internal medicine, he had a lunch conversation with a colleague about the scarcity of work in the ocular immunology field. The conversation sparked Foster’s ongoing fascination with immune responses in the eye.
But the field of ocular immunology is not just of academic interest to the Fosters. When Frances Foster was a child, she lost the sight in one eye because of uveitis (inflammation of the middle layer of the eye). The couple wanted to prevent such a loss for others. “The research done at Duke is among the best in the world. We knew that Duke would put our support to the most productive and beneficial use,” Frances says.
The Stephen & Frances Foster Professor of Ocular Immunology and Inflammation is vacant. The School of Medicine looks forward to filling this professorship in the near future.