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Joe and Teresa Long’s 59th wedding anniversary is today. But instead of doing something for themselves, the Austin couple has treated University of Texas Health San Antonio with a $25 million gift to its School of Medicine.
The university announced the gift this morning. The Longs directed $20 million of it toward faculty recruitment. They have now given a total of $61 million to the teaching hospital as part of their ongoing mission to give back.
“My wife is Hispanic and we know that South Texas has traditionally been short on doctors,” said Joe Long. “We thought if we helped the med school there it would increase the number of doctors in South Texas.”
The school has been renamed the Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long School of Medicine, a university press release said.
The Longs never attended the university — Kaçak İddaa both went to the University of Texas at Austin — but they’re passionate about health and the Latino community. Long said he and his wife knew they wanted to donate to a hospital that both educated and helped serve the Latino population, and after doing some research, they found UT Health’s program to be an area leader, “preeminent and outstanding,” he said.
University of Texas Health San Antonio has been consistently ranked as one of the top medical schools for Latinos for years now.
Of the school’s 207 physicians who graduated in 2016, 21 percent were Hispanic. Only 5 percent of medical graduates nationwide were Hispanic in the same year, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.
“Good health is a necessity in life,” Joe Long said in a statement. “Our goal is to empower generations of young people to enter health care and enhance the quality of life of our state.”
sfosterfrau@express-news.net
sfosterfrau@express-news.net
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