Through generous annual gifts starting in 2007, Gene and Tubie Gilmore of Grand Rapids, MI, created exceptional opportunities to support highly innovative, pilot research designed to improve understanding of sleep disorders or their treatment.  These investments opened new directions of investigation at U-M; shed new light on areas as important as sleep during pregnancy and how to design better fitting CPAP masks; and provided justification for further external grant awards, from sources such as the National Institutes of Health.

In 2008, Shalini Paruthi, MD, and Raman Malhotra, MD, two physician graduates of the U-M Sleep Medicine Fellowship training program, expressed gratitude for their education here by creating a permanent endowment. Although the principal remains permanently invested, the interest on this account is made available each year to further educational aims of the U-M Sleep Disorder Center.  For example, these funds can help a trainee attend a national sleep meeting, support the purchase of new medical textbooks, or provide assistance for a fellow research project.

To commemorate the life of Johnathan A. Covault, who passed away prematurely in 2000 in part because of an untreated sleep disorder, his family made a gift to the University of Michigan to support research on sleep disorders.  The result was an early-stage but impactful study that received world-wide attention in the media and helped to educate people about obstructive sleep apnea.  The study, published in 2013, was entitled “The Face of Sleepiness: Improvement in Appearance after Treatment of Sleep Apnea”. The study showed that patients who used their CPAP regularly to treat their sleep apnea looked better after the treatment.  Specifically, lay and medical raters who did not know the participants looked at before and after pictures, and were able to beat the odds in guessing which pictures looked more alert, young, and attractive.  This seminal research, which could not have been performed without the help of the Covault Foundation, helped to publicize information that could motivate patients across the nation to use their CPAP machines more regularly.