USC Mann School Marks a New Era

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Before a crowd of more than 300 wellwishers on Feb. 8, USC President Carol L. Folt, Board of Trustees Chair Suzanne Nora Johnson and Dean Vassilios Papadopoulos celebrated the naming of the USC Alfred E. Mann School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences—a game-changing moment in the school’s 118-year history.

The event formally celebrated the generous $50 million endowment from the Alfred E. Mann Charities and the Alfred E. Mann Foundation for Biomedical Engineering to name and further strengthen the school.

Folt was instrumental in restructuring the Alfred E. Mann Charities’ original gift to ensure the USC Mann School’s rise as a leading research and educational institution.

The naming endowment also underscores the prominence of the school—one of the top-ranked pharmacy schools in the nation—in education, research and community care in Los Angeles.

“In the coming century, biomedical engineering will drive some of the most consequential breakthroughs,” Folt said. “The school is now partnering with USC Dornsife to turn plastic waste from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch into medicines and other much-needed products.”

Johnson, who knew Mann, said his spirit of ingenuity was legendary. The legacy his foundation now leaves to USC Mann and his namesake Department of Biomedical Engineering in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering is especially fitting.

“Al cared less about stockpiling wealth and more about serving humanity,” Johnson said. “It’s not hyperbole to say: The companies he founded helped the blind to see, the deaf to hear and the physically challenged to walk.”

“Very few pharmacy schools have received naming gifts, and still fewer have been bestowed with a significant endowment,” Papadopoulos said. “What this means for our community—and how it will redirect what we can achieve—is beyond measure.”

The Alfred E. Mann Charities’ gift will fuel a strategic plan for the school that focuses in part on curricular changes that will “ensure the school’s longstanding place at the vanguard of progress in pharmacy and pharmacological sciences,” Papadopoulos added.