Noel Foundation Honored for “Legacy of Philanthropy” at LSU Health Shreveport

Formal investiture ceremony held for Elizabeth Disbrow, PhD as inaugural holder of the Noel Foundation, Inc. Endowed Professorship Honoring Dr. Robert C. Leitz, III in Parkinson’s Disease Research at the Center for Brain Health

October 3, 2022

Pictured left to right: Dr. David Lewis, Interim Chancellor at LSUHS; Stacy Williams, Noel Foundation board member; Claire Adkins Sevier, Noel Foundation board member; Delton Smith, Noel Foundation Vice President; Shelby Smith, Noel Foundation founding board member; Merritt B. Chastain, Noel Foundation President; Dr. Elizabeth Disbrow, Director of the Center for Brain Health at LSUHS; Rich Lamb III, Noel Foundation board member; Oliver Jenkins, Noel Foundation board member; Dr. Alexander Mikaberidze, Noel Foundation board member

We also held the formal investiture of the inaugural holder of the Noel Foundation, Inc. Endowed Professorship Honoring Dr. Robert C. Leitz, III in Parkinson’s Disease Research – Elizabeth Disbrow, PhD. 

Elizabeth Disbrow was born in Los Gatos, California in 1966. She received her PhD in 1996 from the University of California, Davis in Neuroscience. She then obtained a postdoctoral fellowship from the University of California, San Francisco in the Department of Radiology to study brain imaging. After training, she joined the faculty of both UC Davis and UCSF. For over ten years, she studied tactile and motor processing in healthy people, receiving several federal grants to support this work. She then became interested in the pathophysiology of Parkinson’s disease, especially motor planning and cognitive decline. She was awarded several federal grants to study cognitive dysfunction and rehabilitation in PD.

In 2013 she moved with her family to Shreveport to join LSU Health Shreveport School of Medicine. She is currently a member of the Department of Neurology, as well as the Department of Pharmacology, Toxicology, and Neuroscience. She led the effort to obtain Board of Regents approval for the LSU Health Shreveport Center for Brain Health in 2017, which she directs.

The Noel Foundation, Inc. Endowed Professorship Honoring Dr. Robert C. Leitz, III in Parkinson’s Disease Research represents the first endowed professorship in support of the Center for Brain Health. It will expand the study of age-related neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease (PD) and dementia and fund neurological training equipment for graduate and medical students studying at LSU Health Shreveport. The endowed professorship honors the Noel Foundation’s former president, Dr. Robert C. Leitz III, who has courageously battled Parkinson’s disease for many years. Dr. Leitz is a Professor Emeritus of English at Louisiana State University in Shreveport and served the Noel Foundation for over 20 years.