Family, friendships—and good health. Dr. Ken Botsford (Col ’75, Med ’79) and Nina Botsford hold these values in highest regard along with the Honor System and the University of Virginia, which they are drawn to.
 
Their family’s ties to UVA run deep. Two of their three children are Virginia graduates (one married an alumnus), as was Nina’s father. Nina’s three sisters married alumni, too, and now, three of their children are alumni with alumni spouses. Ken’s brother is an alumnus, and his children also graduated from the University. These connections go on even further, perhaps perpetually, with generations of UVA alumni threading throughout their family. Also—important to note—quite a few lived on the Lawn, including Ken.

Extensive, too, are the many positions their family members have held and currently hold on boards and committees related to areas across Grounds: the Jefferson Scholars Foundation, Alumni Association, College Foundation, UVA Health Foundation, McIntire School of Commerce, Reunions, and more.

Ken Botsford, co-founder of and chief medical advisor for NaviHealth, most recently accepted the position of ex officio member of the UVA Health Foundation Board and is vice chair for health for the Honor the Future campaign. He was also involved in the two previous University of Virginia campaigns. He is a trustee emeritus of the College Foundation and emeritus board member of the Arts & Sciences Benefactor Society. He currently serves on the Health System Board for UVA Health. Ken and Nina are members of many giving societies, including Lawn, Cornerstone, and Rotunda Societies as well as the Benefactors Society, Compass Rose Society, Jefferson Circle, and School of Architecture Dean’s Forum. Ken has been a Reunions volunteer five times, and fortunately he and Nina do love to come back to Charlottesville.

The Lawn is special to them. “I’ll always let the family know when I visit Charlottesville,” Ken said. “I call them and tell them ‘I’ve got my fix. I’m walking down the Lawn.’ Nina’s father lived on the Lawn when he was a student. My brother lived on the Lawn. It’s a go-to.”

A Lawn resident during his time at UVA, Ken returns often with his family.

Aspirations for Health

The Botsfords have long supported many areas of the University, including Lawn room restoration, but Ken and Nina made a significant family mark at UVA years ago, when they created the Alan and Muriel Botsford and Crawford and Virginia Johnson Jefferson Scholarship in memory of their parents. They recently took it a step closer, personally, when they created the Nina and Ken Botsford Bicentennial Professorship in Neurology.

Nina’s father developed dementia in his 60s and died at age 78. “It was a tough time, hard on him and the entire family,” Ken said. Ken’s mother, a diabetic, most likely suffered from multiple mild strokes, which affected her ability to communicate.
 
“We wanted to make a significant contribution to this campaign. Our interest is driven by personal experience. We felt it was important to invest in something that would impact health in ways that would have helped us with our parents.”
 
They considered creating an endowed professorship focused on dementia, but when presented with the opportunity to create an endowed professorship for a new chair of the Department of Neurology, they opted in. “We liked it,” both agreed. “It fits in with the Paul and Diane Manning Institute of Biotechnology research (a significant part of the research is neurological) and with the Harrison family’s gift for Alzheimer’s and neurodegenerative diseases.”
 
Their strategic philanthropy promises to lead to life-changing advances in neurosciences and neurology. They hope their story encourages others to support efforts in the area—efforts being driven by health care leaders such as Dr. Xuemei Huang, a renowned Parkinson’s disease expert who was recently named the inaugural Nina and Ken Botsford Bicentennial Professor and chair of the Department of Neurology.
 
Before joining the UVA faculty, Dr. Huang was associate dean for physician-scientist development and chief of the Division of Movement Disorders at Pennsylvania State University’s College of Medicine. She was also the founding director of Penn State’s Translational Brain Research Center, which pursues translational research on neurodegeneration related to aging and diseases.
 
The Botsfords will also create the Nina and Ken Botsford Research Fund in Neurology through their estate to support research in Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other neurodegenerative disorders.

What are their highest hopes for this research? “The Manning Institute has potential to be life-changing for the central Virginia area, considering the employment and research that could result,” said Ken. “I know it’s important to Paul [Manning] that it’s not research that goes onto the shelf but can be put into use and change lives. I think that will be a very important thing for UVA and Virginia.”
 
Nina affirmed the intention: “Ken and I talked about really wanting to track what’s going on there and to see how mental health and neurodegenerative diseases are being impacted,” she said. “The opportunity to have the chair named and appointed was a pivot, but it assured me that there will be experts in these diseases.”

Friendships

For the Botsfords, the people are what is best about the University. Ken cited professors and classmates who stood out for him-—too many to mention, he said. However, “There were Ken Elzinga, still a friend, and Ernest ‘Boots’ Mead (Col ’40), who was chair of the music department,” said Ken. “I got to know him because I was in his fourth-year seminar. One of our children took that as well. We would meet in my Lawn room, and if the weather was nice, we took a walk on the Lawn and talked about various topics."

Ken served on the Honor Committee as an undergraduate.

 

Friendships and honor go together, Ken explained. “I think it’s the friendships. The kind of people I got to know and became friends with, and stayed friends with, are not the kind of people you meet every day in life. The Honor System played a big part in that; it’s student-run, and that made a difference. It’s a very different responsibility for everyone in the community.”

Nina, who is a closely engaged alumna of Chatham Hall in Chatham, Virginia, compared the two schools’ commitment to honor codes and noted the overlap in friendships. “Whitt Clement (Col ’70, Law ’74), who was the chair of the Honor Committee, came to Chatham Hall to speak when I was a student and drove home the importance of the Honor System at UVA. It resonated because the Honor Code was, and still is, so important at Chatham. Years later, Whitt came to our wedding! The essence of UVA is things like the Honor System, which sets it apart. This is important now more than ever to our society. We are launching children into society with a strong sense of honor. It’s important for them and for the communities that they impact.”

Other friends, classmates, and special people at UVA they mentioned are too numerous to include. Now, the Botsfords have UVA friends across the country, many of whom they have traveled with internationally, and a close group in Birmingham, Alabama (home to the Botsfords), who came together to fund the Andrew P. Selfridge Bicentennial Scholarship.
 
“I think I am a different person after having gone to UVA,” said Ken. “Ask our children who graduated from Virginia, and they’d say the same thing about themselves. In a couple of weeks, our daughter is having some of her UVA friends and their alumni spouses down to a lake for the weekend, so it’s lasting. The impact of being a student at UVA on our lives, to see that carry forward, that’s great. The University changes lives and continues to change lives.”