Stony Brook Medicine lands $5.5 million endowment from Carol M. Baldwin Breast Cancer Research Fund 

The Carol M. Baldwin Breast Cancer Research Fund has established a $5.5 million endowment for Stony Brook Medicine, leaving Stony Brook staff thrilled at the potential for new research. 

The endowment will generate income for grants that will serve as a security blanket for future projects, according to Alison Stopeck, who does clinical breast cancer research at Stony Brook Medicine. And the $5.5 million does not stop there. Between the State Endowment Match Challenge and the Simons Infinity Investment Challenge, both of which pledge to match endowments to Stony Brook, that amount will triple, according to a release from Stony Brook University. 

“This will allow us to even push the research machine forward further,” said Stopeck, who is planning on submitting another grant now that this money is coming in.

Stopeck also is hopeful about the impact the money can have on outreach projects, like the Mammovan, for example. That  mobile mammography van drives around Nassau and Suffolk counties year-round to provide mammograms to Long Island women who need easier access.

“We just go to a library parking lot and anybody can get a free mammogram,” Stopeck said. She also said this endowment will likely attract new and more talent to Stony Brook University Hospital.

The cancer research fund, founded in 1996 by Carol Baldwin, her family and friends, has a stated mission of “battling breast cancer by supporting both new and established researchers,” according to its website.

Carol Baldwin raised her six children — including celebrity sons Alec, Daniel, Stephen and William Baldwin — in Massapequa. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1990 and endured a double mastectomy. Six years later, she created the fund. 

Also in 1996, the Stony Brook Cancer Center dedicated the Carol M. Baldwin Breast Care Center in her name, honoring her efforts to combat the disease through research.

The fund and Stony Brook University Hospital are very close, according to Anne Line, the fund's director, who has been with it since its inception. The fund gives multiple grants to Stony Brook every year.

At Stony Brook Medicine, which integrates all of Stony Brook University’s health initiatives, breast cancer is just one of 12 specialties, which include lung cancer, thyroid cancer and gastrointestinal cancer, but this money will go specifically to breast cancer research.

Baldwin died at age 92 on May 26, 2022, and Line, her colleague, said the goal of this endowment is to keep her legacy alive.

“We’re hoping that it funds a cure, but I know that any bit of research is going to help us,” Line said.

Later in 2022, Alec Baldwin was spotted at the Great New York State Fair in Syracuse staffing the booth for his late mother's fund. “She wanted [her children] to be a part of it, and now that she’s gone, they’ve stepped up to the plate,” Line said this week.