THE AEGIS INSTITUTE
The shape of our stories affects everyone we meet and everything we do. There is a Buddhist proverb: you touch nothing without that thing also touching you. We are memorialized in our actions and our words in every minute of our own lives and in the lives of those we meet. To me, there is no greater memorial to a life than to continue to give the best of yourself through a scholarship/donation/foundation that will improve the lives of many young and yet unborn children. All the people listed here have deeply influenced me and helped to find a stronger, fiercer kindness to confront world full of problems and difficulties. I only hope that Aegis can live up to their collective wisdom.
* For donations of over 1000 dollars, we urge you to contact us directly through email.
Johanna Elizabeth Hove Memorial Fund
Johanna was my first very close friend. We stayed best friends for 20 years. We met in middle school and urged each other to ever more towering academic achievements. She and I talked about Aegis when it was still in its most nascent stages 8 years prior. Her life was cut tragically short a year later, but her story will live on in the myriad people she has impacted and in every life that Aegis will go on to affect.
James Scott Berkovitz Scholarship and Fund
Scott was an extraordinary individual. He was only 27 when he died and this happened only 2 months after Johanna’s death. Scott had had a dream all of his life of becoming a particular physicist and had just accepted a position at the LHC in graduate school working on the ATLAS project. It meant the world to me to become a part of his loving family and to help him achieve this dream.
[More about Scott]
Scott was a gifted athlete and physically, the picture of health. This belied the fact that he battled with significant mental illness. Scott was diagnosed with clinical OCD and several related disorders. The reason I want to mention this is because I look at him as a model of how much the human spirit can achieve in spite of its worst demons
Mental illness is a particularly wicked demon for someone like Scott who appeared extremely physically healthy even at his worst. It made it sometimes hard for others to believe he needed help. Moreover, the state of psychology and psychiatry today is nascent when compared to other branches of medicine. The brain is an incredibly complex organ.
Yet, despite all of the difficulties he faced in his interior life, he always found the strength to rise to become the best version of himself. He would suffer crippling anxiety and accompanying depression and would often force himself to do whatever needed to be done before he was diagnosed. When I first met Scott, he believed the world was fixed and determined- that we could never escape or achieve more than we were destined to.
Scott’s beliefs on this point evolved as we became closer. While it’s unclear to me whether or not our lives are preordained, it’s very clear to me that we live better lives if we believe we have at least some control. Scott came to agree with me on this point and that launched him on an odyssey through science and mathematics that eventually landed him at his dream job. With a less supportive family or with less caring friends Scott’s life could have become a very dark place. Instead, a community of caring people helped lift someone out of deeply troubled waters and onto road towards a dream.
Drew Bradbury Scholarship and Fund
An extraordinary child, son, and brother, Drew has touched the lives of many people very deeply. Drew was born with a genetic anomaly that caused cystic fibrosis. This made both his life and his family’s life tremendously difficult; yet, even in the darkest moments some people help us to find the wings courage. He helped his parents and sister grow as kind and loving people. The lessons learned from his treatment have helped and the money raised in honor of his brief and beautiful life have helped tens of thousands of people the world over. The work he helped begin has lifted the quality of life and life expectancy of someone with CF from 14 years when Drew was born to 44 years today.
[More about Drew]
Carl Berkovitz Scholarship and Fund
Carl was a dear friend, an advocate for the underdog, an Airforce veteran, an avid proponent of the law and of improving the American legal system, and a father. He spent his life dreaming of and working towards a more fair and equitable world in a variety of ways. One of the things that he most often lamented to me was how conservative he was in his aspirations as a youth. He wished he had dreamed bigger and he was proud that his son had.
[More about Carl]
One of the things I loved most about Carl was his willingness to take on new challenges even in his final years of life. He had put off learning how to read music almost all his life and had wished he had done it. In his last year, he had taken to regularly practicing the keyboard and had taught himself how to read music with moderate proficiency. I was very proud of him for this achievement.
He would often say that it’s harder and harder to change as you get older. Yet, he, as much as anyone, was a counterexample to this.
Carl, a life long atheist, took to studying Buddhism the last several years of his life. He said that it brought him peace and understanding and a new level of empathy. Carl also became a dog owner and enthusiast late in life with a deep love for cocker spaniels.