Family
To contact Kay’s family: kaykazukowheeler@gmail.com
The Brain Observatory & The Digital Brain Library Project
Knowing how much Alzheimers Disease altered the last 7+ years of Kay’s life, her family is committed to helping advance scientific understanding of the brain, and diseases of the brain including Alzheimers. To this end, Kay donated her brain to The Brain Observatory at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine. Its Digital Library Project is an unprecedented effort to create a library of 1,000 personal neurological portraits, using innovative techniques to create an unabridged physical and digital collection, including sequential images that can be visualized at different levels of resolution, reassembled into three-dimensional models, or inspected with virtual dissection tools – all without compromising the integrity of the original dataset, allowing them to be accessed by countless researchers simultaneously, anywhere in the world, over and over again. The brain is also cryogenically preserved and protected for future, still-unimagined questions and experiments, and additional medical, neuropsychological, and even biographical data is collected and preserved to add to the complete neurological portrait of each donor.
Learn about The Brain Observatory and its Digital Brain Library
See the National Science Foundation’s special report and video about The Brain Observatory, Mind Mappers: Understanding the Mind by Mapping the Brain
Read Esquire’s feature on “The Brain That Changed Everything“:
For those who may be interested in making a donation in tribute to Kay, consider making a donation to The Brain Observatory; more info and a button for an online donation form are here.
San Diego Hospice
Kay’s end-of-life care was supported by the San Diego Hospice, which provided a formidable team of compassionate professionals to help her remain comfortable and safe at home. We say, Go Teal! and offer our profound thanks to Keith, Kraig, Carol, Arlene, Alexis, Betsy, and Dr. Patel. (and a special thank you to Dr. Lolo). We invite anyone wishing to make a donation as a tribute to Kay to consider donating to the San Diego Hospice.
Kay with Lynette
In addition to San Diego Hospice, we are enormously grateful to Lynette Soliver – a beautiful soul, indeed.
Lynette brought much love and happiness to Kay’s final years, months, days, hours and minutes. She is truly family, now and forever.
