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Couple provides research gift


MSU alum Richard Bush and Patty McGuigan of Palo Alto, Calif., recently made a $25,000 gift to the CAS Health and Risk Communication Center (HRCC) “so that Michigan State University can be on the leading edge of health commmunication research.”

“We had a need to return all the wonderful opportunities that MSU has given Richard,” McGuigan said. Richard graduated from MSU in 1967 and felt that it was the tool that allowed him to become all that he has. Richard has started four tech companies over the last 20 years and they have all been successful.”


For his most recent business, Bush brought together a team of key marketing and engineering executives from Oracle, Nortel Networks, Cisco Systems, Redback Networks and Spirent Communications to address a problem they experienced
in their respective companies: a growing identity gap between network access control and user directories. Bush is the
chairman and founder of Identity Engines, a company that provides identity security for network systems. He has over 30 years of hightechnology industry experience in engineering, sales, and marketing positions from entry to top executive
level. McGuigan is a highly successful commercial real estate executive in the Silicon Valley area.


The donation established the“Bush and McGuigan Organ Donation Communication Research Fund” in the Health and Risk Communication Center.

Several professors in the college including, Sandi Smith, Hee Sun Park, and Mary Bresnahan, are working on projects centered on different aspects of the communication process to persuade the public to document their wishes and to
engage in family discussion about organ donation.

Smith, the director of the HRCC, said that she is “thankful for the generosity of Dick and Patty, and she hopes that their donation will serve as a model so that others will give for research purposes.”