Citywide Tribute to Turn Town Gold Saturday Night in Jonathan’s Honor

On July 28, Gold’s birthday, landmarks from L.A. City Hall to the Ferris wheel
on the Santa Monica Pier will be lit up with gold to celebrate the late food critic

LOS ANGELES – July 26, 2018 – Jonathan Gold, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Los Angeles Times restaurant critic who richly chronicled the city’s vast culinary and cultural landscape, died on July 21 at the age of 57. As many have noted in recent days, Gold had a unique gift for making a sprawling metropolis feel like a community. This Saturday, July 28, in honor of what would have been Gold’s 58th birthday, the community will come together for a special tribute with several buildings and landmarks around town displaying messages and lighting up with gold inspired by “the Belly of Los Angeles”.

After sundown on Saturday, buildings and landmarks including the L.A. Times headquarters in El Segundo, L.A. City Hall tower, Wilshire Grand Center, The Broad, US Bank Tower, Arthur J. Will Memorial Fountain in Grand Park, Natural History Museum, pylons at LAX and Pacific Wheel on the Santa Monica Pier will be illuminated for the occasion. Additional venues and events, including The Wiltern, the Ford Theatres, The Theatre at Ace Hotel, Chinatown Summer Nights and the Fairplex in Pomona will also display messages and projections in Gold’s honor, with more to be confirmed and all welcome to participate.

Gold died of pancreatic cancer last Saturday after being diagnosed in early July. He and his wife, Times arts and entertainment editor Laurie Ochoa, have two children, 23-year-old Isabel and 15-year-old Leon. The Gold-Ochoa family asks that, in lieu of flowers, those wishing to honor Gold’s life consider supporting any of these nonprofit organizations: L.A. Regional Food Bank, Hirshberg Foundation for Pancreatic Cancer Research, Heal the Bay or Al Otro Lado. Friends of the Ochoa-Gold family have also created a GoFundMe campaign to assist them with immediate expenses.

Another public event celebrating his life, which will include an opportunity for the community to gather together, is being planned for Sunday, August 26. The location and details will be announced soon.

The Los Angeles Times thanks the Office of Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, Offices of L.A. County Supervisors Hilda L. Solis and Sheila Kuehl, KCRW, Central City Association, Grand Park and The Music Center, Live Nation, Los Angeles Chinatown BID, Los Angeles World Airports, OUE Ltd., Pacific Park and all of the participating organizations for this special tribute to the city’s beloved food critic, Jonathan Gold. The community is encouraged to share photos of the tribute using #LAGold.

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The Hirshberg Foundation is excited to announce that video presentations of the 14th Annual Symposium on Pancreatic Cancer are now viewable on our website. Hosted in collaboration with the UCLA Agi Hirshberg Center for Pancreatic Diseases, 200 caregivers, survivors, medical professionals and researchers attended the Hirshberg Foundation’s most important patient and caregiver event of the year. This was the first time the symposium was hosted at the UCLA Luskin Conference Center, providing an inspirational learning environment in a thoughtfully designed space.

The Symposium provides an experience where patients and their caregivers may ask questions, explore new options, understand advances in research and begin making informed decisions. As in years past, the symposium included several esteemed guest speakers, survivors and caregivers, each sharing expertise, unique perspectives and personal experiences with pancreatic cancer. Speakers focused on topics that would educate and empower families facing this disease.

“Each year our goal is to educate, empower and instill hope – once again we’ve made that a reality,” said Agi Hirshberg, Founder and CEO of the Hirshberg Foundation for Pancreatic Cancer Research. “We hope you will watch and learn from these newly released videos and the valuable information shared at the event.”

The Foundation staff works hard to ensure that the annual event is free of charge for all attendees. “We want to thank our sponsors, Incyte and Joanne & Ken Weinman, for their support“, said Lisa Manheim, Executive Director of the Hirshberg Foundation. She added, “The success of the symposium is made possible by the generosity of private donors, the participation of attendees and the expertise of our guest speakers.”

Plans are already underway for the 15th Annual Symposium on Pancreatic Cancer, to be held on Saturday, March 2, 2019 at the UCLA Luskin Conference Center.

It is with great sadness that the Hirshberg Foundation shares the news of the passing of Dr. Wai-Nang Paul Lee, our distinguished member of our Scientific Advisory Board. Dr. Lee passed away this week from pancreatic cancer – a disease that he studied for the last 40 years of his life.

He was a mentor to many medical colleagues who pioneered biochemistry and metabolic profiling for translational and clinical medicine. His contributions are extraordinary and his publications are cited in fundamental papers in medical literature close to 10,000 times. Dr. Lee was one of the first investigators to develop exact mathematical tools to process large amounts of metabolic profiling data, nevertheless his interpretations moved metabolic disease towards a functional arena involving biochemistry and physiology named tracer-based metabolomics.

Dr. Lee was a 2014 Hirshberg Seed Grant Recipient for his project titled “Metabolic Profile of Gemcitabine Resistance in pancreatic cancer.” Most recently, Dr. Lee was a Professor of Pediatrics at Harbor-UCLA and the Director, Biomedical Mass Spectrometry Facility at Harbor-UCLA LA Biomed Research Institute. His bio can be read here.

Brandon Walters of Gemini Timing has been a part of the Orange County Triathlon for the past seven years.   Now, with his new company Five Point Productions, he is the owner of the Orange County Triathlon. Brandon was looking for his next step in the race industry and when it turned out a race date had already been set for June 3rd, it was kismet for the date of the Orange County Triathlon 2018 falls on his father Richard’s birthday.

In December 2016, Brandon’s seemingly healthy dad Richard was rushed to the hospital with what initially seemed like symptoms of an ear infection but turned out to be a T.I.A (a minor stroke). Once in the emergency room he mentioned that he was short of breath, which resulted in a full body scan. The doctors found blood clots which led them to a diagnosis nobody expected, Stage 4 Pancreatic Cancer.  

Because of his partnerships in the running industry through Gemini Timing, Brandon had done races with the Hirshberg Foundation, founded by Agi Hirshberg in honor of her late husband Ronald S. Hirshberg, who passed away from Pancreatic Cancer and he reached out for help. He and his family were overwhelmed by their generosity. Brandon would receive weekly, sometimes daily calls to check on not only Brandon and his father but the entire family and offer their support. Agi and her team at the Hirshberg Foundation helped Brandon’s family through the uncertainty of this horrible disease.

Unfortunately, in April 2017 Richard Walters passed away. Agi and The Hirshberg Foundation have continued to be a support system to this day.   When Brandon took on the Orange County Triathlon he saw this as the perfect opportunity to give back to the people who had helped his family so much as well as raise awareness and funds for research in the hopes that one day Pancreatic Cancer can be eradicated.

This is your opportunity as well to combat this awful disease. Very little is known about pancreatic cancer and it is often called a silent killer. There are not “routine screens” or tests, and very few symptoms that make Pancreatic Cancer the obvious diagnosis. Help us to end Pancreatic Cancer by donating today.

Thank you.

The Hirshberg Foundation is excited to have Matt Lashey joining us at the 14th Annual Symposium on Pancreatic Cancer to share how the newly created app, chemoWave, can help cancer patients when they document their patient experience.

A free new mobile app, chemoWave, from parent company Treatment Technologies and Insights (TTI), was created with a mission to improve the patient experience and harness the power of patient reported outcomes (PROs).

When Matt’s partner was diagnosed with cancer and they couldn’t find a comprehensive tool to help navigate treatment, Lashey drew from his extensive experience with strategic research and data analysis to create his own. At the encouragement of their doctor, Lashey began developing chemoWave to enable patients to be better partners with their care providers.

The chemoWave technology not only tracks the full treatment experience outside the clinical setting (including medications, meals, symptoms, side effects and other activities), it also analyzes the resulting patterns and provides on-going actionable insights & tips to users. The result for patients is propelling them to do more of what makes them feel better and less of what makes them feel worse; The result for care teams is improved quality, effectiveness and efficiency of cancer care.

Prior to TTI, Matt Lashey served as acting SVP of Primary Research for Discovery Networks. Lashey also served as Vice President of Innovation Insights and Business Leadership at the consulting firm Maddock Douglas. Prior to that, he was VP of Strategic Insights for Lifetime Networks and A&E Television’s Digital Assets. Mr. Lashey received his MBA from Columbia Business School, after a successful career as a Broadway actor.

Matt Lashey will speak on how chemoWave enables Chemo Patients to Take Control.

The Hirshberg Foundation is excited to have Dr. Stanton joining us at the 14th Annual Symposium on Pancreatic Cancer to discuss how important it is to understand the emotional journey that cancer patients and loved ones experience once diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

Annette L. Stanton, Ph.D., researches factors that promote or impede psychological and physical health in adults and couples undergoing chronically stressful experiences, with a focus on the experience of cancers of the breast, pancreas, eye, and lung. She then translates her findings into action by developing and testing approaches to enhance psychological and physical health over the course of the cancer trajectory.

In recognition of her research contributions, Dr. Stanton received the Senior Investigator Award from the Society for Health Psychology of the American Psychological Association in 2003. She was elected to serve as president of the 3,000-member Society in 2012-2013. She also has received the Outstanding International Collaboration Award from the International Society of Behavioral Medicine. Awards for undergraduate teaching and graduate mentoring include the J. Arthur Woodward Graduate Mentoring Award and the Distinguished Teaching Award in the UCLA Department of Psychology. In 2017, she was elected to the Executive Council of the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research. Dr. Stanton’s research is supported by the Hirshberg Foundation for Pancreatic Cancer Research, the National Cancer Institute, the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, and the American Cancer Society.

The Hirshberg Foundation supports the performance of a systematic review of the scientific literature on quality of life in adults and partners living with pancreatic cancer (in press), as well as an on-going study of contributors to quality of life and health in adults with pancreatic cancer and their caregivers. We are honored to have Dr. Stanton join us to present on Managing the Emotional Journey at the 14th Annual Symposium.