Transforming the Future of Health Care in South Florida

Since 2023, Griffin Catalyst has made transformative gifts to major health care institutions in Miami. Taken together, the support, totaling $150 million, represents an investment in the future of medical care and research in South Florida, allowing these institutions to recruit some of the best health-care professionals in the country, and propelling the region’s future.
Photo Credit: U Health Miami
On March 5, 2024, Ken Griffin added his signature to a ceremonial steel beam placed on the roof of the new Kenneth C. Griffin Cancer Research Center building, now under construction at the University of Miami Health System's Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center.

In recent years, few regions of the United States have grown as swiftly as South Florida, and with it, Miami-Dade County. South Florida, once known as a haven for retirees from other parts of the country, has attracted a rapidly growing population of younger newcomers, as families with children from across the United States are increasingly attracted to Miami-Dade’s bustling economy, appealing lifestyle, and pro-growth policies.

This influx of new arrivals has increasingly strained the region’s existing health care centers, many of them already in the midst of dramatic expansion. To address the needs for world-class medical care and research for the region’s wide-ranging, demographically diverse population, Griffin Catalyst is supporting institutions that meet the unique health care needs of the community—from exceptional pediatric treatment for children to advancements in neuroscience and cancer research for adults and seniors.

Who We’re Supporting

Griffin Catalyst has focused on three areas of growing medical need in the Miami metropolitan area, through major support of the region’s premier health-care institutions which together see millions of patients annually.

In January 2023, Nicklaus Children’s Hospital—ranked among the top children’s hospitals nationwide—announced a $25-million gift from Griffin Catalyst Founder Ken Griffin. The new Kenneth C. Griffin Surgical Tower, a five-story, 131,000-square-foot building that opened in 2025, enables the hospital to provide state-of-the-art care for thousands of young patients who require surgical procedures each year. The surgical tower’s new operating rooms replaced three-decade-old facilities that lacked the size and ceiling height to fit the latest equipment and modern surgical teams. The building also allows Nicklaus to improve patient experience by offering generously sized, fully private pre- and post-surgical care spaces for the children and families it serves.

Opened in 2026, the new Kenneth C. Griffin Cancer Research Building at the University of Miami Health System’s Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center is advancing oncological research and treatment for the region’s families. Supported by a $50-million gift from Griffin Catalyst Founder Ken Griffin, the new 12-story, 244,000-square-foot facility, located in the heart of the Medical Campus near downtown Miami, doubles the University of Miami’s dedicated cancer research footprint. The state-of-the-art facility enables an innovative approach to cancer research and treatment, building on the Center’s National Cancer Institute designation—one of only 72 centers nationwide to hold that distinction. By including two floors devoted to clinical care alongside research efforts, the facility is bridging the gap between scientists and patients to encourage a focus on total-body wellness during treatment, improving patients’ overall quality of life.

Finally, $50 million in support for Baptist Health South Florida, the largest single donation in the hospital’s history, is advancing research and care for neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and other movement disorders. Announced in 2024 and set to open in the coming years, the new Kenneth C. Griffin Center at Baptist’s Miami Neuroscience Institute, where the region’s neurological patients are treated on a daily basis, will not only include extensive laboratory space but clinical areas for patients. This cutting-edge “co-location” of researchers and working physicians is expected to foster higher levels of collaboration and innovation, and lead to crucial advances in neuroscience and neurodegenerative disorders.

What’s the Impact

Together, the new structures and expanded resources of the three institutions will dramatically improve medicine and health care across South Florida—from advancing basic research and accelerating the development of new therapies to increasing access to clinical trials.

At the most basic level, they will improve the availability of world-class, compassionate health care for the region’s nearly ten million residents, who are able to receive state-of-the-art medical and surgical procedures close to home. It will also enhance care for the tens of thousands of people who travel each year from around the Caribbean and Latin America to receive treatment.

Building on established areas of Griffin Catalyst’s support—including partnerships with Boston Children’s Hospital, Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and the Michael J. Fox Foundation, a leader in Parkinson’s research—these transformational investments in South Florida’s health care ecosystem also advance scientific understanding of some of the 21st century’s most critical medical challenges. Together, they represent a major step toward the goal of ending these and other life-threatening diseases in our lifetime.

Griffin Catalyst Founder Ken Griffin’s support of these three well-established and fast-growing medical centers will have a significant impact on the millions of patients who have seen their lives transformed by the institutions’ commitment to hope, dignity, compassion, and care.  One such patient is Sebastian Krys, a Grammy Award-winning audio engineer who, diagnosed with Parkinson’s at the age of forty-eight, was limited by his medical condition to just five hours of activity each day—until he came into the care of Dr. Diego Torres, a determined physician at Baptist Health, who helped to transform his quality of life. “I am now getting about thirteen or fourteen hours a day of my normal self—which meant I could work, meant I could travel, meant I could enjoy my kids, I could go to concerts, I could live my life,” Krys declared at the March 2024 ceremony for Griffin Catalyst’s gift. “Mr. Griffin, this is life-changing for us, to deal with these diseases. I can’t put into words what this means to the communities that deal with neurological diseases.”

For South Florida, the impact of these gifts is only just beginning to be felt. “What makes great cities is education and health care” observes Matthew Love, Nicklaus Children’s Hospital CEO. Griffin Catalyst’s philanthropic investments in the medical ecosystem are enabling Florida’s hospitals to attract the best and brightest from around the country—further differentiating the Sunshine State and driving the region’s future. In Love’s words, “From a South Florida perspective, we’ve seen pretty significant advances towards elevating the level of care. Philanthropy helps us do innovative things, things that are on the leading edge, things that we may not otherwise be able to do.”

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In Brief

May 20, 2024
In December 2023, Griffin Catalyst and the David Geffen Foundation announced a gift of $400 million to New York's Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK), one of the most renowned and advanced cancer research and treatment institutions in the world. This landmark gift—the largest donation to the institution in its nearly 150-year history—will allow MSK to significantly expand and upgrade its research, educational, and treatment facilities toward a singular goal: eradicating cancer.
October 28, 2024
Griffin Catalyst provided a seed gift of $2.5 million to accelerate the efforts of Feng Zhang, a faculty member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, to develop “programmable therapeutics,” an approach that holds promise for revolutionizing medicine by reprogramming cells to cure a wide range of human diseases.
November 14, 2023
Griffin Catalyst is supporting a major enhancement of UK Biobank, one of the world’s leading scientific resources for health data and biological samples. Griffin Catalyst’s $10 million gift—matched by Eric Schmidt and Schmidt Futures—will enable UK Biobank and scientists from around the world to accelerate research into disease mechanisms, to better leverage artificial intelligence, and to work towards more personalized options for treatment.
June 10, 2026
Griffin Catalyst is supporting scientific innovation through a novel approach known as Focused Research Organizations (FROs). These initiatives take on high-risk, high-potential challenges in science that academic research groups and for-profit companies aren’t well-suited to solving—with a well-defined goal and a time-limited opportunity to make progress. Griffin’s $20 million in support of this model has helped propel two initial FROs—Parallel Squared Technology Institute and Forest Neurotech—to advance work with the potential to address a range of neurological and age-related diseases. Inspired in part by the promise of this approach, the National Science Foundation recently announced a new Tech Labs Initiative,
May 12, 2026
For the first time in recorded history, in recent years, avian flu reached Antarctica, threatening animals in an already fragile ecosystem. Griffin Catalyst responded proactively to this potential crisis—which, gone unchecked, had the potential to devastate Antarctica’s penguin, seal, and seabird populations, with global consequences. By supporting a new scientific monitoring and surveillance effort led by researchers at Cornell University, Griffin Catalyst helped scientists understand the nature and spread of the new virus and what immunity looks like for previously infected animals, with important implications for mitigation strategies and poultry, fishing, and tourism policies that may reduce its spread.
November 12, 2025
The health of one of America’s greatest and best-known watersheds, the Florida Everglades, has been under increasing threat in recent years from agricultural needs and the development demands of the fast-growing population of South Florida. Griffin Catalyst’s support for The Everglades Foundation—a three-decade-old nonprofit organization that helps to protect and restore the immense but fragile ecosystem—is allowing the group to expand its scientific team and resources in order to provide data-driven policy recommendations to the state and federal agencies that are leading the Everglades’ multiyear, multibillion-dollar restoration effort.
September 4, 2025
A three-year gift to the University of Chicago’s Education Lab has brought an innovative, high-dosage, math tutoring initiative to middle schools in Miami-Dade County in an effort to support and accelerate student learning in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Initial results from the program, which started in spring 2024, are promising, suggesting that this approach can help tackle learning loss and enable students to catch up to grade level.
June 17, 2025
How did the end of the Age of Dinosaurs in Africa impact world history? That’s what researchers aim to uncover during a five-year project of excavation and analysis in the Northern Cape region of South Africa. Their study will explore fossil ecosystems and the biodiversity of sub-Saharan Africa during the Late Cretaceous Period to dramatically expand scientists’ currently limited understanding of this important epoch.
April 17, 2025
Griffin Catalyst is proud to partner with the nonprofit American History Unbound. The collaboration will present dramatic multimedia storytelling about World War I and World War II to audiences in New York and Miami, and nationwide through a documentary being filmed for broadcast on public television later this year, to coincide with Veterans Day. The unique combination of narration and imagery from renowned historian John Monsky, accompanied by music from Broadway stars and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, brings to life in new ways two of the most pivotal events in the 20th century.