New Endowment Paves the Way for Impactful Mentorship in Neuroscience

Dan Hoch ’75 and his wife, Jane Erb, were raised on different coasts and went to college across the country from each other, but one common factor shaped their upbringing and careers: inquisitive fathers.

Hoch’s father, Paul, was a chemist, and Erb’s father, Christian, a lawyer—and both inspired curiosity and lifelong learning in their children.

“I knew Jane’s father 30 years before he passed away, and I heard these stories about him going on a roller coaster because he needed to learn how they work and how they could crash for his defense work,” Hoch says. “My dad was constantly learning,” he adds. “He was trying to tackle Japanese when he was in his late 70s, and he inspired me constantly to learn new things. Jane and I are both really influenced by this inquisitiveness.”

Now, the couple wants to encourage that spirit of inquisitiveness in the next generation through the Whitman Endowment for Brain, Behavior and Cognition. 

The Pathway to a Passion

Hoch came to Whitman College from the Bay Area in California. He was looking for a school far enough away from home that he couldn’t return on the weekends, but close enough to allow him to drive to campus, so he drew a big semicircle centered around the Bay Area on a map and started visiting schools from Southern California to Utah 
to Washington.

“When I visited Whitman, I just kind of fell in love and decided,” he says. “A lot of it was about the liberal arts experience …. But what do you know when you’re 17? It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Not only was the decision to attend Whitman a good idea, but Hoch’s experience on campus turned out to be one of the most formative times in his life.

“Whitman is great for building relationships between students and influential thinkers that allow you to start to get into that adult mindset of, ‘What’s important? Where am I going with my intellectual world? What am I going to do with my life?’” Hoch says.

A double major in Psychology and Philosophy, Hoch credits three titans of those programs as instrumental to his Whitman experience: the late Professor of Philosophy William Soper; Professor of Psychology, Emeritus, Jay Eacker; and Associate Professor of Psychology, Emeritus, Jack Metzger.

“[Soper and Eacker] really got me thinking very much about the brain and conscious behavior,” he says. “And then I took a class from Jack Metzger called Physiological Psychology, and that, as much as anything … really solidified my interest in the brain—and specifically consciousness, thinking, awareness and so forth.”

After Whitman, Hoch continued his education in an Experimental Psychology program at Purdue University in Indiana, then earned his doctorate in Neurobiology from the University of North Carolina. 

He jokes that after finishing his doctorate, he thought he might actually have to go out and get a job, but he was able to put the career search on hold for another eight years by attending medical school. He completed a residency in Neurology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he met Jane Erb, a Psychiatry resident.

“I met Jane at UCLA because they had called her for a psychiatry consult,” Hoch explains. “And she initially thought it was for me, but it was actually for a patient I was caring for, and I kind of liked her style.”

Hoch and Erb decided to make the transition from residency together, and they ended up in Boston, where they spent the rest of their careers. Hoch has been a Neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital since 1991, while Erb recently retired from both a psychiatry practice and her role as an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

Empowering Inspired Mentorship

It is Hoch’s and Erb’s joint love of the brain—and their curiosity—that inspired them to establish the Whitman Endowment for Brain, Behavior and Cognition, which will provide funding for student-faculty neuroscience research in Whitman’s new Brain, Behavior and Cognition (BB&C) program, in honor of both of their fathers.

At the time the new major was announced, Hoch and Erb’s daughter, Jenna Hoch ’23, was completing her time at Whitman with a degree in Psychology. It was talking to Jenna’s advisor, Associate Professor of Psychology and Co-Director of BB&C Nancy Day ’05, that planted the seeds for the new endowment.

“We started to think about how we could help support that,” says Hoch. “We can give Nancy or one of her faculty colleagues a pair of hands during the summer for a research project. What could be better than that? A pair of free hands that are inquisitive and interested and really want to learn something is probably the most valuable commodity in a research lab or setting that you could ever want.”

“And working with a mentor in a research setting is one of the best parts of college, at least in terms of academics,” Erb adds.

“Working with undergraduates is an enlightening experience,” says Day. “They ask interesting and curious questions or make observations that sometimes lead down paths I wouldn’t otherwise pursue. Providing students with those opportunities is meaningful and essential; gifts from fellow scientists like Dan and Jane help make these experiences possible.”

It’s important to Hoch and Erb that current and future Whitties have opportunities to participate in meaningful student-faculty research.

“I didn’t get to spend any summers here because I went home to do work in a machine shop and earn money,” says Hoch. “But to have been able to stay even longer in the summer and explore ideas in experimental psychology with Jack Metzger or to hang out with Bill Soper or Jay Eacker and talk about psychology and philosophy and the brain would have been fabulous.”

“I really wish I had a connection in college to people on the ground who were applying what they learned,” Erb adds. “Having an opportunity to get to know or be mentored by people who were out there in the field … could have influenced me in ways that would have been more helpful.”

The Gift of Learning

Hoch and Erb made their gift to establish the endowment in honor of Hoch’s 50th Reunion, which he celebrated at commencement this past May, but their impact on campus goes back much further. 

Hoch made his first contribution to Whitman 44 years ago with a modest $10 gift. Over the years, as he reflected on his time on campus as the highlight of his educational career, he began to increase his donations, little by little. 

Then about 20 years ago, one of his best friends from Whitman, Arthur Watts ’75, passed away, and Hoch’s Whitman roommate, Douglas Carlsen ’74, took the initiative to create an endowment in Watts’ honor: the Arthur Belden Watts Student Field Research Fund. Hoch and Erb still support the fund today.

“Art was my friend in our class, and that started me donating a lot more regularly, because we wanted to get that fellowship going and supporting great students to do field research in geology or biology,” Hoch says. “That one is really important to us.”

Through the Watts Fund and the new endowment to support BB&C research, Hoch and Erb hope to inspire current and future students to be inquisitive.

“An amazing thread to me amongst Whittie graduates, and the Whitman experience, is how meandering some of their courses are. It sets you up to question and explore,” says Hoch. “You’re going to explore and explore—and some of us do that into our later years.”