BATON ROUGE - Former Pennington Biomedical Research Center Executive Director Dr. Claude Bouchard and his wife, Monique Chagnon, were celebrated Tuesday for pledging $1 million to support the research center's postdoctoral program.

The Claude Bouchard-Monique Chagnon Fund will support postdoctoral fellows basic research as well as in clinical and public health and population science, according to the announcement.

“I became very conscious that postdocs are critical to the success of the scientific research enterprise. They work hard, they master the latest technologies, they are eager to succeed and passionate about science. One could argue that they are the actual driver of research in a laboratory. They are not passive recipients; they challenge their mentors and everyone becomes wiser in the process,” said Dr. Bouchard, formerly the John W. Barton, Sr. Endowed Chair in Genetics and Nutrition and LSU Boyd Professor Emeritus.

Read the full statement from the Pennington Biomedical Research Center here.