Northern Light Acadia Hospital receives $500K gift for Alzheimer’s research program

Northern Light Acadia Hospital, a psychiatric hospital in Bangor, has received $500,000 to support the Robert C. Strauss Neurocognitive Research Program in finding new treatments for Alzheimer’s disease and other disorders affecting mental health.

The gift from Camilla Cochrane is in honor of her late husband, Robert Strauss.

Northern Light Acadia Hospital provides inpatient and outpatient behavioral care for children, teens and adults, specializing in the treatment of mental illness and substance use disorders.

Strauss was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia, a rare neurodegenerative disease, and died in 2018. Strauss and Cochrane had turned to the team at Acadia’s Mood & Memory Clinic for treatment and a clinical trial to slow the course of the disease.

"From the minute I walked in there, I had hope for the first time. I’m honored to be able to take the worst thing that ever happened in our lives and make it into something positive for others,” Cochrane said. “Bob would be so proud to know his name is associated with such an important resource for the community.”

The Robert C. Strauss Neurocognitive Research Program will collaborate with the clinical research center at Northern Light Eastern Maine Medical Center and has key research partnerships with experts in aging and dementia at Massachusetts General Hospital, the Jackson Laboratory and the University of Maine.

“With the rapidly increasing number of seniors in Maine, the future needs of our state for specialty services that we provide will not be met unless we expand our program. This gift puts us closer to that goal,” says Scott Oxley, president of Acadia Hospital.

Northern Light Health provides care to people from Portland to Presque Isle and from Blue Hill to Greenville. It includes 10 member hospitals with 987 licensed beds, a single physician-led medical group, eight nursing homes with 585 long-term beds, five emergency transport members and 37 primary care locations. The health care system employs more than 12,000 people.