Friends in Deed

Gift Honors UAB Physician Through New Women & Infants Center

By Tyler Greer

Alice Goepfert

Jennifer Overstreet Styslinger, Net Sommers Wade, Leslie Jackson Moody, and Alice Reeves Goepfert, M.D., associate professor of maternal and fetal medicine at UAB, have been best friends for most of their lives. Through the years, there has been plenty of laughter shared and tears shed. The friends combined the two last year when Styslinger, Wade, and Moody told Goepfert they were raising money for the new UAB Women & Infants Center—and that they expected to generate enough funds to name one of the center’s labor-and-delivery rooms for her.

“It is one of the nicest things anyone has ever done for me to acknowledge the importance of the work I do, the people I work with, and what the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology has done for the people of Alabama,” Goepfert says. “I was incredibly touched and honored.”

“At our age, we’ve gone through a lot together,” Styslinger says. “We’ve seen Alice work hard and make sacrifices, and for her to be so successful, we just couldn’t be happier.” Styslinger was a member of Theresa Bruno’s fund-raising team for the center, and they very quickly determined that they wanted to raise the money to honor a woman. “Theresa and I thought it was a great opportunity to honor Alice,” Styslinger says. So she recruited Wade and Moody to help. Their efforts yielded more than $75,000.

“We care for women across the spectrum—every cultural and ethnic group from any socioeconomic background—and we provide excellent care to these women and their infants regardless of who they are, where they come from, or what issue they have,” Goepfert says. “Now they will get what always has been the best level of care in the best facilities.”