IRVING, Texas (March 20, 2023) — Since married doctors Elizabeth Heyne, PA, Psy.D., and Roy Heyne, M.D., founded it in 1992, the Dallas-based Low Birth Weight Development Center (LBWDC) has helped thousands of underweight babies and their parents. The center offers classes, counseling, therapeutic daycare and case management for teen parents, all tailored for babies born under 3.5 pounds.
The center was one beneficiary of the university’s latest Charity Week, organized by the UD junior class. As an act of thanks for the UD community’s generosity, LBWDC gave its Community Service Award to UD President Jonathan J. Sanford, Ph.D., and the students who organized the donation, juniors Dani Fregoso and Dominique Weisbruch.
The award was presented on March 4 by pediatrician and bioethicist William Stigall, MD, MA ’09, an adjunct faculty member who teaches philosophy.
“UD, under the academic and administrative leadership of Dr. Sanford, and lived out by the student leadership of people like Dominique and Dani, seeks to establish community as much as it studies community,” Stigall said at the ceremony.
Stigall, who works as an attending physician in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit of Cook Children’s Hospital, earned his philosophy degree from the Braniff Graduate School.
He highlighted UD’s role in the donation, where the effort and the people involved all show that peculiar confluence of smarts, ambition and love that characterizes the UD community.
“UD is the most self-consciously Catholic liberal arts university in the world. Many other institutions call themselves Catholic, think they teach the liberal arts and do so while calling themselves a university. And many of them are very good at one or more parts of this,” Stigall said.
“But none do this with the vigor or intentionality by which the University of Dallas educates its students and community in Catholicism, the liberal arts, or how communities should live out Catholicism and the liberal arts.”
The Heynes’ unassuming Dallas headquarters has served over 6,000 babies, and it’s not their only project. Before LBWDC, the couple founded another endeavor, the Thrive Program, a clinic to provide follow-up care for babies coming out of the neonatal intensive care unit. An active researcher, Elizabeth Heyne also serves as an adjunct professor at UD.
Thanks to Fregoso, Weisbruch and the givers of Charity Week — from Penny War veterans to Mall jailbirds — the Heynes can help a few more babies grow up in love.
