Elon names new health center for Bill and Tish Slattery, adds scholarships

Elon University is turning its newest health and wellness center into a major campus statement, tying the building not only to student care but also to donor influence, scholarship support and the university’s broader push to make wellness part of daily academic life.

President Connie Ledoux Book and the Board of Trustees announced at the board’s spring meeting on April 10-11 that the new center will be named for Trustee Bill and Tish Slattery. The gift will also create 14 additional scholarships in Elon’s Odyssey Program for students with significant financial need, adding a financial aid component to a project already central to the university’s long-term planning.

The Slattery Center is scheduled to open in fall 2026 in Elon’s Innovation Quad, where the university has concentrated its engineering and other STEM programs. Elon first announced the 135,000-square-foot HealthEU Center on April 16, 2024, when it said the building would be the second-largest on campus behind Schar Center and would open in summer 2026. Weather-related construction delays later pushed that opening to fall 2026.

The project is meant to do more than house recreation space. Elon says the center will integrate academics, wellness, campus recreation and fitness programs as a core piece of HealthEU, the university’s wellness initiative launched in 2022 and built around six dimensions of well-being: community, emotional, purpose, financial, physical and social.

Plans for the three-story building include new classrooms, student-faculty research spaces, multiple floors for wellness and fitness activities and the Mark and Kim Tyson Counseling Center. That counseling center will handle individual and group therapy, workshops and outreach programs, placing mental health services inside the same facility as classrooms and athletic space.

Bill Slattery joined Elon’s Board of Trustees in 2024 and is a partner in the Biotherapeutics group at Deerfield Management Company. Tish Slattery said social media has affected students and argued that institutions with centers like HealthEU will have an advantage. Bill Slattery said the gift is intended to intervene early in students’ lives and reduce hardships over time.

For Elon, the naming decision signals where the university is placing its bet: on wellness infrastructure, on expanded counseling and fitness services, and on a model that folds student health into the center of campus rather than keeping it at the edge of university life.