The philanthropy of Roblox founder David Baszucki and author Jan Ellison Baszucki is paying for a new McLean Hospital center built around a treatment the couple credits with their son’s recovery.
Many large gifts to medicine come with a name on a building. The newest one from David Baszucki and Jan Ellison Baszucki arrives with a story the couple has told many times in public: that a high-fat, very-low-carbohydrate diet helped bring their son’s bipolar disorder into remission after years of hospitalizations and failed medications.
On Oct. 21, the Baszucki Group, the couple’s philanthropy, announced a $20 million grant to McLean Hospital, the Harvard-affiliated psychiatric hospital in Belmont, Mass., to establish the McLean Center for Metabolic Psychiatry. The same announcement launched the Global Network for the Advancement of Metabolic Psychiatry, known as MetPsy, an international network of researchers and clinicians that the Baszucki Group is also funding.
“The launch of MetPsy reflects our family’s commitment to continuing to advance the field of metabolic psychiatry worldwide,” Ms. Ellison Baszucki, the group’s founder and president, said in the release. “As this network grows, we hope fellow funders will join us in expanding access to evidence-based metabolic interventions — a clinical approach that has restored the health and future of our son Matthew, and offers that same hope to many more.”
What the money buys
According to the release, the grant pays for three things: a clinical service, a research program and a medical education and training effort. The center’s director is Dr. Dost Öngür, chief of McLean’s psychotic disorders division and a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. The education and training arm is co-led by MH², a clinical and training practice founded by Dr. Christopher M. Palmer, the Harvard psychiatrist who treated Matthew Baszucki.
Dr. Öngür told The Boston Globe that the center expects 50 to 75 referrals in its first year; he told WBUR he anticipates “hundreds of patients” in later years. He told WBUR that while ketogenic therapy is the focus, researchers will also look at other metabolic treatments, including GLP-1 drugs. McLean’s existing metabolic and mental health research program will continue to operate separately.
“The Center will demonstrate the feasibility of integrated metabolic care and provide an operational blueprint for other academic medical centers worldwide,” Dr. Öngür said in the release.
A family story, told in public
The Baszuckis have made their son’s history central to their giving, and Matthew Baszucki, now 30, has told it himself. WBUR reported that the family has described psychiatric hospitalizations, dozens of providers and more than a dozen medications, and a period in which he left home in a psychotic state and slept on the streets of Los Angeles. His mother contacted Dr. Palmer after hearing him on a podcast about ketogenic therapy for bipolar disorder.
“A part of me prepared to say, ‘I can’t talk to you because I’m not taking new patients,’ and I’m really glad I took the call instead,” Dr. Palmer told WBUR.
After about four months on the diet, Matthew Baszucki said on the family’s Metabolic Mind podcast in June, his symptoms improved. “My brain felt like it could work again,” he said, according to WBUR. “We gradually began the process of tapering medications, and I haven’t had any bipolar symptoms in a long time. It feels like I don’t have the illness anymore.”
The science, and its limits
The people running the new center are careful about what the treatment can and cannot do. “It doesn’t work for everybody, not in this kind of almost miraculous way,” Dr. Palmer told WBUR. “Not everybody gets a full and complete remission.” He estimated that about half of his patients who follow the diet closely for months report some relief, and he cautioned that the diet is meant to supplement therapy and medication, not replace them. WBUR noted that he has disputed claims by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that a ketogenic diet could “cure” schizophrenia.
Dr. Öngür was equally measured with the Globe. “The evidence base is still relatively thin,” he said. He also told the paper, “The ketogenic diet is not intended to replace mainstream treatment.” WBUR reported that some medical professionals remain wary of metabolic therapies and have pointed to links between the ketogenic diet and heart disease, kidney complications and nutrient deficiencies, and that most insurers do not now cover metabolic therapies for psychiatric conditions.
That gap is what the Baszuckis have been paying to close. In 2024 the group highlighted a small, single-arm Stanford Medicine pilot study led by Dr. Shebani Sethi, which it helped fund, that reported psychiatric and metabolic improvements in patients with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. The group followed with a program it calls ReTHINK Bipolar, which it said in 2024 had committed $8 million to randomized controlled trials at McLean and the University of Pittsburgh.
The philanthropy behind it
The Baszucki Group was founded in 2021. In a January 2025 report, she wrote that the group had “recently passed the $100 million mark in philanthropic giving” and had grown from one employee to fourteen. The same report said it had distributed more than $60 million to mental health research, treatment programs and impact investments. Its interests extend beyond psychiatry, to regenerative farming and ranching, food and what it described as nonpartisan work on open primaries and ranked-choice voting.
The report also welcomed the new federal attention to diet and chronic disease, which Ms. Ellison Baszucki attributed largely to Mr. Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again coalition, while describing the group as “deeply non-partisan.”
Mr. Baszucki, who co-founded Roblox and remains its chief executive, is worth about $3.8 billion, according to Forbes real-time estimates as of Oct. 28, 2026; Forbes lists his home as San Francisco. Ms. Ellison Baszucki is a novelist. Mr. Baszucki was among the San Franciscans in The Inquirer’s Oct. 23 survey of the city’s wealthiest families.
What is new in the McLean gift is its scale and its institutional home. Earlier grants seeded pilots and trials; this one pays for a standing clinic inside one of the country’s best-known psychiatric hospitals, with the explicit aim of showing other academic centers how to copy it. Ms. Ellison Baszucki’s appeal for “fellow funders” suggests the family does not intend to be the field’s only patron for long.
Asked about the gift, the Baszucki Group referred The Inquirer to its announcement.
Pilar Ashcombe covers San Francisco society and the public lives of its billionaires, from galas, museum and opera boards and art collections to landmark homes and the city’s old and new fortunes, for the Inquirer’s Billionaires desk. More from Pilar Ashcombe
