- March 29, 2025
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As Siesta Key resident Dr. Joel Morganroth nears his 80th birthday, there’s a lot of names, monikers and titles he’s had over the past eight decades. A partial list includes: cardiologist, medical educator, author, innovator, visionary, entrepreneur and philanthropist. Even more important titles: husband to Gail for more than 50 years, dad to three adult children and, more recently, grandpa of two toddlers.
Another name to describe Morganroth, if not a title, would be, simply, curious.
That’s the consensus of multiple people in Sarasota who have served on a nonprofit board with Morganroth; been a recipient of the generosity of Morganroth and his wife, Dr. Gail Morganroth, which tallies at least $30 million in the past 15 years; or have merely shared a conversation or meal with him or went on art tours with the couple. That curiosity, and generosity, has led to some big-time changes at some big-time places across Sarasota, particularly in the past six years.
“He always wants to know why,” says Ringling College of Art and Design President Larry Thompson. “He’s like a little kid, curious about everything.”
Adds Thompson, notably: “He’s great at asking questions. When he asks questions about something, they are incredibly significant. And then he processes information quickly. He’s brilliant.”
Thomoson and a handful of others who know the Morganroths well stress Joel Morganroth’s brand of curiosity is purposeful, not pesky. He challenges the people around him, they say, to think bigger, deeper and differently about an issue or problem. “He always asks a lot of questions, wanting to find this out, find that out,” says Sarasota Memorial Healthcare Foundation President Stacey Corley, who has worked with the Morganroths on major donations at both the foundation and Ringling College. “He always brings it back to what we are (focused) on, which I love about him.”
The Morganroths might seek answers, but, despite having long and distinguished careers in medicine and giving large swaths of money to a host of prominent organizations, one thing they don’t seek is publicity. Joel Morganroth, for example, spoke on behalf of himself and Gail for this story — a nugget that doesn’t surprise most people who know the couple well.
Yet there’s a lot to publicize. The Morganroths, who moved to Sarasota in 2009 (Siesta Key came a few years later) from Philadelphia and maintain a second home up north, have been strategic about their gifts, says Morganroth. Those donations include:
The Morganroths have donated money to several other organizations in the area, from one-off $5,000 and $10,000 gifts to some $6 million for the Jewish Federation of Sarasota-Manatee. The latter gift included funds earmarked to redevelop the campus, and Morganroth also led the Federation’s CEO search, which brought Shep Englander on board in spring 2021.
Another aspect of the Morganroths’ donation story comes from commitment: to each other and to their careers — both of which led them to have the financial means to be philanthropic in this stage of their lives. The Morganroths met in the early 1970s — he was a resident, she was an intern, at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, the teaching hospital of Harvard. They got married, Joel says, in 1972. They worked together at the National Institutes of Health and lived in Bethesda, Maryland, before making their life and career home in Philadelphia.
Gail Morganroth, a board-certified nephrologist, a doctor who specializes in kidney care, spent most of her career in administration at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine.
Joel Morganroth, meanwhile, was a practicing cardiologist, clinical researcher and a consultant for the FDA for a large part of his career. From 1993 through the late 2000s, he was also a top executive for a Philadelphia company, then named eResearchTechnology, that provided technology and software for pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device industries. In 2010, Morganroth was named to PharmaVOICE magazine’s 100 Most Inspiring People in the Life Sciences Industry list, for, in part, leading the team that invented ERT’s “breakthrough and proprietary technology platform for centralized electronic electrocardiograph data collection and management.”
Gail Morganroth has two degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, and Joel Morganroth has one. And the Penn Quaker spirit runs deep in the family: All three of the couple’s children have degrees from the Penn Wharton School; one daughter is a neurological fellow at Columbia University, while another daughter works in media content for Amazon Studios in New York City. Their son works in real estate finance. The grandkids? They are 2 and 8 months old and live up north, so while the Morganroths see them, “it’s not nearly enough,” he quips.
Joel Morganroth’s dad had a furniture business and Gail’s dad was a pharmacist while her mom worked for a printing company. Both grew up middle class, and their moms volunteered, but neither of them came from especially philanthropic families.
Morganroth says he and his wife, as they got into their 70s, knew “we wanted to do something transformative because we have the money to do so.”
That led Morganroth to get curious with the organizations. He says there are two ways he thinks about donating $500,000 and up to a nonprofit.
One is like a horse race. First, you look at the horse, and the breeding and the organization. “Are they in good financial shape, are they doing the right things?” Morganroth asks. “Then you look at the jockey just as you would look at an organization’s leaders.”
Another way he thinks about giving is treating the organization like the stock of a startup. Asks Morganroth: “Do I believe in the product, the mission and the board?”
“I do a lot of research,” he adds. “I kick the tires. Hard. I don’t just read an (IRS public tax form) 990. I want to be incredibly involved and aware of what the organization is doing.”
The Morganroths discovered Sarasota like many other Northeasterners: by checking out the state’s east coast first and liking this side better. They came here in 2009 to visit friends, and, says Morganroth “we immediately fell in love with Sarasota.”
They first bought a condo at the Ritz-Carlton Beach Residences on Lido Key. A few years later they bought a Carl Abbott-designed home on Higel Avenue on Siesta Key known as the Dolphin house. A few years later they moved into their current home, on north Siesta Key.
Sarasota Memorial Health Care President and CEO David Verinder, like Larry Thompson at Ringling and Stacey Corley at the foundation, says he appreciates the Morganroths both for being here and being so giving. Verinder says he looks forward to an occasional lunch with Morganroth, to talk SMH as well as health care models and leadership.
“They have been an amazing addition to the Sarasota community,” Verinder says. “There are some people who come and go here, but there are others who really make this community better, and that’s the Morganroths.”
