A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:
Jewish Education Project
Billionaire Bernie Marcus gave $20 million through his Marcus Foundation to establish RootOne, a new program that will help to pay for trips to Israel for Jewish teens seeking a deeper connection to the country and their Jewish identity.
Marcus co-founded the home improvement giant Home Depot in 1979 after being fired from his job as CEO of Handy Dan Home Improvement, a Los Angeles chain of stores that closed in 1989. Marcus is a longtime donor to Jewish causes, medical research, and more.
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
M. Dozier Gardner and his wife, Sandy, gave $5 million to establish the Dozier Gardner Family Fund, which will provide flexible support for Dana-Farber’s president and CEO, Dr. Laurie Glimcher, to direct toward cancer research programs.
Dozier is a Dana-Farber trustee and a former president and CEO of Eaton Vance Corporation, an investment management firm in Boston.
Rutgers University
Herbert Klein donated $5 million to establish the Jacqueline Krieger Klein Endowed Director’s Chair in Neurodegeneration Research, which is named for the donor’s wife, who died in 2017 after battling Alzheimer’s disease.
The gift also will create the Herbert and Jacqueline Krieger Klein Alzheimer’s and Dementia Clinical Research and Treatment Center at the Brain Health Institute, which is affiliated with Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences.
Klein is a lawyer who was a New Jersey assemblyman from 1972 to 1996 before being elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1993, where he served one term. He graduated from Rutgers in 1951.
Furman University
Dr. Matthew Wilson pledged $4 million to expand internships and other programs at the university’s Institute for the Advancement of Community Health, a health care center that offers internships to Furman students hoping to pursue health care careers.
Wilson is a pediatric ophthalmologist and a professor of ophthalmology at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, where he is also the vice chair for Academic Affairs. He also serves as the chief of ophthalmology at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, in Memphis. He graduated from Furman in 1986.
Cornell University
Jeffrey Dean and Heidi Hopper gave $3.3 million through their Hopper-Dean Foundation to create the Office of Diversity and Inclusion in the Faculty of Computing and Information Science.
The gift will also go toward new graduate student fellowships and expand existing programs that foster diversity in computing. Dean leads the artificial-intelligence division at the search giant Google.
Salisbury University
Bob Clarke and Glenda Chatham pledged $1.5 million to endow the university honors college, which will be named the Glenda Chatham and Robert G. Clarke Honors College.
Clarke served as president of Vermont Technical College for 15 years before being appointed chancellor of the Vermont State Colleges in 1999. He retired from that position in 2009.
Chatham worked as an English teacher and reading specialist at schools throughout the country after graduating from the university in 1972. The couple met at the university as freshman in 1968.
To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated throughout the week.
