A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle
Monmouth Medical Center
Anne and Sheldon Vogel gave $50 million to back the development of the center’s new 100,000- square-foot medical campus in Tinton Falls, N.J., which will be named for the Vogels.
Sheldon Vogel served as controller and chief financial officer at Atlantic Records. The couple have a long association with the medical center as donors; both were born there when it was known as Monmouth Memorial Hospital.
Southern Methodist University Cox School of Business
Gina and Tucker Bridwell pledged $15 million, half of which will be used to establish the Bridwell Institute for Economic Freedom, a new research institute that will examine and promote free enterprise. The remaining half of the donation will back other programs to be determined later.
Tucker Bridwell is president of the Mansefeldt Investment Corporation, an investment-management firm in Abilene, Tex. He also manages MDJ Minerals, an oil and gas mineral business.
He earned a bachelor’s degree and an MBA from the Cox School in 1973 and 1974, respectively. He currently serves on the university’s Board of Trustees.
University Hospitals Seidman Cancer Center
Kimberly and Joseph Wesley donated $10 million to create the Wesley Center for Immunotherapy. Joseph Wesley founded Tradesmen International, a construction staffing company, in 1992. He previously worked as a commercial electrical contractor.
He said in a news release that his positive experiences as a cancer patient at the center inspired him and his wife to donate.
“Kim and I chose to make this gift because we’re firm believers in the power of immunotherapy and want others to benefit from this leading-edge innovation,” he said.
University of California at Los Angeles
Bernice Wenzel and Wendell “Jeff” Jeffrey left more than $8.7 million for a variety of programs. The late couple were professors who spent a significant portion of their careers at the university. They directed about $4.5 million of the total to support four faculty chairs, scholarships and fellowships, and programs in the psychology department, and roughly $4 million for scholarships in the Herb Alpert School of Music.
They earmarked the remainder of their bequest for the Hammer Museum at UCLA, the UCLA Emeriti/Retirees Relations Center, the UCLA Library, and the annual Henry J. Bruman Chamber Music Festival.
Bernice Wenzel was a professor in the department of physiology and the department of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences. She served as an assistant dean for educational research at the medical school from 1974 to 1989.
Known for her groundbreaking discovery that pigeons smell and use sight and sound to guide themselves, she was also part of the first generation of female professors at UCLA. She died in 2018.
Jeffrey was a developmental psychologist in the psychology department, studying the learning processes of young children and mentoring graduate students by supervising research, facilitating collaboration, and introducing them to well-known experts. He died in 2015.
Pennsylvania State University
Donna and Steven Overly pledged $7.3 million to launch the Overly Scholars Program at Penn State Harrisburg and in the Schreyer Honors College. The program will provide full-tuition scholarships to high-achieving students.
Steven Overly earned a master’s degree in public administration from Penn State Harrisburg and served in leadership roles at a number of companies, including General Electric, Lockheed Martin, American Casino & Entertainment Properties, and Textron. Donna Overly is a painter and a published novelist. She was a critical-care nurse for 20 years earlier in her career.
Liberty Science Center
Betty Wold Johnson bequeathed $5 million to support renovations to the center’s 163-foot-tall pyramidal tower. When completed in 2022, the renovated structure will serve as a learning and event space in the New Jersey-New York-Connecticut region and provide visitors with 360-degree views of Jersey City, Lower Manhattan, Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty, and the Verrazano Bridge.
Wold Johnson, who died in May at 99, was the matriarch of the family, whose ancestors founded the Johnson & Johnson medical-device and health care-products corporation. Her first husband was Robert Wood Johnson III, president of Johnson & Johnson and grandson of the multinational corporation’s founder.
During World War II, Wold Johnson served in the U.S. Navy as a WAVE, a naval-reserve squad for women, and was stationed in Corpus Christi, Tex. She also helped train fighter pilots in flight simulators at Rhode Island’s Naval Air Station. A lover of astronomy, she gave the science center an earlier $5 million in 2017 for interactive exhibits.
Villanova University
Robin and Court Lorenzini gave $5 million through their Lorenzini Family Foundation to establish the Intergroup Dialogue Center, which will be dedicated to help students and faculty learn how to build better communication and understanding between people of diverse backgrounds and viewpoints. The new center will be housed within Villanova’s Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Court Lorenzini co-founded Rainier Renewable Energy, a sustainable-energy company; and DocuSign, a Web-based electronic-signature company.
To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated throughout the week.
