A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:
Brown University
Robert and Nancy Carney gave $100 million to endow the Brown Institute for Brain Science to speed up the pace of research into brain and nerve disorders and help find cures for diseases such as ALS and Alzheimer’s. The institute will be named for the donors.
Robert Carney founded several companies including Vacation Publications, which publishes travel magazines; Jet Capital Corporation, a financial adviser; and Texas Air Corporation, which owned Continental Airlines and other airlines.
He graduated from Brown in 1961 and is a long-serving university trustee. Nancy Doerr Carney is a former television news producer.
Art Institute of Chicago
The museum received two large gifts: Janet and Craig Duchossois donated $50 million, and Robert Levy and Diane von Schlegell Levy gave $20 million. The Duchossois gift is unrestricted, and the Levy gift will be used for acquisitions of artworks and museum operations.
Craig Duchossois is chief executive of the Duchossois Group, a holding company with interests in consumer products, technology, and service businesses. Janet Duchossois serves on the institute’s Board of Trustees.
Robert Levy is chairman of the museum’s Board of Trustees and is a retired executive at the investment firm, Harris Associates. Diane von Schlegell Levy serves on the institute’s committees on Textiles, European Decorative Arts, and Ancient and Byzantine Arts.
Birthright Israel Foundation
Sheldon and Miriam Adelson donated $70 million to help pay for the nonprofit’s efforts to provide free trips to Israel for young Jewish adults.
Mr. Adelson is the developer of the Venetian Las Vegas, a hotel and casino, and chairman of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, a developer of resorts.
Miriam Adelson is a physician who specializes in treating drug abuse and addiction. The couple have given the nonprofit a total of $410 million.
Mary Baldwin University
Bertie Murphy Deming Smith pledged $25 million for endowment. Smith attended Mary Baldwin for two years before earning a bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas.
She is the widow of John Winton Deming, a physician and an associate professor of clinical medicine at Tulane University who died in 1996. Her second husband, John Dorsey Smith Jr., a newspaper publisher in Louisiana, died in 2008.
She served on the Mary Baldwin Board of Trustees for 30 years until 1996 and is now trustee emerita.
Indiana University of Pennsylvania
John and Char Kopchick pledged $23 million toward science and mathematics programs.
John Kopchick is a professor of molecular biology at Ohio University. He is a co-inventor of the drug Somavert, which combats acromegaly, a growth-hormone disorder. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Indiana University of Pennsylvania in 1972 and 1975.
Char Kopchick is Ohio University’s assistant dean of students. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Indiana University of Pennsylvania in 1973.
University of Maryland
Barry and Mary Gossett committed $21.5 million to create the Gossett Center for Academic and Personal Excellence in the Department of Intercollegiate Athletics and help student athletes transition to careers.
The money will back paid internships and stipends, workshops on topics such as job interviews and financial literacy, and efforts to connect alumni student-athletes with current ones as mentors.
Barry Gossett is a retired head of Acton Mobile Industries, a construction company. He studied engineering at the university for two years in the late 1950s but had to leave to support his mother and two younger brothers after his father died.
KEXP
An anonymous donor, identified only as Suzanne, pledged an approximately $10 million estate gift to the nonprofit public radio station in Seattle.
The money will endow a range of music and media education programs, back the radio station’s digital-content efforts, and support experimentation radio and online music programming.
The donation prompted the organization to create a new planned-giving program called the Reverb Society.
Arizona Opera
Ron and Kay McDougall gave $2 million for the opera’s new RED Series, which will be named for them.
The money will back two new productions during the opera company’s 2018 fall season: “Maria de Buenos Aires,” by Astor Piazzolla and Horacio Ferrer, and “Charlie Parker’s Yardbird,” by Daniel Schnyder and Bridgette Wimberly.
Ron McDougall formerly led Brinker International, a restaurant company that owns Chili’s and Maggiano’s Little Italy restaurant chains. Kay McDougall serves on the Arizona Opera Board of Directors.
To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated throughout the week.
