The billionaire venture capitalist John Doerr and his wife, Ann, pledged $1.1 billion to launch the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, Stanford University officials announced Wednesday. The new school aims to tackle the world’s most urgent climate and sustainability challenges and will focus broadly on three main areas: climate, earth, and society. This is the largest publicly announced gift from an individual in 2022 so far.
A number or other major donors, including the Yahoo! co-founders Stanford alumni Jerry Yang and his wife, Akiko Yamazaki, and David Filo and his wife, Angela, also gave large gifts to the create the school. In all, Stanford has received commitments totaling nearly $1.7 billion from individuals donors and foundations for the new school.
The Doerrs are not Stanford alumni. They both earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Rice University and have given their alma mater at least $65 million since 2009 for a leadership institute and for engineering. Forbes estimates the couple’s current net worth at $11.2 billion.
John Doerr is an engineer by training who joined the Intel Corporation in 1974. He got into venture capitalism in 1980 when he was hired away by the Menlo Park, Calif., investment firm Kleiner Perkins. There he invested in technology startups that have since become some of the biggest companies in the world, including Compaq, Sun Microsystems, Amazon, and Google, among many others. He now serves as the firm’s chairman.
Doerr has played a prominent, if quiet, role in other realms. He was appointed by President Obama to the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board in 2009 to help advise the Obama administration on its efforts to overcome that era’s financial crisis. He has also written two books: Measure What Matters, about how today’s technology giants achieved business success and Speed & Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now.
The Doerr School will focus on eight areas of scholarship: climate change, Earth and planetary sciences, energy technology, sustainable cities, the natural environment, food and water security, human society and behavior, and human health and the environment. The new school will house a collection of academic departments and interdisciplinary institutes. It will also be home to a “sustainability accelerator,” which, among other efforts, will award grants to researchers and others to develop new technologies in environmental sustainability and related arenas, advance new policies, and support partnerships.
The academic departments at the Doerr School will start out with about 90 existing faculty members who will transition from the university’s School of Earth, Energy, and Environmental Sciences and other schools. The university plans to hire 60 more faculty over the next decade.
The undisclosed amount from Yang and Yamazaki will go toward making some of the Doerr School’s earliest new hires, which will be in the fields of energy, climate science, sustainable development, and environmental justice. The gift from the Filos is unrestricted; its size is also undisclosed.
The interdisciplinary institutes housed at the Doerr School will include the existing Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Precourt Institute for Energy. Those two entities will be joined by the new Institute for Sustainable Societies, which will study institutional and economic infrastructure and the political issues related to efforts to transition societies to more sustainable lifestyles.
To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated regularly.
