A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:
Northwestern University
Chicago billionaires Patrick and Shirley Ryan gave $480 million to back a variety of programs including education and research in the fields of applied microeconomics, business, digital medicine, neuroscience, and global health. A portion of the gift will also be used to support translational research efforts at the university’s Feinberg School of Medicine and to pay for renovations to a sports stadium and other building projects.
Patrick Ryan founded Pat Ryan and Associates, an insurance company in the Chicago area. He built the business up over time to form the Ryan Insurance Group, which eventually became the Aon Corporation in 1987. He retired in 2008 and two years later founded Ryan Specialty Group to provide products and services for insurance brokers, agents, and carriers.
The Ryans are Northwestern alumni. He earned a bachelor’s degree in business from the university in 1959 and served as chairman of the university’s Board of Trustees for 14 years. Shirley Ryan earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the university in 1961. She co-founded Pathways Pediatric Clinic and the Pathways.org Medical Round Table. The latter guides content for Pathways.org, a website and social-media platform that provides online tools to help parents track and improve their infants’ motor, sensory, and communication skills.
University of Wisconsin at Madison
John and Tashia Morgridge pledged $125 million to create the School of Computer, Data and Information Sciences and pay for the construction of a building to house the school. Of the total, the Morgridges have earmarked $50 million to match donations up to that amount from other donors.
The new school brings together the university’s computer sciences and statistics departments and its Information School all under one umbrella and in one place once the building is completed, which is scheduled for 2024.
John Morgridge is chairman emeritus of Cisco Systems, a company that designs networking and communications technology and services. He and Tashia Morgridge both graduated from the university in 1955 and are longtime donors to the institution. Including their latest donation, the couple have given the university at least $253.5 million over the years and have appeared on the Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest donors four times.
Harvard University
Former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker donated $100 million to help pay for a new building to house the Department of Economics at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The goal of the new building is to make it easier for researchers, scholars, and others to deepen research aimed at solving important challenges such as persistent economic inequality, public-health emergencies, inequities in the criminal-justice system, and the climate crisis.
Pritzker is chairman and founder of PSP Partners, an investment firm, and its affiliates, Pritzker Realty Group, PSP Capital, and PSP Growth. Pritzker also founded a number of other businesses in real estate, senior living, technology, and financial services. She served as U.S. secretary of commerce under President Barack Obama from 2013 to 2017, as well as on President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness and his Economic Recovery Advisory Board.
An heiress to the Hyatt Hotels fortune, Pritzker graduated from Harvard in 1981 with a degree in economics and worked her way up through her family’s business, eventually being appointed as one of three successors to an uncle, Jay Pritzker. Forbes estimates her net worth is currently $3.1 billion.
Columbia Business School
Entertainment mogul David Geffen pledged $75 million through the David Geffen Foundation to help pay for two new buildings that are scheduled to open next year on Columbia University’s Manhattanville campus. The campus is located in the West Harlem section of New York, nine blocks north of Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus. One of the new buildings will be named for Geffen.
Geffen founded Asylum Records, Geffen Records, and Geffen Pictures and co-founded DreamWorks Pictures with Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg. His net worth stands at about $10 billion, according to Forbes.
He has used some of that fortune to give extensively to the University of California at Los Angeles, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and several museums and other nonprofit institutions over the years. He has appeared in the Chronicle’s Philanthropy 50 list six times since 2002.
University of Virginia
Tessa Ader gave $50 million to build a performing arts center at the university that will host concerts, dance performances, plays, and interdisciplinary art forms. Ader is an enamelist and jewelry designer in New York and Key Biscayne, Fla.
Her late husband, Richard Ader, was a lawyer with the New York law firm Greenbaum, Wolff & Ernst and represented a number of well-known writers and artists, including Eudora Welty and Peter Matthiessen, and the assemblage artist Joseph Cornell. Richard Ader died in 2019.
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
Elon Musk pledged $50 million to support the expansion of the hospital’s research programs. The donation is part of a $200 million fundraising effort created earlier this year by the 37-year-old billionaire Jared Isaacman.
In February, Isaacman pledged $100 million to launch the fundraising effort in conjunction with his Inspiration4, the first all-civilian space flight, which completed a three-day mission on September 18. He asked others to give to exceed the $200 million goal, and Musk pledged his gift in celebration of the flight.
Musk founded Tesla Motors, a luxury electric automobile manufacturer, and SpaceX, a space transport company, which helped transport Isaacman and his crew to space.
University of California at Irvine
Robert Mah and Adeline Yen Mah gave $30 million through their Falling Leaves Foundation for a new medical research and education building that will be named for the foundation.
Robert Mah is a professor emeritus at UCLA, where he taught environmental microbiology. Adeline Yen Mah is a retired physician who practiced internal medicine and anesthesiology. During their careers, they had hoped to one day conduct medical research together. Instead, they started their foundation in 2007 to promote research and understanding of recent advances in medical science.
To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated regularly.
