A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:
NYU Langone Health
Julia Koch gave $75 million through her Julia Koch Family Foundation to build a new outpatient medical center in West Palm Beach, Fla., that is being named for the donor. The ambulatory center is scheduled to open in 2026.
Koch is the widow of David Koch, a billionaire energy and manufacturing tycoon who helped lead his family’s Koch Industries for decades. With an estimated net worth of $60 billion, Julia Koch is now one of the wealthiest women in the world. She established her foundation last year and has focused so far on primarily supporting the arts, education, and health care.
North Dakota State University Foundation
Richard Offerdahl gave $25 million to help construct the Center for Engineering and Computational Sciences, a complex that will house new buildings and some existing ones. The new hub will be named the Richard Offerdahl ’65 Engineering Complex.
Offerdahl is a real estate investor who started his career in the technology industry and co-founded Zycad Corporation in 1981. The company developed and marketed a type of technology that reduces the run time of computational models. He later bought and helped lead Digi International, which made computer serial cards and ports. He earned an engineering degree from the university in 1965.
Allegheny College
Patricia Bush Tippie pledged $16 million to support an array of programs. She is directing $10 million of the total to renovate Brooks Hall, a historic student dormitory, and $5 million to match donations from other donors for other campus programs. The remaining $1 million will establish and endow a student investment fund in the Bruce R. Thompson Center for Business and Economics to give students hands-on experience investing in the stock market. It will be run by students under the guidance of faculty and an advisory board.
Tippie leads Tippie Services, a management services company in Austin, Texas. She graduated from the college in 1956. Her late husband, Henry Tippie, was well-known in Wall Street circles for his role in helping the Rollins company acquire the pest-control business, Orkin, in 1964 using a leveraged buyout. Leveraged buyouts were so rare at that time that the deal became a Harvard Business School case study.
Beebe Medical Foundation
Rocco and Mary Abessinio gave $6 million through their Rocco A. and Mary Abessinio Foundation to support what will be renamed the Abessinio Health Campus, which is home to a special surgery hospital, the Tunnell Cancer Center, Beebe Outpatient Surgery Center, and other medical centers.
Rocco Abessinio began his career in banking and went on to found Applied Card Systems and Applied Bank, in Wilmington, Del. He also founded Roch Capital, which owns hotels and commercial office buildings throughout the U.S.
Quinnipiac University
Lynne Pantalena gave $3 million to endow a faculty chair in the School of Law. The donor serves on the university’s Board of Trustees who gave in previous years to support the law library and to back scholarships.
Pantalena earned a degree from the law school in 1985 and worked in private practice for several years before joining Connecticut Bank and Trust, which later became part of Bank of America. She served as a wealth strategy expert at Bank of America Private Bank before she retired.
To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated regularly.
