A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:
Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Penn Medicine
Philadelphia Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie, his mother Nancy Lurie Marks, and their family gave $50 million, $25 million apiece through their respective foundations, the Lurie Family Foundation and Nancy Lurie Marks Family Foundation. The family gave the money to establish the Lurie Autism Institute, a research center that will connect scientists, clinicians, patients, and others to develop a better understanding of autism and new treatments to help people with autism spectrum disorders. Together, the children’s hospital and the University of Pennsylvania’s health system will operate the institute.
The Lurie family have been supporting efforts to help people with autism for decades. Nancy Lurie Marks, an heiress whose father founded the film company General Cinema Corporation, created her foundation in 1977 to help people with autism lead more fulfilling lives. She later established the Lurie Center for Autism at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Jeffrey Lurie is the billionaire chairman and CEO of the Philadelphia Eagles football team and the founder of the Eagles Autism Foundation. In 1985, he founded Chestnut Hill Productions, which produced feature films, documentaries, television shows, and commercials. He started his career as an adjunct assistant professor of social policy at Boston University but left academe to join his family’s General Cinema Corporation, where he worked as an executive and liaison with Hollywood film production companies.
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
Daniel and Jane Och gave $50 million to support the construction of the cancer center’s Kenneth C. Griffin Pavilion, a new facility that will be equipped with advanced technologies to help medical personnel better treat and care for cancer patients. The lobby of the new facility will be named for the Ochs.
Daniel Och co-founded the New York hedge fund Och-Ziff Capital Management, and leads Willoughby Capital Holdings, his family office. He has invested in several technology companies, including Coinbase, Instacart, Stripe, and Robinhood. He is a member of the Memorial Sloan Kettering’s Board of Trustees. Jane Och is an inventor of household products and a former Goldman Sachs investment banker.
University of Alabama
J. Frank Barefield Jr. pledged $35 million to endow the College of Arts and Sciences, which will be named for him. The money will help university officials support the college’s research efforts, retain faculty, assist students facing unexpected hardships, and back a range of other programs as needs within the arts and sciences college arise.
Barefield founded Abbey Residential, a property-management company in Birmingham, Ala. He was a vice president and senior investment officer at Southern National Bank earlier in his career, and a manager at Arthur Young & Company, a public accounting firm that became Ernst & Young in the late 1980s. He graduated from the university with a bachelor’s degree in finance in the late 1960s and served in the U.S. Air Force. He later earned an M.B.A. from the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Vassar College
Rowland Winton Evans pledged $28 million to back programs in the music department, bolster scholarships, and support campus maintenance. The money will be used to establish and endow the Rowland W. Evans ’75 Student Lesson Fund, which will subsidize the cost of individual instrument lessons for students; and the Rowland W. Evans ’75 Concert Fund, which will pay for the music department’s annual concert programming.
A portion of the pledge will be directed to the Vassar Fund, and the remainder will create several additional funds as part of the donor’s estate plans. Among them is one named for his late mother, Katherine Winton Evans, a 1946 Vassar alumna who was the managing editor of the Washington Journalism Review, a publication that covered the media world. It later became known as the American Journalism Review before ceasing publication in 2015. Rowland Winton Evans earned a degree in history of Vassar in 1975 and is a jazz musician.
University of Chicago
Thea Berggren gave $21 million to establish the Berggren Center for Quantum Biology and Medicine, which will house efforts to use quantum engineering to discover new insights into human biology and disease and develop new diagnostic tools and therapies. The Berggren Center will be housed within the university’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering.
Berggren is neither a University of Chicago alumna nor a quantum engineer. She is an art collector and former assistant professor of design at IIT College of Architecture, in Chicago, who earned a bachelor’s degree in Art History from Northwestern University and a M.F.A from Yale.
She told the Chronicle that her interest in quantum engineering was awakened last year when she traveled to Chile and was introduced to the field while visiting some of the largest telescopes in the Southern Hemisphere. Berggren subsequently sold her collection of Russian and German modernist art and used the proceeds to support the creation of the Berggren Center because she wants to transform medicine and patient care.
Mount Sinai Medical Center of South Florida
Semyon and Janna Friedman gave $15 million to launch the Semyon and Janna Friedman Advanced Research Institute, where clinicians and scientists will turn the information patients provide about their health-care experiences into data that will be used to inform researchers work on improving the quality of patient care.
Semyon Friedman founded several health-care companies, including MHC Healthcare, an Owing Mills, Md., chain of health-care clinics that treat people recovering from injuries. A former researcher and chemical engineering professor at Johns Hopkins University, Friedman emigrated to the United States from Ukraine when it was part of the USSR. He was a chemical engineering professor at Kiev Polytechnic University early in his career. Janna Friedman is a retired concert pianist and music teacher. She taught music at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore after coming to the U.S. from Ukraine many years ago.
University of Chicago Booth School of Business
Mary Tolan and Edward Grzelakowski pledged $12 million to establish the Tolan Center for Healthcare and advance the work of the business school’s integration of business and medical viewpoints to address the complex challenges facing the U.S. health-care system.
Tolan founded and leads Chicago Pacific Founders, a private equity firm that invests in health-care companies. She earned an M.B.A. from the Booth School in 1992 and went on to found R1 RCM, a Chicago company that provides billing, claims submission, payment collection, and accounts receivable management services to hospitals and health-care systems. Grzelakowski is an estate-planning attorney in Oak Brook, Ill.
To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated regularly.
