A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:
University of Massachusetts
The billionaire Gerald Chan and his family gave $175 million through the family’s Morningside Foundation for the university’s medical school, which will be renamed the T.H. Chan School of Medicine. T.H. Chan is the donor’s later father. The gift is unrestricted and more than doubles the medical school’s endowment, according to the university’s news release about the gift.
University officials will also rename the Tan Chingfen Graduate School of Nursing after Chan’s mother, a retired nurse, and the Morningside Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences.
Chan, who became U.S. a citizen in the 1970s, co-founded Morningside Group, a private-equity and venture-capital firm, with his brother Ronald. Their late father founded Hang Lung Group, a Hong Kong real-estate firm, and was a long-time supporter of education.
Montana State University College of Nursing
Mark and Robyn Jones gave $101 million to support a variety of new efforts within the nursing school aimed at expanding health care services to people who live in rural and remote communities in Montana.
The money will be used to pay for new buildings at each of the MSU College of Nursing’s five campuses in Billings, Bozeman, Great Falls, Kalispell, and Missoula; establish five endowed faculty professorships; create and endow a scholarship fund; and establish a certified nurse midwifery program for doctoral-level nurses.
The couple founded Goosehead Insurance, a Westlake, Tex., insurance agency. Mark Jones serves as its chairman and CEO, and Robyn Jones is director and vice chairman of the company’s Board of Directors. The Joneses are not alumni but grew up visiting Montana with their families and now have a home there.
Boston College
Paul and Joyce Robsham left approximately $75 million to back a range of programs and to establish a scholarship for students studying the performing arts and graduate fellowships for those pursuing counseling or school psychology.
The Robshams also designated that their bequest be used to support programs in psychology and theater, two disciplines that were close to Paul Robsham’s heart, and pay for operations, repair, and upkeep of the Robsham Theater. The theater was named in honor of their son, E. Paul Robsham Jr., a member of the college’s class of 1986 who died in a car accident immediately following his freshman year.
Paul Robsham, who died in 2004, founded Robsham Industries, a real-estate development firm in Framingham, Mass. He enrolled in a graduate program in the early 1950s, but his education was cut short when he was called to serve in the Korean War. He returned to Boston College 30 years later and completes a master’s degree in education in 1983.
Joyce Robsham was a respected thoroughbred owner and breeder in the horse-racing world. She died in 2018.
Mount Sinai Health System
James and Merryl Tisch pledged $60 million to create and build the Mount Sinai Tisch Cancer Center so the health system can provide more cancer patients with personalized treatment and holistic care in the form of new therapies, diagnostics, and clinical trials.
James Tisch is president and CEO of the Loews Corporation, a New York company with holdings in the insurance, energy, hospitality, and packaging industries. He also serves as co-chairman of Mount Sinai’s Boards of Trustees. His paternal grandparents started Loews in 1946 when they bought a hotel in Lakewood, N.J., and his father (Laurence), and his uncle Robert expanded the business and its holdings.
Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College
Two donors gave a total of $50 million to establish an endowment for the center’s curatorial studies program. Marieluise Hessel gave $25 million through her Marieluise Hessel Foundation, and George Soros matched her gift with an additional $25 million.
Hessel is a New York art collector who, in the late 1980s, entrusted her foundation’s collection of contemporary art to Bard for study by its students and faculty. She helped start the center in the 1990s and has donated to its operations over the years. She also helped pay for the construction of the Hessel Museum of Art in 2006 and the expansion of the library, special collections, and archives in 2015.
Soros is a billionaire financier who founded Soros Fund Management, a New York firm that manages hedge funds. He also started and leads Open Society Foundations, a nonprofit that includes the Open Society Institute and other grant makers that are primarily supported by Soros’s wealth. Soros is a long-time donor to nonprofits and has appeared on the Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest donors eight times.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Paul and Cleo Schimmel pledged $50 million to support the university’s life sciences programs. The couple gave $25 million to establish the Schimmel Family Program for Life Sciences in the Department of Biology. They plan to give the remainder as a matching gift over the next five years as other supporters donate toward the program.
Paul Schimmel is a biophysical chemist who co-founded several biotechnology companies, including Alkermes, Alnylam, and Cubist Pharmaceuticals. He serves as the Ernst and Jean Hahn Professor at the Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology at the Scripps Research Institute, in La Jolla, Calif.
He and his family are long-time donors to MIT. He earned a Ph.D. at MIT in 1966 and was an MIT professor for 30 years before leaving in 1997 to join Scripps. He was later named MIT’s John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics Emeritus.
University of Massachusetts
Robert and Donna Manning gave $50 million for a variety of programs aimed at increasing student access and opportunities across all five of the university system’s campuses. The donors plan to announce more in the coming months about what programs the money will support.
They said in a news release that $15 million of the donation will be used to endow the UMass Boston nursing program, which will be renamed the Robert and Donna Manning College of Nursing and Health Sciences. The funds will support student diversity and equitable patient-care programs. Donna Manning retired as an oncology nurse from Boston Medical Center in 2018 after a 35-year career there.
“For the majority of my career in Boston, I was struck by the fact that most of the nurses looked like me while most of the patients didn’t,” Donna Manning said in a news release. “UMass Boston plays a critical role in supporting diversity in Boston, and I have seen first-hand how diversity in the nursing workforce can improve patient care and address health inequities.”
Robert Manning is chairman of MFS Investment Management, a Boston investment firm where he previously served as president and CEO. He announced he will retire in March after a 38-year career with the firm. He earned a degree in information systems management from UMass Lowell in 1984, and Donna Manning earned a nursing degree and an MBA from the university in 1985 and 1991, respectively.
Summa Health
Gary Williams and his wife, Pamela, gave $15 million to the Akron, Ohio, health care system where Gary Williams was a surgeon for more than four decades.
Before he retired, Dr. Williams served as chief of the Division of General Surgery and medical director of breast health services at Summa. He previously served as an associate professor of surgery at Northeast Ohio Medical University and an instructor of surgery at Ohio State University.
Pamela Williams is a retired teacher and taught at schools throughout Ohio and now volunteers with a number of nonprofit organizations, including the American Red Cross and United Way of Summit and Medina.
Francis Marion University
The financier Darla Moore pledged $5 million through her Darla Moore Foundation to support scholarships that will cover tuition, room and board, or school fees depending on the individual recipient’s needs each semester. To be eligible for the scholarships, students must be South Carolina residents in need of financial aid.
Moore is a former vice president of Rainwater, a Fort Worth, Tex., investment firm created by her late husband, Richard Rainwater. Moore previously served as vice chair and managing director of Chemical Bank, in New York, where she became well known in finance circles as an expert in corporate bankruptcy takeovers.
A prolific philanthropist, Moore grew up in Lake City, S.C., and appeared on the Philanthropy 50 in 2004 when she gave the University of South Carolina $45 million.
Millersville University
Samuel and Dena Lombardo donated $5 million to renovate an existing building that will be renamed Samuel N. and Dena M. Lombardo Hall and house the Lombardo College of Business.
Samuel Lombardo founded the Benecon Group, a Lititz, Pa., employee-benefits company, and ConnectCare3, a business that helps people find medical specialists, facilities, and treatment options within the health care system. The couple also own Lombardo’s, a Lancaster, Pa., restaurant that Samuel Lombardo’s family started in 1946.
Including their latest donation, the couple have given the university nearly $10 million over the last six years.
Sutter Health
Gay and Bill Krause gave $3 million to support improvements to online patient portals and to build a digital-health patient advisory group.
Gay Krause is executive director of the Krause Center for Innovation, a Los Altos, Calif., nonprofit organization that provides technology, leadership, and social-emotional learning programs and workshops for educators, school districts, and students. She is a former teacher.
Bill Krause founded LWK Ventures, a private advisory and investment firm in Los Altos, Calif. He previously served as president and CEO of the now-defunct computer company 3Com and as a general manager of the personal-computing division of Hewlett-Packard.
To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated regularly.
