A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:
University of California at Irvine
Vincent and Amanda Steckler gave $10.4 million through their Steckler Charitable Fund. Roughly $5 million of the gift will be used to create the Center for Responsible, Ethical and Accessible Technologies within the Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Sciences. The center’s work will focus on creating a computing industry that’s inclusive, accessible, safe, and equitable.
The other half of the gift — nearly $5.4 million — will primarily support graduate and undergraduate art-history students and provide experiential learning, research-related travel, mentoring, career-building opportunities, and fellowships.
Vincent Steckler is a retired CEO of Avast Antivirus Software, a Czech company that provides internet security software to businesses worldwide. He previously served in posts at two other large software companies, Symantec (now NortonLifeLock) and Logicon. He earned a B.S. in information and computer science and a B.S. in mathematics at UCI in 1980.
Cornell University College of Architecture, Art and Planning
Arthur Gensler donated $10 million to endow the college’s New York program, which will be named the Gensler Family AAP NYC Center.
Gensler co-founded the San Francisco architecture and design firm, Gensler, in 1965, with his late wife, Drucilla Gensler. The two grew the firm into one of the world’s largest global design firms, with offices worldwide. Arthur Gensler earned a bachelor’s degree in architecture from Cornell in 1958.
Drucilla Gensler, who died in 2017, worked at Cornell as an assistant to Urie Bronfenbrenner in the Department of Child Development and Family Relationships in the College of Human Ecology. Bronfenbrenner was a developmental psychologist who served on the federal panel that created the Head Start program in 1965.
Virginia Tech
Mehul and Hema Sanghani gave $10 million to back the newly renamed Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics, housed at the university’s Innovation Campus in Alexandria, Va. Most of the gift will endow recruiting, research, and fellowships at the center, and it will provide students from underrepresented backgrounds opportunities to pursue graduate degrees with a focus on artificial intelligence.
Mehul Sanghani founded and leads Octo Consulting Group, an emerging-technologies consulting and services firm in Reston, Va. He graduated from the university in 1998. Hema Sanghani is a manager at CGI Federal, which provides information-technology services to U.S. federal agencies. She graduated from the university in 1999.
Brain & Behavior Research Foundation
Stephen Lieber left $8 million to expand the foundation’s research into mental illness. He had deep ties to the organization. He was chairman of its Board of Trustees from 2008 until he died last year, and his late wife, Constance Lieber, served as the organization’s president from 1989 to 2007 when it was known as the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression.
Stephen Lieber was a New York financier who founded Evergreen Asset Management Corporation and Saxon Woods Advisors. He later joined his son Samuel’s investment firm, Alpine Asset Management, and the two created Alpine Woods Capital Investors.
The Liebers were noted mental-health advocates and longtime donors to the foundation and other mental-health nonprofits. Their daughter struggled with schizophrenia, and the couple subsequently made a lifetime commitment to advancing scientific research on the brain and mental health with the goal of reducing human suffering caused by severe psychiatric disorders.
Lehigh University
Kenneth Woodcock gave $5 million to endow a director’s fund for the Lehigh University Art Galleries, which helps to pay for the preservation of the university’s teaching collection.
Woodcock retired as senior vice president of the AES Corporation, an electric company, in Arlington, Va., in 2004. He graduated from Lehigh in 1965 with a degree in mechanical engineering and began his career with DuPont.
He served as a commissioned officer with the U.S. Public Health Service, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Energy Administration, and the Department of Energy. He was the environmental adviser to the energy czars during the Arab oil embargo of 1974.
New College of Florida
Robert and Pasqualina Peterson left $4 million to support students, endowment, and other programs. Bob Peterson was a Navy veteran of World War II and the Korean War; he spent 33 years with the United Parcel Service, where he was senior vice president and general counsel.
Pasqualina Peterson, who went by Lee, was an opera singer who performed with the Amato Opera and After Dinner Opera companies in New York. Robert died in 2012, and Lee died in 2017.
To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated regularly.
