A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:
University of South Carolina
Alumnus Peter McCausland and his wife, Bonnie, pledged $75 million through their McCausland Foundation to support career-development programs for students in the liberal arts and sciences, expand research and teaching in neuroscience and brain health, and support faculty within the newly named McCausland College of Arts and Sciences.
The McCauslands’ donation will provide paid internship stipends for up to 150 students annually. The money will also be used to support student and faculty neuroscience research efforts, and to augment the McCausland Faculty Fellowship. The couple established the fellowship in 2014 to support early and mid-career tenure-track faculty who have excelled in both teaching and research.
Peter McCausland founded Airgas Inc., a Radnor Township, Pa., company that supplies industrial, medical and specialty gases, welding equipment, and safety products to a range of companies. He founded the business in 1982 and took it public in 1986. Airgas was acquired by the French company Air Liquide for $13.4 billion in 2016. Peter McCausland earned a bachelor’s degree in history from the university in 1971. Bonnie McCausland was an occupational therapist early in her career before founding businesses in needlepoint and interior design.
College of William & Mary
Rob Estes and Jean Berger Estes and their family gave $15 million to launch the Estes Center for Excellence in Accounting, within the Raymond A. Mason School of Business. The new center will offer students weekend seminars, career networking opportunities, and experiential learning through case competitions and specialty courses.
Rob Estes is CEO and chairman of his family’s freight carrier company, Estes Express Lines. The Richmond, Va., company was started by his grandfather, W.W. Estes, in 1931 as a small trucking business hauling livestock for local farmers. Today it is considered the largest privately owned freight carrier in North America. Estes said in a news release that he is hoping the new center will eventually change the accounting field to one where accountants are thought of less as number-crunchers and more as C-suite decision makers.
The couple are William & Mary alumni. Rob Estes graduated from the university in 1974 and serves on the school’s Board of Visitors. Jean Berger Estes graduated in 1975 and is a former trustee of the William & Mary Foundation. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of the college’s alumni association.
University of Connecticut
Denis and Britta Nayden pledged $15 million to establish the Nayden Center for Academic Excellence and back the expansion and renovation of a recreation center and the Hugh S. Greer Field House into what will become the Bailey Student-Athlete Success Center. The centers will be home to a range of programs aimed at the well-being of student athletes and at helping them excel academically.
The Naydens met at a dance when they were students at the university. He earned a bachelor’s degree and an M.B.A there in 1976 and 1977, respectively; and she earned a degree in physical therapy in 1976.
Denis Nayden is chairman of James Alpha Management, an asset management and financial services company in Stamford, Conn. He also serves as chairman of Harkness Capital Partners, a private-equity fund, and as vice chairman and lead independent director at Avolon Holdings Limited, an international aircraft leasing company. He was a managing partner at the private equity fund Oak Hill Capital Partners, and led GE Capital earlier in his career.
Northwestern University
Florida businesswoman Kimberly Querrey gave $10 million to establish the Querrey Simpson Institute for Regenerative Engineering, where researchers and others will work on developing medical tools that help the human body to heal through the regeneration or reconstruction of tissues and organs. The goal of the Institute’s work is to speed up patients’ recovery from injuries and surgeries, and to develop bioengineered tissues and organs to reduce reliance on donor transplants.
Querrey co-founded the Naples, Fla., investment advisory firm SQ Advisors with her late husband, Louis Simpson. She served as the firm’s president and chief compliance officer and later founded and led Querrey Enterprises, a business operations, environment, and health and safety consulting firm.
Simpson was an investment executive with Geico, a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway. He graduated from Northwestern in 1958 and later served as a senior fellow, an adjunct professor of finance, and a member of the Kellogg School’s Asset Management Practicum advisory council. He died in 2022 at 85.
Along with Simpson, Querrey has given extensively to Northwestern to support biomedical research, scholarships, professorships, building projects, and other programs. She gave $121 million to the university in 2022 to expand biomedical-research programs and to support the business school. She and Simpson appeared on the Chronicle’s 2015 Philanthropy 50 report of the biggest donors for gifts to Northwestern and Princeton University.
The Queen’s Health Systems
Candice Uytengsu gave $7.5 million to back the expansion of the Queen’s Medical Center’s emergency department. The money will pay for the construction of 41 additional treatment rooms and new diagnostic facilities. The department will be renamed the Uytengsu Family Emergency Department.
Uytengsu is an investor in Atherton, Calif. Her late father, Wilfred Uytengsu Sr., founded the Alaska Milk Corporation and General Milling Corporation. The family once owned the Sunshine Biscuit Company, maker of Cheez-It crackers and other snack foods, until 1996, when it was acquired by the Keebler Company.
The Honolulu medical center is named for its co-founder, Emma Kalanikaumakaʻamano Kaleleonālani Naʻea Rooke, who served as queen of Hawaii as the wife of King Kamehameha IV from 1856 until the king’s death in 1863.
Creighton University School of Law
Donna Gilbert and her children, Dave and Stacey Gilbert, gave $2 million to establish the Samuel & Ida Kaiman Center for International Criminal Justice & Holocaust Studies, and to endow the law school’s Howard A. Kaiman, JD'67, Nuremberg to the Hague Program. Samuel and Ida Kaiman are Donna Gilbert’s late parents, and Howard Kaiman is her late brother, an attorney and Creighton alumnus.
Known as N2H, the summer program takes between 25 and 30 Creighton students to Germany, the Netherlands, and Poland to learn firsthand about the Holocaust. The program immerses the students in a series of historical and legal experiences, combining classroom instruction with trips to actual crime scenes, places of conspiracy, and trials for crimes against humanity being litigated today. Among the places they visit is the Hague, Netherlands, the city that hosted the Nazi war crimes trials after World War II and is considered the birthplace of modern international criminal law.
The Kaiman Center will be home to a wide range of programs, including new classes, and seminars with prominent attorneys from around the world who will speak about genocide litigation, explore cases currently being tried in the International Criminal Court of Justice, examine the genocide of the Rohingya in Burma, the Kurds in Iraq and others throughout the world.
Kaiman was accepted into Creighton’s law school at a time when Jewish students were being turned away from many U.S. universities and went on to become a prominent Omaha attorney. He joined organizations promoting Jewish culture and education and was a local activist who established a “working man’s court” for those seeking small claims in Nebraska. He also helped push for lower bus fares and fought against utilities price hikes that affected senior citizens. Before he died in 2023 at 93, Howard Kaiman asked Gilbert and her children to donate his estate to causes the Kaiman family cared about.
“My parents and brother lived their lives doing good deeds and good work, both for our family and for our communities,” said Donna Gilbert in a news release. “This program and center will continue my family’s work. They will keep the memory of the Holocaust alive for a new generation [and[ challenge them never to forget that this happened and that it can happen again, very easily, if we don’t remember.”
To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated regularly.
