Gifts Roundup: $25 Million for Northwestern Medicine; $17 Million to Ohio State

A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:

Northwestern Medicine

Neil Bluhm gave $25 million to the medical center’s Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute through the Bluhm Family Charitable Foundation.

The gift is for a center where artificial intelligence and machine learning will be used to advance the study and treatment of cardiovascular disease.

Bluhm is a real-estate developer who co-founded JMB Realty Corporation. He helped start the institute with a gift in 2005.

Ohio State University

Tim and Kathleen Keenan pledged $17 million through their family foundation to establish the Keenan Center for Entrepreneurship and to support entrepreneurship programs in the Max M. Fisher College of Business.

Tim Keenan is chief executive of Keenan and Associates, a consultancy that helps small and midsize businesses with strategic planning and development. He graduated from the university in 1980.

Washington University in St. Louis

Kim Kuehner committed $15 million for the School of Medicine to create the Kim D. Kuehner Program for Personalized Cardiovascular Medicine and to support research focused on advancing personalized approaches to fighting heart disease.

Kuehner retired in 2016 after a nearly 40-year career as a men’s clothing retailer. He graduated from the university with a master’s degree in business administration in 1977.

In 2017 he gave the university $2 million to build Anabeth and John Weil Hall in the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts. His parents, Howard and Hortense Kuehner, met while both were students at the university in the late 1930s and also provided the institution with a number of donations over the years.

Joffrey Ballet

Christopher and Cindy Galvin donated $5 million to endow the Mary B. Galvin artistic director position, which is named for Christopher Galvin’s mother, a longtime member of the ballet company’s Board of Directors.

The couple donated the gift through their family’s Paul Galvin Memorial Foundation Trust, named for Christopher Galvin’s grandfather, who founded the telecommunications corporation Motorola.

Mary Galvin is the widow of Paul Galvin’s son, Robert. He died in 2011. Christopher Galvin, their son, led Motorola from 1997 to 2003.

Washington and Lee University

Hal and Barbra Higginbotham pledged $2.5 million to endow the university’s head librarian’s post and back needs of the campus’s James Graham Leyburn Library.

Barbra Higginbotham formerly served as chief librarian and head of academic information technology at Brooklyn College. She is the author of Our Past Preserved: A History of American Library Preservation, 1876-1910, and Access Versus Assets: A Comprehensive Resource Sharing Manual for Academic Librarians.

Hal Higginbotham served as director of financial aid at New York University before joining the staff of the College Board, an education nonprofit in New York. He retired in 2013 as senior vice president in the Office of the President

The Higginbothams graduated from Washington and Lee in 1968.

To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated throughout the week.