Gifts Roundup: $12 Million Donation Boosts Denver Art Museum Renovation

Denver Art Museum

John and Anna Sie pledged $12 million for a renovation project of the museum’s North Building, which houses most of its permanent collection. The donation will support the construction of a new Welcome Center, which will be named for the couple.

Mr. Sie, a native of China who immigrated to the United States with his family at age 14, is a former executive with media company Tele-Communications, the forerunner of Liberty Media, and the founder of Liberty’s programming spinoff Starz. He retired as Starz’s CEO in 2005. He has been a member of the museum’s Board of Trustees for 15 years.

University of Houston-Downtown

Marilyn Davies made a $10 million donation to the university’s College of Business, which will be renamed for her.

Ms. Davies is the chief executive of Bailey Banks Seismic, a proprietary seismic-data company. The Marilyn Davies College of Business is the first named college on the university’s campus and the first college of business in Texas to be named for a woman.

University of California at Los Angeles

Businessman Meyer Luskin gave $5 million to establish the Luskin Center for History and Policy. The research center will foster projects that use history to help solve present-day problems and provide courses to train students to apply historical analysis to current issues.

Mr. Luskin is the chairman of Scope Industries, which produces animal feed from recycled bakery waste. He and his wife, Renee, both got bachelor’s degrees at UCLA, his in economics in 1949 and hers in sociology in 1953. They gave the university $100 million in 2011 to support academic programs and capital improvements.

University of Maryland at College Park

Tech-consulting executive Kimmy Duong pledged $2 million through her personal foundation to support endowed and current-use scholarships for undergraduates in the engineering and business schools.

The scholarships will go to freshmen or community-college transfer students and are renewable for up to four years.

Ms. Duong, a Vietnamese immigrant, is the chief financial officer of Pragmatics, an IT consulting firm in Reston, Va., that was founded by her husband, Long Nguyen. Several of the couple’s nieces and nephews are College Park alumni.

Delaware Valley University

Kate Littlefield, a director at lawn-and-garden company Scotts Miracle-Gro, gave $1.5 million to create the institution’s first endowed professorship.

The endowed professor will lead a new program in university’s plant-science department dedicated to developing ways for people to grow food in unconventional places using limited resources. Ms. Littlefield is a university trustee.

University of Arizona Health Sciences

Iris Cantor made a $1 million commitment to establish the Iris Cantor Research and Innovation Fund at the university’s Center for Integrative Medicine.

The money will be used to develop new curricula, train integrative-health professionals, and expand the center’s residency program to include a women’s health specialty.

Ms. Cantor is president of the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Foundation and a former vice chair of Cantor Fitzgerald, the securities firm founded by her late husband.