Purdue U. Pharmacy College Gets $20 Million to Launch New Program

A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:

Purdue University College of Pharmacy

Marcel Sassola III pledged $20 million to establish the Marcel Sassola III Leaders and Entrepreneurs Advancing Pharmacy Academy, which will expand the college’s offerings and prepare pharmacy graduates for the shifting health care landscape. The academy will include a scholars program for undergraduate, Pharm.D., and Ph.D. students.

Sassola is the former CEO of Santa Barbara Specialty Pharmacy, and he previously served as president of On Call Pharmacist, a medical-staffing agency, and as CEO of Intravenous Therapy Services, a home infusion and specialty pharmacy. He worked with Roche Laboratories as a business development manager earlier in his career. Sassola earned a bachelor’s degree in pharmacy from the university in 1983.

University of New Hampshire

Dana Hamel gave $20 million to establish the Hamel Honors and Scholars College, which will create housing and other spaces for high-achieving students. The money will also go toward expanding academic and extracurricular opportunities for honors students and Hamel Scholars.

The Hamel family established the Hamel Scholars and Hamel Scholarships Program in 2007 to provide merit scholarships and special programs for exceptional students who have demonstrated academic excellence, leadership, and community involvement.

Dana Hamel co-founded Penn Corporation in 1964 and served as chairman of the Princeton, N. J., consumer products company until it was sold in 1987. He worked for Dow Chemical earlier in his career and served as an officer in the U.S. Army’s Quartermaster Corps prior to that. His daughter, Karen Simas, graduated from the university in 1988.

University of Virginia McIntire School of Commerce

John and Stephanie Connaughton gave $10 million to establish and endow the Connaughton Bicentennial Scholars Fund, need-based scholarships for undergraduate students. The money will also support the launch of Commerce for the Common Good, an effort to help students develop into well-rounded business leaders and prepare them to apply their business and entrepreneurial skills toward addressing critical societal issues.

John Connaughton, a 1987 McIntire graduate, is co-managing partner of Bain Capital, a private investment firm in Boston. Stephanie Connaughton is an angel investor and senior adviser to a variety of consumer start-ups. She is a former marketing executive at Gillette.

Wisconsin Veterans Museum Foundation

Jerome Frautschi pledged $10 million to help pay for the construction costs of a new building to house the 122-year-old Wisconsin Veterans Museum, which has outgrown its current facility.

Frautschi ran Webcrafters, a book-manufacturing company that he led with his brother, John, for 42 years. The brothers sold the business to the CJK Group, a printing company in Brainerd, Minn., in 2017.

Jerome Frautschi, who served in the U.S. Navy during the Korean War, is a longtime donor to nonprofits in Madison, Wis., and made a splash in the 1990s when he gave $205 million to build the Overture Center, a performing-arts center that replaced Madison’s outdated Civic Center. The center opened in 2004 and includes a concert hall, a refurbished historic theater, a small theater-in-the-round, and the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art.

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