Billionaire Casino Magnate Steve Wynn and Wife Give $50 Million to Upstate N.Y. Hospital

A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:

Mohawk Valley Health System

Steve and Andrea Wynn gave $50 million through their Wynn Family Foundation to back a variety of health care services and enhancements at a new hospital in Utica, N.Y., which will be named for the donors.

Specifically, the money will be used to ensure every patient has a private room with a window and technologies to minimize sound, so patients can avoid disturbances; and separate patient, visitor, and service elevators will also ensure that patients have more privacy when they move about the hospital. The money will also pay for medical education and residency programs, and other efforts.

Steve Wynn, who grew up in Utica, is a real-estate developer who founded Wynn Resorts, which owns and operates luxury casinos and hotels in Las Vegas, Macau, and elsewhere. In the 1970s he founded Golden Nugget Companies, a hotel and casino developer that later became Mirage Resorts. Mirage was acquired by MGM Grand in 2000 for $4.4 billion.

Cornell University

David and Patricia Atkinson pledged $30 million to help pay for a new building that will provide space for faculty and staff of the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability and the new Master of Public Health program. It will also house laboratory and office space for faculty and staff of the new Center for Immunology, the new Friedman Center for Nutrition and Inflammation, the planned Center for Cancer Biology, and the Department of Computational Biology.

David Atkinson founded Atkinson & Company, his private investment office, Princeton, N.J. He retired in 1992 as general partner of Miller, Anderson & Sherrerd, a Philadelphia money-management firm. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the university in 1960.

DePaul University

George and Tanya Ruff committed $21 million to create the George L. and Tanya S. Ruff Endowed Scholarship and to support the university’s Institute of Global Homelessness, which will be renamed for the Ruffs. The scholarship fund is designed to benefit low-income students, students of color, first-generation college students, and current members or veterans of the U.S. armed services.

George Ruff is senior principal of Trinity Hotel Investors, a real-estate investment company in New York. He also founded Fall Creek Partners, an investment and advisory firm that provides real estate and hotel asset-management services. He previously served as partner and executive vice president of real estate for the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company. He graduated from DePaul’s Driehaus College of Business in 1974 and helped to establish the Real Estate Center in the business school.

New York Public Library

Richard and Lynne Pasculano gave $15 million to create the Pasculano Learning Center, a new adult learning center focused on technology training, career counseling, English-language classes, and other programs.

Lynne Pasculano is a private investor and an heiress to a manufacturing fortune created by her late father, Harry Lebensfeld, who founded United Industrial Syndicate in 1945. Richard Pasculano is a former executive vice president of the company, now known as UIS.

University of Missouri College of Veterinary Medicine

Glenn and Nancy Linnerson left $11 million to the veterinary college to establish the Dr. Glenn R. and Nancy A. Linnerson Imaging Center, which will further comparative and translational veterinary medicine research at the university.

Both Linnersons graduated from the university in 1954. Glenn Linnerson graduated from the College of Veterinary Medicine and practiced in Waukesha, Wis. Nancy Linnerson graduated with a degree in human environmental sciences.

They met at the university and remained connected to their alma mater throughout their lives. Dr. Linnerson passed away in 2014, and Nancy Linnerson died in 2018.

Northwestern University

Michael and Cari Sacks donated $5 million to back scholarships for former Chicago Public Schools students attending Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and its Pritzker School of Law.

Of the total, $2 million will support students at Kellogg and $2 million will support students at Northwestern Pritzker Law, creating an endowed Cari and Michael Sacks ’88 JD, MBA Family Scholarship at each school. The scholarships will fund tuition, books and supplies, student fees, and living expenses for at least one student at each school per year in perpetuity.

Michael Sacks is chairman and CEO of GCM Grosvenor, an alternative-asset-management firm in Chicago. He earned a joint law and M.B.A. degree from Northwestern in 1988. He has served on the university’s Board of Trustees since 2007.

Cari Sacks is a vice chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. In 2010, she was appointed to the President’s Advisory Committee on the Arts for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.

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