Broadcom CEO Hock Tan and Wife, Lisa Yang, Give MIT $27 Million (Gifts Roundup)

A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Hock Tan and Lisa Yang gave $27 million to establish the K. Lisa Yang and Hock E. Tan Center for Molecular Therapeutics in Neuroscience at the university’s McGovern Institute. Research at the new center will focus on brain disorders and the development of new molecular tools that target dysfunctional genetic, molecular, and circuit pathways.

Tan is chief executive of Broadcom, a global infrastructure technology company. Originally from Penang, Malaysia, he graduated from MIT in 1975 and became a U.S. citizen in 1990.

Yang is a former investment banker who has devoted much of her time to advocacy for individuals with disabilities and autism-spectrum disorders. In recent years, the couple has given large donations to established centers for autism research at both MIT and Harvard, where Tan earned an MBA.

Greenwich Hospital

Lynne and Richard Pasculano donated $14 million to create the Pasculano Radiation Oncology Center at the hospital’s Smilow Cancer Care Center. Patients at the oncology center will have access to medical and surgical and radiation oncology, as well as a speciallydesigned garden for patients and their families.

Lynne Pasculano’s father, Harry Lebensfeld, started United Industrial Syndicate, in 1945, and Richard Pasculano served as executive vice president of the company. The company once owned and operated New England Confectionery, Hurd Millwork, and a collection of autocrat manufacturers.

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Steve and Jackie Bell pledged $11 million to pay for a new building for the Kenan-Flagler Business School’s undergraduate business program.

Steve Bell founded Bell Partners, an apartment investment and management company in Greensboro, N.C. He graduated from the university in 1967.

Asbury University

Walter and Rowena Phillips Shaw donated $10 million to build a new collaborative learning center for the university’s STEM programs. The Shaws designated $500,000 of the total to go toward the science and health department within Asbury’s School of Science, Health & Mathematics.

The Shaws founded Avanti Polar Lipids in 1967 and sold the lipid-product business to a British chemicals company, Croda, in July. The Shaws both graduated from Asbury in 1963.

Rice Family Foundation

Mike and Jane Rice and Dylan and Stacie Lissette together gave $10 million to their Hanover, Pa., foundation to increase their grant making to education and to health and well-being programs in Hanover and the broader central Pennsylvania area.

The donors are heirs of the family that founded what is today called Utz Brands, a potato-chip company. The company went public in August. Dylan Lissette is chief executive officer of Utz Brands, and Mike Rice is chairman. Stacie Lissette is the daughter of Mike and Jane Rice.

Baltimore Museum of Art

Nancy Dorman and Stanley Mazaroff donated $5 million to establish a center dedicated to the presentation, study, and preservation of the museum’s collection of prints, drawings, and photographs.

Nancy Dorman retired in 2004 as administrative general partner at New Enterprise Associates, a Chevy Chase, Md., venture-capital firm specializing in early-stage investments in communications, technology, medical, and health care-service companies. She currently serves as vice president and chairman of the museum’s governance committee.

Mazaroff is a retired lawyer and an art historian. He was a partner in the Washington law firm of Venable, Baetjer & Howard from 1971 to 2001, and then he enrolled in Johns Hopkins University’s art-history program. He is the author of two art-history books published by Johns Hopkins University Press: Henry Walters and Bernard Berenson, Collector and Connoisseur and A Paris Life, A Baltimore Treasure: The Remarkable Lives of George A. Lucas and His Art Collection.

Northern Westchester Hospital

Seema Boesky gave $5 million to back the hospital’s Seema Boesky Heart Center. Of the total, $3.6 million supports a cardiac catheterization lab that opened in September.

Boesky at 13 inherited a 48 percent interest in the Beverly Hills Hotel Corporation, which was part of the real-estate and hotel empire built by her father, Ben Silberstein. A long-time philanthropist, she financed this recent gift by selling two works from her collection of impressionist paintings: Renoir’s “The Cup of Tea” and Monet’s scene of the “River Seine in Argenteuil.”

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