Cedars-Sinai Medical Center Lands $100 Million From Vera Guerin

A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:

Cedars-Sinai Medical Center

Vera Guerin gave $100 million through her Shapell Guerin Family Foundation to establish a children’s health care center, which will be named for the Guerin family.

Vera Guerin is a theater producer and heiress to a construction fortune. She owns a significant stake in Shapell Industries, a Beverly Hills, Calif., company that builds homes and commercial buildings. Her father, Nathan Shapell, co-founded the company with his brother David and brother-in-law Max Webb in 1955.

Johns Hopkins University

William (Bill) Miller III pledged $50 million to the Department of Physics and Astronomy, which will be named for him. The gift will endow professorships, postdoctoral fellowships, and graduate research.

Miller founded the investment bank Miller Value Partners and is a former portfolio manager at Legg Mason Capital Management Value Trust, an investment and assets-management firm in Baltimore that was acquired by Franklin Templeton Investments in 2020.

Prior to his finance career, he served in Vietnam as a military intelligence officer in the U.S. Army and then pursued graduate studies in philosophy at Johns Hopkins. In 2018, he donated $75 million gift to the university’s Department of Philosophy.

Juilliard School

Michael Moritz and Harriet Heyman gave $50 million through their Crankstart Foundation. The donation will endow the school’s Music Advancement Program and bolster the program’s efforts to increase access to arts education for people who have been historically underserved and underrepresented in classical music.

Moritz is a partner at Sequoia Capital, a venture-capital firm. Heyman is a sculptor and former journalist who wrote for the New York Times and other publications.

Mercy Ships

Harry and Linda Fath gave $50 million to be used as a matching challenge gift to raise money to support the charity’s work delivering free health care and other services to people in need in Africa well into the future. The Faths gave the charity $50 million in 2018 to help pay for the construction and delivery of the Global Mercy, the world’s largest nongovernmental hospital ship.

Harry Fath is a lawyer and the owner of Fath Properties, which manages apartment buildings in Indiana, Kansas, Ohio, and Texas. He is also a minority owner of the Cincinnati Reds baseball team.

Siena College

Das and Nipa Nobel gave $35 million through their Nobel Foundation to pay for an expansion of the college’s science center and a renovation of its Roger Bacon Hall.

The Nobels founded MTX Group, a technology consulting firm in Frisco, Tex. Das Nobel serves as CEO, and Nipa Nobel serves as the company’s chief brand and culture officer. Das Nobel graduated from Siena in 2006, and Nipa Nobel serves on the college’s Board of Trustees.

Indiana University School of Medicine

William and Mary Stone gave $34.2 million to establish the Mary O’Daniel Stone and Bill Stone Center for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. The center will focus on improving the standard of care for people with bipolar disorder, and increase access to psychiatric care for children and adolescent youths in southwestern Indiana.

William Stone founded SS&C Technologies in 1986. The Windsor, Conn., company provides services and software for the financial and health care industries and opened an Evansville, Ind., office in 2011. Mary Stone is a 1978 graduate of the College of Arts and Sciences at IU Bloomington.

University of Michigan

Ronald Weiser pledged $30 million to establish the Ronald Weiser Center for Prostate Cancer at Michigan Medicine, the university’s medical center.

Weiser founded McKinley Associates, a real-estate investment firm in Ann Arbor, Mich. He is a former U.S. Ambassador to Slovakia from 2001 to 2004. Weiser graduated from the university in 1966 and has been a member of the university’s Board of Regents since 2016.

He said in a news release that he was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2019, and the experience caused him to reflect on how he could help combat the disease. He is a longtime donor to the university and to other nonprofits, and he has appeared on the Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 list of the most-generous donors twice in recent years.

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