Druckenmillers Give $100 Million to Memorial Sloan Kettering

A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

Fiona and Stanley Druckenmiller gave $100 million through their Fiona and Stanley Druckenmiller Foundation to establish the Fiona and Stanley Druckenmiller Presidential Innovation Fund. The new fund will back programs that aim to develop more effective ways to treat and cure cancer.

Stanley Druckenmiller founded the investment firm Duquesne Capital Management and served as an investment-portfolio manager at the Dreyfus Corporation in New York. He led the financier George Soros’s Quantum Fund from 1988 to 2000. He closed Duquesne Capital Management in 2010. Fiona Druckenmiller is a former investment-portfolio manager at the Dreyfus Corporation who started and leads a fine-jewelry boutique in New York.

The couple give extensively but usually quietly and focus their philanthropy on education, medical research, and efforts to fight poverty. They appeared on the Chronicle’s 2009 Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest donors.

Utah State University

The Bastian family gave nearly $41.3 million to create the Bastian Agricultural Center, which will educate the public about contemporary agriculture. The goal is to reach adults and youths in 4-H programs, local government officials, corporate leaders, and others through programs in science, engineering, and technology.

The family has farmed in the Salt Lake Valley for more than 75 years. The Bastians previously had given the university $6 million toward the initial creation of the center.

University of Pennsylvania

Scott and Elena Shleifer gave $18 million to expand Penn First Plus, a program the university started in 2018 that provides financial and other types of support to students who are in the first generation of their family to attend college or from households of modest or limited income.

Scott Shleifer is a 1999 graduate of the university’s Wharton School. He is a partner at the investment firm Tiger Global Management where he co-founded the firm’s venture-capital business. The space that houses the program will be renamed the Shleifer Family Penn First Plus Center.

Music School of Delaware

Mary Ellen Northrop left $10 million for endowment and to establish the Mary Ellen Northrop Endowed Fund for Music Education, which will provide scholarships to students in preschool through 12th grade. The 97-year-old school offers classes to people of all ages and musical abilities.

Northrop worked as an income-tax analyst for DuPont and a budget analyst for General Electric. She was also a savvy private investor and an amateur clarinetist and music lover. She died in June at 78 and left smaller bequests to several other nonprofits, including $4 million to the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned an MBA in 1976; $3 million to the Scoliosis Research Society; $3 million to Our Daily Bread Ministries; $400,000 to Gideon International; and other gifts to the Salvation Army.

Arkansas Tech University Foundation

Stan and Patrice Miller gave a $5.3 million gift to establish the Miller Center for Global Engagement, support student scholarships for study-abroad programs, upgrade the university’s language computer labs, back international faculty-exchange programs, and launch an international speakers series.

Stan Miller graduated from Arkansas Tech in 1971 with a bachelor’s degree in political science before going to law school. He founded Stan Miller Law, a Little Rock, Ark., law firm.

University of California at Irvine

Sue Gross gave $3 million through her Sue J. Gross Foundation to expand training and education programs in the Sue & Bill Gross School of Nursing. Of the total, Gross directed $2 million to pay for a simulation center for team-based exercises and $1 million to establish the Founding Dean Adey Nyamathi Endowment, which will provide nursing Ph.D. scholarships.

Gross is a Southern California philanthropist who helped establish the nursing school with a $40 million gift that she and her former husband, William Gross, gave in 2016 through their then-named William and Sue Gross Family Foundation. She has given extensively to nursing, health care, and other causes.

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