Gifts Roundup: N.Y.’s Northwell Health Gets $40 Million From Longtime Donor
By Maria Di Mento
Senior Editor
July 10, 2017 | Read Time: 2 minutes
A roundup of notable gifts compiled by The Chronicle:
Northwell Health
Sandra Atlas Bass gave $40 million to the Long Island health-care organization for a variety of programs. Of the total, $25 million is earmarked for North Shore University Hospital to support a cardiac-care facility that will be named for her.
Ms. Bass is the daughter of Sol Atlas, a New York real-estate tycoon who died in 1973. She is a longtime trustee of Northwell Health and, including this donation, has given the organization $93 million over more than 25 years.
Bucknell University
Kenneth and Elaine Langone pledged $30 million to back financial aid.
Mr. Langone is a Home Depot co-founder. He graduated from Bucknell in 1957, and he and his wife have given the institution multiple gifts over the years, including a then-anonymous $10 million gift in 2013 that was recently revealed to have come from the couple.
Auburn University
Walter and Virginia Woltosz committed $5 million to help build a new performing-arts center that will present touring Broadway productions, operas, dance, symphonic concerts, and student and faculty music and theater performances.
The Woltoszes founded the companies Simulations Plus, which develops simulation software for the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, and Words+, which creates communication tools for people with disabilities.
Mr. Woltosz earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in aerospace engineering from Auburn in 1969 and 1977, respectively.
Portland State University
Fariborz Maseeh donated $5 million through his Massiah Foundation to renovate the campus’s Neuberger Hall and help promote the university’s computational and biosciences efforts in engineering and mathematics.
Mr. Maseeh is an expert in microtechnology and the founder of IntelliSense, a maker of microelectric-mechanical systems. He sold the company to Corning for about $500 million in 2000.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in structural engineering and a master’s in mathematics from Portland State, and in 2014 he gave $8 million to what became the university’s Fariborz Maseeh College of Engineering & Computer Science.
To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated throughout the week.
