Gifts Roundup: Washington U. in St. Louis Gets $10 Million for Vision Care

A roundup of notable gifts compiled by The Chronicle:

Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis

Jane Hardesty Poole gave $10 million to endow vision research and provide vision care for patients, including those in financial need.

The money will also support efforts to recruit more physician-scientists to join the faculty of the school’s Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, which will be named for Ms. Poole’s late father, John Hardesty.

Ms. Poole graduated from Washington University in St. Louis in 1961. Her father was an ophthalmologist and an expert on glaucoma treatment who led the ophthalmology department at the Saint Louis University School of Medicine in the early 1950s.

Institute for Advanced Study

Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google parent company Alphabet, and his wife, Wendy, donated $2 million through their Schmidt Family Foundation to launch the Program in Theoretical Machine Learning in the Princeton, N.J., institute’s School of Mathematics.

The three-year program will begin this fall and will focus on developing the mathematical underpinnings of machine learning.

The program will also explore connections between machine learning and fields such as biology, computer vision, natural language processing, neuroscience, and social science.

National Park Foundation

Mary Jo Veverka and her family gave $1 million through their foundation for a new science-education program called Citizen Science 2.0.

The program will be geared toward teachers and students and take place inside America’s national parks and monuments. It will begin in the 2017-18 school year at four sites: Cabrillo National Monument, in California, Cuyahoga Valley National Park, in Ohio, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, in North Carolina and Tennessee, and Rock Creek Park, in Washington, D.C.

Ms. Veverka is a retired management consultant. She was a partner at Booz, Allen & Hamilton, and later at Accenture. She also served for more than four years as a senior adviser and deputy commissioner with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

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