Hedge-Fund Couple Give $5 Million for Lyme Disease Research (Gifts Roundup)

A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:

Agnes Scott College and Oxford College of Emory University

Henry Duane Blair and Sara Emma (Emy) Blair left a total of $16.8 million — $8.4 million apiece — to their alma maters. The bequests will support financial aid building projects.

The $8.4 million the couple gave to Agnes Scott College is being used to help pay for renovations to several campus buildings, and to create the Emy and Duane Blair Science Scholarship Fund, which will provide scholarships for science students beginning in fall 2020.

Half of the $8.4 million the Blairs left to Emory’s Oxford College will back student financial aid through the Duane and Emy Blair Scholarship Endowment, while the other half will go toward future building and renovation efforts.

Henry Blair, who earned an undergraduate and medical degree from Emory, was a surgeon in Atlanta who served as chief of surgery and chief of staff at DeKalb Medical Center. As a member of the DeKalb County Board of Health, he helped create one of the largest health systems in Georgia. He died in 2015 at 85.

Emy Blair earned a degree in mathematics from Agnes Scott College and worked early in her career as a research assistant at Seydel-Woolley & Company, a textile chemicals business. She went on to run her husband’s medical practice for four decades. She died in 2017.

Ohio State University College of Education and Human Ecology

Gay Su Pinnell pledged $7.5 million through her donor-advised fund at the Columbus Foundation to endow a clinical professorship in reading and to support children’s reading and literacy programs.
Pinnell is a professor emerita of the university and spent her career there studying childhood reading and literacy and spearheaded Reading Recovery, an intervention effort she helped create 35 years ago that has provided reading instruction to more than 2.3 million first-graders in the lowest 20 percent of their classes in reading.

Pinnell earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D. at Ohio State in 1968 and 1975, respectively.

Harvard Medical School

Malcolm and Emily Fairbairn gave $5 millionto support research into Lyme disease and efforts to educate the public about the disease.

Of the total, $2 million will back neuroimmunology research to uncover how the bacterial pathogen behind Lyme disease may influence the connections between immunity, inflammation, and the nervous system during infection; and $2 million will back the study of the processes that underlie the development of the disease following infection. The remaining $1 million will pay for programs to help the public understand and avoid contracting the disease.

Malcolm Fairbairn founded Ascend Capital, an Orinda, Calif., financial firm that managed three hedge funds and was focused on the health care and life sciences markets. Emily Fairbairn worked as a stock trader at Ascend. The couple closed the firm in 2018. Malcolm Fairbairn earned an MBA from Harvard Business School and served as a managing director of Citadel Investment Group before he started Ascend.

The Fairbairns have given extensively to combat Lyme disease and gained attention last year when they brought a case against Fidelity Charitable, which they accused of mishandling such donations from their Fidelity donor-advised fund.

University of South Florida Foundation

Lynn Pippenger donated $5 million to establish an endowed deanship in the Muma College of Business and support faculty salaries, graduate fellowships and assistantships, research awards, professional development support, conferences, other academic, research and public service programs.

Pippenger had a 43-year career at Raymond James, a St. Petersburg, Fla., brokerage firm. She started there in 1969 as a payroll clerk and worked alongside the firm’s founders to help build the company. She went on to serve as chief financial officer and treasurer of the firm and created its human-resources department and its internal educational program. Eventually, she helped file the paperwork to take the company public before retiring in 2012.

Pippenger attended courses at USF in the 1980s and earned an MBA there. In 2015 she donated $10 million to name the Lynn Pippenger School of Accountancy, and in 2016 she gave $5 million to name Lynn Pippenger Hall, which houses the Kate Tiedemann School of Business and Finance.

Indiana University School of Nursing

Audrey Geisel left $2 millionto endow a professorship and two nursing scholarships, one for graduate students and another for undergraduates.

Geisel, who died in 2018 at 97, graduated with a degree in nursing from IU in 1944. She was married to the late Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known by his pen name, Dr. Seuss.

She founded and led Dr. Seuss Enterprises, where she oversaw the licensing and productions of the Dr. Seuss trademark, characters, and properties, and served as executive producer of several animated film adaptations of his works.

Cornell University College of Arts and Sciences

Robert and Carola Jain gave $1 million to create the Robert ’92 and Carola Jain Cornell Promise Scholarship. The scholarship will support Black students in the college and other students who enhance the university’s efforts to expand diversity, equity, and inclusion among its student population. It is aimed especially at helping those whose families are facing financial challenges because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Robert Jain is co-chief investment officer for Millennium Management, an investment firm headquartered in New York. He graduated from Cornell in 1992. Carola Jain is chief marketing officer for Spartan, an extreme-sports company known for its obstacle-course races.

University of Mississippi

James and Traute Langmesser pledged $1 million to the College of Liberal Arts. The gift is unrestricted. James Langmesser graduated from the university in 1969 and went on to a career in the U.S. Army before retiring and entering the private sector.

He started his military career serving in the U.S. Army Europe’s 66th Military Intelligence Brigade and years later served as battalion commander of the 360th Signal Battalion at Fort Gordon outside Augusta, Ga. (home of the U.S. Army Cyber Center of Excellence) and as the deputy chief of staff for information management for the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command in Washington.

After retiring, he joined Calibre Systems, where he was director of strategic-decision support and worked with the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Army. He retired from the post after 17 years with the company. Traute Langmesser, a retired high school principal in the German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, co-authored a geography textbook used in the state school system.

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