Hedge-Fund Founder Michael Price Pledges $1 Million to Back Covid-19 Research (Gifts Roundup)

A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:

Dartmouth College

Norman (Sandy) McCulloch Jr. and his wife, Dorothy, gave $2 million to establish the McCulloch Program on Canadian-American Relations, which will be housed at the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding.
Sandy McCulloch is a former chairman of Microfibres, a textile manufacturer in Pawtucket, R.I., that was founded by his family in 1926 and closed in 2016.
A 1950 Dartmouth graduate, McCulloch served on the university’s Board of Trustees from 1975 to 1988 and helped create the Dickey Center, named for his friend John Sloan Dickey, in the 1980s. Dickey, who died in 1991, was Dartmouth’s 12th president and a leading Canadian-American relations scholar.

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

Kenneth Woodcock donated $2 millionto endow the museum’s Curator of Historical American Art position, which will be named for the donor.
Woodcock co-founded the AES Corp., an international electric company with headquarters in Arlington, Va., in 1981 and retired in 2004. He has been a trustee of the academy since 2015 and a long-time donor to the institution, to which he has loaned works from his extensive collection of historical American art.

Albert Einstein College of Medicine

Michael Price pledged $1 million through his Price Family Foundation to match donations from others to back Covid-19 research, including the college’s national clinical trial on the use of convalescent plasma to treat those fighting the infection.
Price is a New York financier who founded the hedge fund MFP Partners. He previously led the Mutual Shares Fund, after his mentor and the fund’s founder, Max Heine, died in 1988. Price was involved in pressuring Chase Manhattan Bank to sell some of its divisions leading to a merger with Chemical Banking Corporation in 1995.

Oklahoma City National Memorial Museum

Chad Richison gave $1 million for endowment and to assist with the costs of safely reopening the museum after it closed temporarily on March 15 because of health concerns surrounding the coronavirus pandemic.
Richison founded Paycom, a national payroll-provider company, in 1998 and took the company public in 2014. Richison founded the Green Shoe Foundation, a nonprofit devoted to helping functioning adults reconcile childhood traumas.

Tulane University

Rob Katz and Elana Amsterdam donated $1 million

to expand the School of Medicine’s molecular pathology lab’s efforts to increase Covid-19 testing capabilities within New Orleans and surrounding areas.
The money will also help the medical school purchase new equipment and hire additional full-time staff to ramp up work processing up to 1,000 Covid-19 tests per day at the lab.
Katz leads Vail Resorts, a hotel and skiing company. Amsterdam is cookbook author. The couple appeared on the Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest donors in 2017.

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