Michael Jordan Celebrates His Birthday With a $10 Million Gift to Make-a-Wish Foundation

A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:

Make-a-Wish Foundation of America

Basketball great Michael Jordan gave $10 million to establish an endowment to ensure the charity can grant future wishes for children with critical illnesses, something it has been doing to provide critically ill youths with hope since it was founded in 1980.

Jordan is chairman of the Charlotte Hornets, a National Basketball Association team that he owns. He played basketball for 15 seasons for the Chicago Bulls and the Washington Wizards. He has been donating to the charity for the last three decades.

Jordan said in a news release that he gave his latest donation to celebrate his 60th birthday and to encourage others to give so the group can close a gap in the number of children who are waiting for their wishes to come true. The wishes that the charity fulfills run the gamut from meeting someone a child admires to spending the day working with an astronaut. Meeting Jordan is one of the charity’s most popular wish requests.

University of Michigan School of Education

Bryan and Kathleen Marsal, and their children, Megan Kirsch Marsal and Michael Marsal, gave $50 million to support a range of programs in the education school, which will be renamed the Marsal Family School of Education.

The family’s donation will establish a new four-year degree program focused on LEAPS, an acronym for Learning, Equity and Problem-Solving for the public good. It will also expand a partnership program with Marygrove Educational Campus to benefit future and early-career teachers and provide financial support to early-career education professionals.

Kathleen Marsal is a former vice president and director of taxes at Citibank; she graduated from the School of Education in 1972. Bryan Marsal co-founded and leads Alvarez & Marsal, a consulting firm in New York. He earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in business from the university in 1973 and 1975, respectively.

Their daughter, Megan Kirsch Marsal, is an education curriculum designer and a former teacher. She graduated from the School of Education in 2014. Their son, Michael Marsal, is managing director and founding partner of Alvarez & Marsal Property Investments, a commercial real-estate investment firm that is part of his father’s consulting firm.

University of California at Irvine

Jo and Paul Butterworth pledged an estimated $35.5 million from their estate to support scholarships and fellowships, and new research and other programs at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences.

Paul Butterworth co-founded several technology companies, including Vantiq, a software developer in Walnut Creek, Calif., where he serves as chief technology officer; the cloud platform development company Emotive; and AmberPoint, which was acquired by Oracle in 2010 for an undisclosed sum. He also co-founded Forte Software, which was bought by Sun Microsystems for $540 million in 1999.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the university in 1974 and has served on the UCI Foundation Board of Trustees since 2011. Jo Butterworth earned a bachelor’s degree from the university’s School of Social Sciences in 1975.

Washington University School of Medicine at St. Louis

Philip and Sima Needleman pledged $15 million to create the Needleman Program for Innovation and Commercialization, which will back the development of new drugs and get them to the stage where the Food and Drug Administration grants investigational-new-drug status. The center will also support some initial clinical drug trials.

Philip Needleman is a former executive at the pharmaceutical companies Monsanto, Searle, and Pharmacia. He joined the faculty of the university’s former Department of Pharmacology and led that department from 1976 to 1989. During that time, he discovered COX-2, an enzyme that plays a key role in arthritis-related pain and inflammation, and he identified an inhibitor of COX-2 that showed therapeutic potential.

However, traditional sources of funding available to academic researchers at that time would neither support the further development of a selective COX-2 inhibitor nor back the additional studies needed to validate the effectiveness and safety of a drug ready for clinical trials. To further this research, Needleman left academe and joined Monsanto as chief scientist and led the development of the drug compound, which was approved in 1998 as the drug Celebrex.

University of Pittsburgh

Roku founder Anthony Wood gave $14.3 million through his WoodNext Foundation to expand research aimed at identifying causes of inflammation that lead to heart disease and dementia, and to establish an entrepreneur-in-residence position to work with faculty scientists and the university’s Innovation Institute on bringing new drugs to the marketplace. The donation will also support an advisory board with ties to the biotech industry and investors.

Known primarily for founding the Roku television streaming platform, Wood has created other companies, including ReplayTV, the first digital video recording company to provide television viewers with a way to skip commercials. He has been a fairly quiet donor who did most of his giving out of the spotlight, but he recently landed on the Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 report of the most generous donors for a number of donations he made to his own foundations and to other nonprofits.

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