North Dakota State U. Lands $75 Million; Sheryl Sandberg Gives Anti-Defamation League $2.5 Million (Gifts Roundup)

A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:

North Dakota State University

Robert and Sheila Challey pledged $75 million for the Division of Performing Arts and the Challey School of Music, endow scholarships and faculty positions, and back building projects and other programs.

Robert Challey is president of the Park Place Group, a real-estate investment company in Walnut Creek, Calif. He earned a chemistry degree from NDSU in 1967, and his mother, Myrtle Challey, once taught food and nutrition classes there.

The couple gave $10 million to the university earlier this year for the Sheila and Robert Challey Institute for Global Innovation and Growth.

Indiana University

Billionaire tech entrepreneur Fred Luddy donated $60 million to establish the Luddy Center for Artificial Intelligence, a multidisciplinary program in artificial intelligence that will be housed in the School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering, which will be named for Luddy.

The money will pay the construction costs of a new building, which will house the center, and create six new endowed chairs and will endow six new professorships, faculty fellowships, and student scholarships. The center’s first research program will focus on artificial-intelligence approaches to digital health.

Luddy, whose net worth has been pegged at $1.1 billion by Forbes, founded ServiceNow, a Silicon Valley company that provides cloud-based, automated IT help-desk services. He entered Indiana University in 1973 but dropped out before graduating because he was spending so much of his time programming. The university gave him an honorary degree in 2017.

Southern Methodist University

David and Carolyn Miller gave $50 million to expand programs at the Edwin L. Cox School of Business. The money will go toward modernizing the business school’s curriculum, providing more scholarships, developing corporate partnerships, and backing other efforts.

David Miller is co-founder and managing partner of EnCap Investments, a private-equity firm in Houston and Dallas. He earned a bachelor’s degree in finance in 1972 and an MBA in 1973, both from SMU.

Carolyn Miller is a former teacher and social worker. She served as a program director at the Senior Source, a Dallas nonprofit that helps senior citizens with a variety of quality-of-life services.

University of California at Berkeley

Terry and Tori Rosen gave $25 million to the College of Chemistry for a building to be named in honor of Terry Rosen’s mentor and the university’s former chemistry dean, Clayton Heathcock.

Terry Rosen is the chief executive of Arcus Biosciences. He was a graduate student of Heathcock’s in the 1980s and worked in Heathcock’s lab. After earning a Ph.D. from the university in 1985, Terry Rosen worked for pharmaceutical companies before joining Tularik as a medicinal chemist and eventually leading the company’s research programs.

Tularik was later acquired by Amgen where Rosen served as head of Therapeutic Discovery. Rosen is a trustee of the UC Berkeley Foundation.

Big Shoulders Fund

Bruce and Beth White committed $16 million through their Bruce and Beth White Family Foundation to support programs for elementary and high-school students from low-income backgrounds.

The money will be directed toward programs in the northwest Indiana area, with a special focus on students and families in the cities of Gary, Ind.; Hammond, Ind.; and East Chicago, Ind.

Bruce White founded White Lodging Services, a hotel-management company in Merrillville, Ind.

Carnegie Mellon University

William and Nancy Strecker donated $15 million to endow the post of dean of the College of Engineering and to help pay for education and research programs across seven departments, and at the university’s locations in Africa and Silicon Valley. The dean’s position will be named for the donors.

Bill Strecker is retired as chief technology officer and executive vice president at In-Q-Tel, a nonprofit that helps start-ups provide technology to U.S. intelligence agencies. He worked for 30 years for Digital Equipment Corporation, where he served in a variety of roles including senior vice president of corporate strategy. He earned 16 patents for his engineering designs there.

A Carnegie Mellon alumnus, he earned bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from the university in 1966, 1967, and 1971.

Nancy Strecker is a mathematician who also had an extensive career with Digital Equipment Corporation, where she built and led the company’s corporate sales team and its global pharmaceutical-industry business unit before retiring as vice president of global customer programs.

Carnegie Hall

Sanford and Joan Weill gave $14.6 million through their Weill Family Foundation to back artistic and education programs. Of the total, the Weills have earmarked $5 million to underwrite the arts center’s music education and teacher-training programs in New York City public schools.

Sanford Weill is a financier and the former chairman and chief executive of the banking giant Citigroup. He joined the Carnegie Hall Board of Trustees in 1983, became chairman in 1991, and then president in 2015.

The couple are serial donors who have given large sums to education, health care, and arts and culture organizations. They have appeared on the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s annual Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest donors eight times since 2001.

West Virginia Wesleyan College

Thomas Albinson left more than $11 million to endow the Thomas H. Albinson School of Business, the media studies program, and the campus radio station.

Albinson, who died in 2016, founded p-Quest Data Systems, which created custom PC-based applications for nonprofit organizations, primarily in cemetery management. He also worked as director of finance and budgeting and as an investment adviser for Sarah Ward Nursery, in Newark, N.J.

He earned a bachelor of arts in economics from Wesleyan in 1976 and held a leadership role with WVWC-FM, the college’s public-broadcasting radio station.

University of Michigan Medicine

Tadataka and Leslie Yamada donated $10 million to establish the Center for Global Health Equity, which will focus on accelerating the work of faculty, staff, and students from across the university who are seeking to provide health care access to people in poor countries.

Tadataka Yamada is a physician who served as chief of gastroenterology at the University of Michigan Medical School from 1983 to 1990 when he became chairman of the Department of Internal Medicine. He later worked in the pharmaceutical industry as the chairman of research for GlaxoSmithKline and chief medical and scientific officer at Takeda Pharmaceuticals.

He also spent five years leading the global health program for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and is now a venture partner with Frazier Healthcare Partners in Seattle.

Rider University

Alumnus Norm Brodsky and his wife, Elaine, gave $10 million to endow a scholarship for business students and for other business school needs. Brodsky is a businessman who founded multiple businesses, including CitiStorage.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Sheila Konar gave $6.2 million through the William & Sheila Konar Foundation to support the Initiative on Holocaust Denial and State-Sponsored Antisemitism. This gift will also establish an endowment to name the program’s director.

Sheila Konar is the widow of William Konar, the founder of a chain of discount drugstores called Clinton Merchandising that was bought by a company that became the CVS Corporation. He served as senior vice president for CVS for eight years and later founded Konar Properties, a real-estate development firm in Rochester, N.Y.

The couple were one of the earliest donors to the museum and were involved in fundraising efforts to build the museum. William Konar was a Holocaust survivor. He was born in Radom, Poland, in 1930 and died in 2015.

Anti-Defamation League

Sheryl Sandberg donated $2.5 million through her Sheryl Sandberg & David Goldberg Family Foundation to back anti-hate and anti-bias education programs, research, and advocacy efforts.

Sandberg is the chief operating officer of Facebook and has given extensively to charity over the years, including to efforts to help women and girls. She has appeared on the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s annual Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest donors three times since 2016.

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

Maria Di Mento directs the annual Philanthropy 50, a comprehensive report on America’s top donors. She writes about wealthy philanthropists, arts organizations, and key trends, among other topics. She recently wrote about a $125 million gift from hedge-fund manager Ken Griffin to a major science museum and a $100 million commitment from Nicole Shanahan for reproductive research and other causes. Email Maria or follow her on Twitter.