Scientist Couple Donates $50 Million for Caltech Endowment
March 6, 2015 | Read Time: 1 minute
Scientists Ronald and Maxine Linde have given the California Institute of Technology $50 million for an unrestricted endowment to enable the university to pursue promising avenues of emerging research, according to a Caltech press release. The couple made previous donations to support institutions, laboratories, and faculty positions in a number of disciplines at Caltech, where Mr. Linde earned master’s and doctoral degrees.
“Our philosophy is to allow for flexibility because you can’t know the future,” said Mr. Linde, the founder and former chief executive of the engineering firm Envirodyne Industries and a Caltech trustee since 1989. Ms. Linde, a mathematician, worked at the Caltech-managed Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the early days of the U.S. space program and was also an Envirodyne executive.
