UC Irvine Lands $50 million to Launch Population and Public Health School

A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:

University of California at Irvine

Southern California businessman Joe Wen gave $50 million to turn the university’s public health program into the Joe C. Wen School of Population & Public Health, and to create two endowments aimed at boosting the academic and research capabilities of the university’s work in critical health-related fields. Of the total gift, $42.5 million will be used to launch a fund to support the Wen School, and the remaining $7.5 million will back cardiology research and education and clinical operations within the School of Medicine and the UCI Health system.

Wen immigrated with his parents Mary and Steve Wen to the United States from Taiwan as a teenager. He worked his way through college and graduate school and earned a bachelor’s degree from UCLA and an MBA from USC before starting Sakura Paper, a paper-trading company in City of Industry, Calif., in 2003. Today it is a division of Formosa Ltd., a conglomerate Wen established in Taiwan that has holdings in finance, real estate development, property management, and forest-products manufacturing and trading.

This is Wen’s second big gift to the university in recent years. In 2022, he gave UCI $20 million for the Joe C. Wen and Family Center for Advanced Care, an outpatient clinical facility at the university’s UCI Health–Irvine complex.

Marian University

Julie Wood gave $29 million through her Tom & Julie Wood Family Foundation to establish and endow scholarships for primary care physicians who plan to practice in Indiana, and to create endowed professorships in the newly named Tom and Julie Wood College of Osteopathic Medicine. Some of the gift will also support renovations to the Michael A. Evans Center for Health Sciences.

Wood is a long-time Indianapolis philanthropist who has given large sums to support health care and medical research in Indiana. Her late husband, Tom Wood, founded what would become Tom Wood Automotive Group in 1967. The Indianapolis company operates car dealerships, a rental car company, a flight school, and other businesses. Tom Wood died in 2010.

Carilion Clinic

Former U.S. Ambassador Nicholas Taubman and his wife, Jenny, gave $25 million to support the construction of a new building to house the clinic’s cancer center, and to expand the clinic’s cancer-related clinical care and research programs. The new facility will be named the Carilion Taubman Cancer Center.

Nicholas Taubman is the retired CEO and chairman of Advance Auto Parts, an auto-parts chain founded by his late father, Arthur Taubman in Roanoke, Va., in 1932. Nicholas Taubman led the company for more than three decades starting in 1969, and was later appointed U.S. Ambassador to Romania by President George W. Bush. He served as ambassador from 2005 to 2008.

University of California at Los Angeles

Meyer and Renee Luskin pledged $25 million to support a range of programs in the Department of History, which will be renamed the UCLA Meyer and Renee Luskin Department of History. The money will be used to provide more support for students, faculty, and early-career scholars, and to back the expansion of the history department’s public-facing centers and programs including the Luskin Center for History and Policy, the Public History Initiative, the Why History Matters series, and the newly established Making History in Los Angeles program.

Meyer Luskin founded Scope Industries in 1961. The Santa Monica, Calif., company recycles bakery waste to make animal feed. The Luskins both graduated from UCLA; he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1949, and Renee Luskin earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology in 1953. Including their latest donation, the Luskins have given the university at least $165 million since 2010 to support the School of Public Affairs, the Goodman-Luskin Microbiome Center, and the Luskin Center for History and Policy. They appeared on the Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 list of biggest donors in 2010.

Meyer Luskin said in a news release that he and wife are giving the money because they believe the study of history is vital to creating well-informed citizens.

“This gift will ensure that students and faculty have ample resources and opportunities to study the past, which will allow them to further understanding of the present in service to the public good,” he said.

Opportunity@Work

MacKenzie Scott gave $20 million through her Yield Giving fund. The gift is unrestricted and the workforce development nonprofit’s leaders said in a news release that they plan to use the money to create a program aimed at improving the annual earnings for workers who have gained their skills on-the-job, through military service, community college, partial college completion, workforce training programs, skills bootcamps, and other routes, but who do not hold bachelors’ degrees.

The program is scheduled to launch in 2025 and will use the money over the next four years to help large companies and the public sector hire such workers, shift employer thinking and hiring practices, and encourage talent and hiring technology platforms to incorporate data related to these workers.

Scott is a novelist who helped create Amazon with her former husband, Jeff Bezos. Her net worth is estimated at $34 billion, and she has given a total of more than $17 billion to more than 2,000 nonprofits in the last four years. Scott appeared on the Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest donors in 2020.

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