A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:
Institute for Protein Innovation
Timothy Springer and his wife, Chafen Lu, gave $210 million to endow this Boston biomedical research institute that Springer co-founded with fellow scientist Andrew Kruse in 2017. The endowment will enable the institute to speed up its efforts in three areas: providing antibodies and other protein-based tools to the scientific community, advancing protein science, and augmenting the education of life scientists.
Springer is an immunologist and professor at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital. He was one of three scientists who received the prestigious Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research last year for their discovery of integrins, proteins that are involved in the recognition, attachment, and trafficking of cells in the body.
He was an early investor in the vaccine maker Moderna Therapeutics and made about $400 million when the company went public in 2018. He also founded several biotechnology companies, including LeukoSite, which was acquired by Millennium Pharmaceuticals in 1999.
Lu is a former assistant professor in pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, and she conducted research at Boston Children’s Hospital. The couple previously gave the institute gifts totaling $40 million, and they have endowed professorships and chairs at Harvard Medical School, Boston Children’s Hospital, and the University of California at Berkeley.
Inova Health System Heart and Vascular Institute
Dwight and Martha Schar gave $75 million to expand the institute’s cardiovascular care and research and design new programs to help underserved populations at risk for heart disease, including women and Black and Latino patients. The Falls Church, Va., institute will be renamed for the donors.
Dwight Schar is a homebuilder and real-estate developer who founded NVR Homes, a homebuilder in Northern Virginia. Counting their latest gift, the Schars have donated more than $126 million to Inova Health System since 1993, including a $50 million gift in 2015 to establish the Inova Schar Cancer Institute.
Ms. Foundation for Women
Lucia Woods Lindley left $50 million, the bulk of her estate, to back programs that aim to strengthen women’s rights and support other nonprofits that help women, children, and families prosper and fight for social justice.
Woods Lindley was a photographer and heiress. Her grandfather Frank Woods Sr. founded the Lincoln Telephone and Telegraph Company and the Sahara Coal Company, both in Chicago. Woods Lindley’s work was shown at the Art Institute of Chicago, Princeton University, the Harold Washington Library in Chicago, the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, and in galleries in London and Quebec. Her photographs also appeared in Willa Cather: A Pictorial Memoir, which was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 1973. She died in 2020 at 83.
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
Henry Kravis gave $40 million through the Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis Foundation to establish the Marie-Josée Kravis Center for Cancer Immunobiology. Scientists across the new institution will focus on basic research, translational research, and the creation of immunodiagnostic assays centered around immuno-oncology, cell engineering, and cancer vaccines.
The new center has been named for the donor’s wife, an economist who serves as vice chair of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Board of Trustees. Henry Kravis co-founded Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, a New York private-equity firm.
The couple have given a number of large gifts to the cancer center over the years, including a $100 million grant through their foundation last year to launch the Kravis Cancer Ecosystems Project, an effort to study the elements that contribute to the relapse of cancer.
Austin College
Clifford Grum left $20 million to support full-tuition scholarships. The donor, who died in 2016 at 82, had deep ties to the college. He earned a bachelor’s degree there in 1956 and was encouraged by his business and economics professor at the time, Clyde Hall, to pursue a graduate degree at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned an M.B.A.
Grum started his career as a loan officer at Republic Bank in Dallas before joining Temple Industries in Diboll, Tex., which merged with Time, Inc., in 1973. He served in a number of executive roles at the media giant, including as treasurer, publisher of Fortune magazine, and executive vice president. When Time spun out of Temple in 1983, Grum became president, CEO, and chairman of Temple-Inland, as it was then named, until his retirement in 2000. Grum was a longtime member of the Austin College Board of Trustees, serving from 1981 to 2001. He stayed closely connected to the college in his later years as a senior trustee.
Fistula Foundation
MacKenzie Scott gave $15 million to support the charity’s five-year plan to provide 80,000 surgeries to women in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia who have been left incontinent through childbirth, and to back the nonprofit’s project to eradicate the suffering caused by fistula in all countries where the condition persists.
Scott is a novelist who helped create Amazon with her former husband, Jeff Bezos. Her net worth is estimated at $31 billion, and she has given a total of about $14 billion to more than 1,600 nonprofits since 2020. Scott appeared on the Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest donors in 2020.
Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center
Sarah (Sally) Ross Soter pledged $15 million through her Soter Kay Foundation to establish the Sarah Ross Soter Women’s Health Research Program, which will focus on efforts to discover new therapies to prevent and treat diseases that disproportionately affect women. The program will include efforts to ensure women from underrepresented communities have equitable access to discoveries and clinical trials.
Ross Soter is a Palm Beach philanthropist and heiress. Her grandfather Stanley Ross co-founded the company that later became Ross Laboratories, now a division of Abbott Laboratories.
To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated regularly.
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