$350 million donation for Harvard, largest in school history
Harvard University received a $350 million gift from the family foundation of real estate developer brothers Gerald and Ronnie Chanof, based in Hong Kong, Bloomberg reported.
Harvard School of Public Health Dean Julio Frenk said that the donation is for the university's public health school. The gift will mainly be focused on public health issues like pandemics, humanitarian crises, failing health care systems, as well as social and environmental threats to health, according to Bloomberg.
After the record donation, which is the largest in Harvard's 378-year history, the university decided to rename the school the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in honor of the brother's late father. The school will be the second at Harvard to be named after an individual, the first one being the John F. Kennedy School of Government. Frenk, in a telephone interview with Bloomberg, said "This is a gift that is incredibly generous and timely as we're starting our second century.This allows us to invent the future of as we create a base of sustainability for our school. It's a dream gift that allows us to dream bigger than we ever have." A chief executive officer at a philanthropy consulting firm based in Chicago named John Glier told Bloomberg the donation by the Chan brothers highlights one of the major unmet priorities in health research. He emphasized the fact that public health researchers are forced to compete for scarce funding to cope with health threats, like the recent Ebola outbreak. "This enables one of the great schools of public health in this country to strengthen its capacity to bring on singular academic thought leadership and enable research," he added. Gerald Chan, 63, received both his master's and doctoral degrees from Harvard School of Public Health. He studied radiation physics and radiobiology. Chan has a house in Newton, a Boston suburb, and he also has investments in the Boston area. When asked about his opinion on public health, Chan said, "The world has moved in such as way that we really need to redouble our efforts in public health if we're to have a safer place for developed and developing countries.This is a propitious moment for all sides to highlight the importance of public health" Bloomberg said.
