SAN JOSE, Calif. — Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Doerr, an early investor in Google, Amazon and other leading tech companies, and his wife, Ann, have agreed to donate $1.1 billion to Stanford University to set up a new school devoted to the study of climate change and its solutions.
The gift, announced Wednesday, is the largest in Stanford history. It ranks as the second-largest donation to any university in American history, behind $1.8 billion that former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg gave to his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, in 2018.
The school is expected to propel Stanford, which already has considerable facilities researching energy and the environment, to the forefront of climate research among the world’s universities. It will be called the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.
“Stanford is making a bold, actionable, and enduring commitment to tackle humanity’s greatest challenge, and we have deep conviction in its ambition and abilities,” said John and Ann Doerr in a statement.
Doerr, 70, of Woodside, was listed as the 146th richest person in the world in the Forbes 2022 list of wealthiest people, with a net worth of $12.7 billion. A St. Louis native, he earned degrees in electrical engineering from Rice University then a Harvard MBA in the 1970s. He came to the Bay Area with no job, then was hired by Intel in 1974, working as a salesman and obtaining several patents for memory devices.
He left in 1980 to join Kleiner Perkins, a venture capital firm in Menlo Park. Since then, he rose to become chairman, helping lead early investments into companies like Google, Amazon, Sun Microsystems, Compaq, Netscape, DoorDash and Slack.
Ann Doerr is chair of Khan Academy, a nonprofit educational organization based in Mountain View that provides video lessons on math and other subjects. She also is a former board member and current advisory board member of the Environmental Defense Fund, and former trustee of Rice University.
In addition to the Doerr’s gift, Stanford also received a staggering $590 million for the new climate school from other donors, many of them tech titans. Among them are billionaire Jerry Yang, the former CEO of Yahoo and his wife, Akiko Yamazaki; along with David Filo, co-founder of Yahoo! and his wife, Angela; the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; and Susan Orr, daughter of Hewlett Packard co-founder David Packard, and her husband Lynn Orr, a professor of engineering emeritus at Stanford.
The school’s academic departments will launch next year with about 90 existing faculty members from Stanford. The university will add 60 more faculty members over the next 10 years, hiring experts in energy, climate science, sustainable development and environmental justice.
Its dean will be Arun Majumdar, who currently works at Stanford as a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science. Majumdar is a former vice president for energy at Google, and served as undersecretary for energy in the Obama administration.
“The Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability will not only harness the intellectual horsepower of our students, faculty, and staff across our campus,” Majumdar said, “but also partner with external organizations around the world to co-develop innovative solutions and identify new insights through research and education. As is often said, we do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children. We must create a future in which humans and nature thrive together.”
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