John Doerr gives $1.1 billion to Stanford for new climate school; largest gift in Stanford history – Times-Herald

The gift announced Wednesday is the largest in Stanford’s history. This is the second largest donation to any university in American history, after the New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg donated $ 1.8 billion to his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, in 2018.

Stanford, which already has large energy and environmental research facilities, is expected to be at the forefront of climate research among the world’s universities. will be called Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.

“Stanford is making a bold, enterprising and enduring commitment to tackling humanity’s greatest challenge, and we have deep faith in its ambition and capabilities,” John and Ann Doerr said in a statement.

Doerr, 70, of Woodside, was ranked as the 146th richest person in the world by Forbes 2022. St. Born Louis, he graduated with a degree in electrical engineering from Rice University and then earned a Harvard MBA in the 1970s. In 1974, he joined Intel as a reseller and obtained several patents for memory devices.

He left in 1980 with Kleiner Perkins, a venture capital firm on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. Since then, he has been president, helping lead companies such as Google, Amazon, Sun Microsystems, Compaq, Netscape, DoorDash, and Slack.

Ann Doerr is president of Khan Academy, a Mountain View-based nonprofit educational institution that offers video studies in math and other subjects. He is also a former member of the Board of the Environmental Protection Fund and a member of the current advisory board, and a former board member of Rice University.

In addition to Doerr’s gift, Stanford also received a whopping $ 590 million from other donors to the new climate school, many of them tech titans. Among them is millionaire Jerry Yang, a former CEO of Yahoo! and his wife Akiko Yamazaki; Along with David Filo, co-founder of Yahoo! and his wife, Angela; 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 department will be launched next year with about 90 Stanford teachers. The university will add 60 more professors over the next 10 years by hiring experts in energy, climate science, sustainable development and environmental justice.

Its dean will be Arun Majumdar, who currently works as a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at Stanford. Majumdar is a former Vice President of Energy at Google, and served as Deputy Secretary of Energy for the Obama Administration.

“Stanford Doerr Sustainability School will harness the intellectual horse of our students, faculty and staff across our campus,” said Majumdar, “but will work with outside organizations around the world to jointly develop innovative solutions and identify new perspectives through research and education. “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 will thrive together.”