UCSF Lands $60 Million From Pritzkers for Mental-Health Programs

A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:

University of California at San Francisco

John Pritzker and Lisa Stone Pritzker gave nearly $60 million to build a new home for the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences that will house research and academic programs, mental-health treatment services for patients of all ages, and a special center for children and teens. The building will be named for John Pritzker’s late sister, Nancy Friend Pritzker.

John Pritzker is a billionaire heir to the Pritzker family fortune. The family’s holdings include the Hyatt Hotels chain. He worked for Hyatt as a teenager in the 1970s and made his way up from busboy to managing director and divisional vice president. He left Hyatt in the late 1980s and later co-founded Ticketmaster and Geolo Capital, a private-equity firm that invests in hotels, resorts, and health and wellness companies.

Lisa Stone Pritzker is former appointee to the California First Five Commission, which funds statewide programs for children in their first five years of life. She has been a longtime volunteer for Safe and Sound, a child-abuse-prevention nonprofit in San Francisco.

The Pritzkers, who divorced in 2019, said in a news release that they gave the gift not only to honor Nancy Friend Pritzker, who died by suicide at age 24 during a depressive episode in 1972, but to also help others struggling with mental-health issues.

“Nancy was a brilliant, funny, beautiful young woman who struggled with mental health,” said John Pritzker in the news release. “Like so many other families, ours didn’t talk about those struggles before or after her death. When she passed, it was like a steel door slammed shut. While times have changed somewhat, stigma and mental health are still very closely linked. Naming the building after Nancy honors her memory and begins to lift the veil on her story, every story like hers, and the psychiatric field itself.”

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

Judith Hale, her son Robert Hale Jr., and his wife, Karen Hale, pledged $50 million to support the Hale Family Center for Pancreatic Cancer Research. The Hales established the center in 2016 with a $15 million gift.

This new gift will back programs in early detection and prevention and in precision medicine and biology. Scientists at the center will use health-system data to identify those at the highest risk for pancreatic cancer, work on ways to detect it early on, and develop new treatments for pre-invasive and early-invasive pancreatic cancers.

Judith Hale is the widow of Robert (Bob) Hale Sr., who, along with his son, founded the telecommunications companies Network Plus and Granite Telecommunications in Quincy, Mass. Hale Sr. died in 2008. With this latest donation, the Hale family has given and pledged $80 million to Dana-Farber.

Clark University

Tina Sweeney left $6 million to support an array of music-education programs. Her bequest will endow a professorship in music, create a scholarship program for students majoring in music, establish a fund to pay for activities and programs that promote music education and exposure for children, and back a concert series at the university.

She also retroactively designated money toward the construction of Clark’s Jennie and Arthur Razzo Hall, named for her parents.

Sweeney was a television producer who had also worked as a counselor for the New York Department of Corrections. She earned a master’s degree in history from Clark in 1949. She died last year at age 92.

Purdue University

Bill Uhrig and Anastasia Vournas gave $5 million to back Project Bridge, a scholarship program aimed at attracting and retaining engineering students from underrepresented populations.

The money will also be used to expand Purdue’s Minority Engineering Program’s efforts to recruit and support engineering students, facilitate a new partnership with historically Black colleges and universities, and conduct a study to identify elements that best predict the success of potential students.

Uhrig is a managing partner at Three Cities Research, a private-equity firm in New York. He earned a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical and astronautical engineering from Purdue in 1982. His late father, J. William Uhrig, was a professor of agricultural economics at Purdue. Anastasia Vournas is a former president of Telmarc Telecommunications in Boston.

University of Tennessee at Knoxville

Randy and Jenny Boyd donated $5 million to renovate and expand the university’s historic Carousel Theatre, a 70-year-old theater-in-the-round. The renovations will replace the old structure with a new one on the same spot and will have up-to-date technology and infrastructure.

The Boyds are both 1979 alumni, and Randy Boyd currently serves as president of the University of Tennessee System. The new theater will be named for Jenny Boyd, who said in a news release that she has vivid memories of visiting the theater on a school trip in the 1960s to see the show Annie Get Your Gun.

Randy Boyd founded Radio Systems Corporation, a Knoxville company that produces pet-related products under the brand names PetSafe, Invisible Fence, and SportDOG. He has served as chairman of the Tennessee Higher Education Commission and as commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development.

Nature Conservancy of Florida

Joseph and Renate Hixon gave $3 million to create and endow the Hixon Environmental Stewardship Program, which will provide new programs at the nonprofit’s flagship preserves in Florida, and to underwrite land-steward internships that will give hands-on experience to students embarking on conservation careers.

Some of the money will also go toward the group’s controlled burning of 250,000 acres throughout the state — using fire to maintain and restore the health of natural environments — and other types of habitat management and restoration.

Joseph Hixon is a former president and chairman of Hixon Properties Incorporated, his family’s San Antonio, Tex., real-estate investment firm. He retired from that post in 2000. Hixon joined the Nature Conservancy of Florida’s Board of Trustees in 1984 and served as board chairman from 1996 to 1999 and co-chair of the first capital campaign for the chapter from 1999 to 2003.

He served on former Florida Governor Bob Martinez’s Commission on the Future of Florida’s Environment and is credited with helping the state create conservation programs that have protected more than 2.4 million acres of land across Florida.

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