Microsoft CEO and Wife Give $15 Million to Children’s Hospital

A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:

Catholic University of America Conway School of Nursing

William and Joanne Conway pledged $20 million to provide scholarships to nursing students over the next five years. They gave $20 million to the nursing school last year, and including their latest pledge, they have now donated a total of $80 million to the nursing school since 2013 both personally and through their Bedford Falls Fund.

William Conway is a co-founder and co-chief executive officer of the Carlyle Group, a private-equity firm in Washington. The couple have given extensively to nursing programs in recent years, including donations totaling $35 million to the University of Virginia School of Nursing and more than $17.2 million to the University of Maryland School of Nursing.

Seattle Children’s Hospital

Satya and Anupama Nadella pledged $15 million to improve care and advance research for children with neurological conditions and brain injuries. The money will be used to build a clinical-trial program, expand children’s mental-health care, and create the Zain Nadella Endowed Chair in Pediatric Neurosciences.

Satya Nadella is the CEO of the software giant Microsoft, where he has served in a number of executive posts and led the company’s transition to cloud computing. He was born in Hyderabad, India, and came to the United States in 1988 to attend graduate school. He joined Microsoft in 1992 and later became a U.S. citizen. Anupama Nadella is a former architect.

The couple’s son, Zain, was born with cerebral palsy and received lifesaving care at the hospital as a child. Zain’s experiences inspired them to support the hospital’s latest efforts to improve care for children with brain conditions.

Naples Community Hospital Healthcare System

Julia Van Domelen gave $5.7 million through her Bill and Julia Van Domelen Foundation to support the hospital’s care of women and children. The money will go toward hiring additional staff, supporting training programs, expanding the hospital’s current neonatal program to a level-three NICU, and bolstering its fetal maternal medicine program and its pediatric surgery and anesthesiology departments.

A portion of the gift will be used to create a more comfortable environment for children and teen patients with emotional, behavioral, and mental-health challenges.

Van Domelen is a former president of Christ Child Society of Naples, a Florida early-childhood-education nonprofit. Her late husband, William Van Domelen, was a Kalamazoo, Mich., businessman who owned a group of about 150 fast-food restaurants throughout the U.S. Midwest and East. He sold his holdings to Taco Bell in 1990. He died in 2015.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

The Shapiro family (Mickey; Steven and his wife, Margie; and Edward) donated $5 million to honor the Shapiro brothers’ parents, Sara and Asa Shapiro, who survived the Holocaust and emigrated to the United States after WWII to become Michigan business owners. Museum officials said they will name a foyer for Sara and Asa Shapiro in recognition of the gift.

Mickey Shapiro founded the M. Shapiro Real Estate Group, in Farmington Hills, Mich. Steven Shapiro is president of ASA Builders Supply, a Walled Lake, Mich., construction company Asa Shapiro founded in 1952. Edward Shapiro serves as vice president of the company.

Sara and Asa Shapiro were both born in what was then Korets, Poland, and is now part of Ukraine. During World War II, Asa was in a Soviet labor camp and then conscripted into the Soviet army. Sara escaped a ghetto in German-occupied Poland and posed as a Ukrainian maid to avoid capture.

Sara Shapiro’s story is the subject of a feature film — My Name Is Sara — which will be released this fall. She and Asa were the only members of their families to survive the Holocaust.

The Arboretum at Pennsylvania State University

Charles (Skip) Smith pledged $3 million to endow the arboretum’s directorship position, which will be named for Smith, a longtime university donor who gave $10 million in 2007 to establish and build the arboretum.

Smith founded an audiovisual supply and services company in 1950 after working for H.O. Smith & Sons, a construction and real-estate-development firm founded by his father, Harry Smith. Skip Smith earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Penn State in 1948. His father graduated from the university in 1918, and his two brothers are also Penn State alumni.

The announcement of the Smith Endowed Directorship comes as the university begins a search to replace the arboretum’s founding director, Kim Steiner, who will retire in June after nearly five decades as a faculty member in the College of Agricultural Sciences.

University of California at Los Angeles Library

Irla (Lee) Zimmerman Oetzel left $2 million. The gift is unrestricted, and the university announced it will use it to help the Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library build, maintain, preserve, and promote its collection of nearly 700,000 print volumes and thousands of electronic resources, including journals and databases.

Oetzel was an expert on child development and conducted research that led to creation of the Preschool Language Scale, a language-skills assessment tool for children. Oetzel developed the test with a speech therapist and an early-childhood educator she met while working as a consultant for Head Start, the federally funded child-development program.

The first version of the test was published in 1969 and is today a widely used preschool language-assessment tool in schools and health care settings in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Oetzel earned three degrees from UCLA, including a doctorate in psychology in 1953. She died last year at 96.

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