Even as success stories of Indian Americans as entrepreneurs, doctors, lawyers and CEOs of MNCs, keep making headlines; many of them have emerged top donors to some of America’s top ivy league universities as well. In fact, Indiaspora, a non-profit organisation of global Indian origin leaders, said its inaugural Monitor of University Giving 2018 report that 50 Indian Americans have donated $1.2 billion to US higher education. Some of the top Indian American names, in the most significant philanthropy outreach to higher education in the US, are as follows:
Gururaj Deshpande
Indian American entrepreneur and venture capitalist Gururaj Desh Deshpande, an alumnus of IIT-Madras, provided the founding grant for the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2002. Along with his wife Jaishree, Deshpande donated $20 million to launch the centre which helps MIT faculty and students commercialise breakthrough technologies and inventions by transforming promising ideas into innovative products and cutting-edge spinout companies. The centre also makes pivotal investments in research, and provides valuable industry expertise. Deshpande is a life member of the MIT Corporation, the board of trustees of MIT, and sits on the board of the MIT school of engineering dean’s advisory council. In September 2011, the Deshpande Foundation gave $2.5 million to the University of New Brunswick in Canada to launch the Pond-Deshpande Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
Mani L Bhaumik
Mani L. Bhaumik, physicist, author and philanthropist, is founder of the Mani L. Bhaumik Institute for Theoretical Physics, a centre for theoretical physics research and intellectual inquiry, at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). The goal is to provide an exceptional environment for excellence in theoretical physics research. Bhaumik, now 92 and an alumnus of IIT-Kharagpur, is a well-known laser physicist, and proud of having had Satyendra Nath Bose (of Bose-Einstein fame) as his academic advisor in India. The Bhaumik Institute provides support for postdoctoral researchers and graduate students, brings distinguished scholars to UCLA and organises workshops and conferences to facilitate the exchange of new ideas. Beginning with a huge $11 million gift in 2016, that was the largest in the history of both the UCLA division of physical sciences and the UCLA department of physics and astronomy, Bhaumik’s vision of a world-leading centre to support foundational work in quantum field theory, unification of forces and, more recently, foundational issues in quantum mechanics, has allowed UCLA to compete with the best universities in theoretical physics. In addition to a 2018 gift of $3 million, he also completed his pledges early – $15.26 million for current-use and endowed funds for the Bhaumik Institute and $1.175 million to support the construction of the UCLA Collaboratory.
Chandrika Tandon
Indian American businesswoman, philanthropist and musician Chandrika Tandon, alumnus of IIM Ahmedabad, and her engineer-turned-investor husband Ranjan Tandon, have donated $100 million for engineering at New York University in 2015. The gift, which is believed to be among the largest donations to education by members of the Indian American community, was principally to support faculty hiring and academic programmes and to build on the engineering school’s cross-disciplinary innovation and entrepreneurship and achieve new levels of academic excellence in engineering. It was re-named the NYU Tandon School of Engineering in recognition of the Tandons’ generosity. As the chairman of the board of NYU Tandon School of Engineering, Chandrika is a champion of STEM education. She is also a member of the board of overseers of the NYU Stern Business School, a member of the board of trustees of the NYU Langone Medical System and leads the NYU President’s Global Council. Her husband, Ranjan Tandon, is an engineer from IIT-Kanpur and a graduate of the Harvard Business School. He is founder and chair of Libra Advisors, a hedge fund he founded in 1990 that is now a family office.
Kiran & Pallavi Patel
Kiran C. Patel, doctor, philanthropist and serial entrepreneur and his wife Pallavi Patel made the largest ever philanthropic gift in the history of Nova Southeastern University (NSU), Florida, in 2017. Dr Kiran Patel, a Tampa-based cardiologist and his wife, paediatrician Dr Pallavi Patel, made the commitment from the Patel Family Foundation, which included a $50 million gift and an additional $150 million real estate and facility investment in a 325,000 square-foot medical education complex as part of NSU’s Tampa Bay regional campus. They have also gifted $30.5 million to the University of South Florida for the Patel Center for Global Solutions and College of Global Sustainability.
Mukund Padmanabhan
Indian-American scientist, researcher and hedge fund partner, Mukund Padmanabhan, gifted $2.5 million to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), for a state-of-the-art engineering lab dedicated to integrated microsystems in 2015. The donation by Padmanabhan, an UCLA alumnus and the founder of nonprofit Guru Krupa Foundation, was used to support the construction of new research facility in the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science. Padmanabhan had earlier made three donations of $500,000 each. He received a BS in electronics and electrical communication engineering from IIT Kharagpur and a MS and PhD in electrical engineering from UCLA. After UCLA, he worked in the area of speech recognition at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Lab from where he pivoted to Wall Street, and is currently a partner and researcher at hedge fund Renaissance Technologies in New York.
Vin (Vinod) Gupta
Indian American businessman and philanthropist and IIT-Kharagpur alumnus Vin Gupta, has donated $2 million to establish a curriculum for small business management at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. He has also donated an additional $500,000 to set up a scholarship fund for its science or engineering schools. In 2013, Gupta partnered with the United States department of state’s office of the global partnership initiative and the George Washington University School of Business to establish the Benjamin Kane Gupta fellows programme in the memory of his son. In 2014, he donated $1 million to the George Washington University Law School to establish the Ben Gupta Endowed Fund for international legal education. The scholarship supports students from developing countries seeking JD or LLM degrees, and those pursuing educational opportunities at the law school on a non-degree basis.
Madan Lal Sobti chair
The Madan Lal Sobti Chair for the study of contemporary India was established at the University of Pennsylvania; Penn Arts and Sciences, through the generosity of numerous Indian American alumni, parents, and friends of the university, including P.C. Chatterjee; Raman Kapur, Sreedhar Menon; Sunil Mittal; Dalip Pathak, Rajiv Sobti and Sanjiv Sobti, in 2003. The chair is named in honour of the Sobtis’ late father, Madan Lal Sobti, and supports in perpetuity a professorship held by the director of the Center for the Advanced study of India.
Sumir Chadha
A gift from Sumir Chadha of Princeton’s Class of 1993 helped establish the M.S. Chadha Center for Global India at Princeton University in 2018, which brings together scholars and students from all disciplines to broadly explore contemporary India, including its economy, politics and culture. The centre is named in honour of Chadha’s grandfather, a distinguished physician who served as the director general of health services in India. Chadha, who earned a BSE in computer science as an undergraduate, is the co-founder and managing director of WestBridge Capital Partners, a leading investment firm focused on India. He is based in Silicon Valley and serves on the boards of Princeton University and the Harvard Business School alumni association. He received an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BSE in computer science from Princeton University.
Monte Ahuja
Monte Ahuja, Ohio State alumnus; founder of Transtar Industries in Cleveland and currently chairman and CEO of MURA Holdings; donated $3.5 million to the Ohio State University to support student success and create the Monte Ahuja endowed dean’s chair. Ahuja, who earned his master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Ohio State in 1970, wanted to give back to his alma mater. Born in India and educated at Punjab Engineering College, he went to Columbus in December 1968 for graduate school and earned his master’s from the college of engineering. Ahuja then completed an MBA at Cleveland State University. Ahuja’s generosity has extended to Cleveland State University, the University Hospital System of Cleveland and Ursuline College. He had served as a trustee of the Cleveland State University board for nine years and its chairman for six years. In 2011, to show their appreciation, Cleveland State named its business school the Monte Ahuja College of Business.
Lakshmi Mittal
UK based steel magnate and executive chairman of ArcelorMittal, Lakshmi N. Mittal, and his family donated $25 million to Harvard University in 2017 to support an endowed fund for Harvard’s South Asia Institute, which was subsequently renamed Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute. The Mittal Institute engages in interdisciplinary research to advance and deepen the understanding of critical issues in South Asia and its neighbourhood.
Late Vijay Sanghvi (1935-2015), gave $2 million to fund University of Cincinnati’s endowed chair in cardiac imaging.
Sunil Puri, an alumni of Rockford University and founder and president of a prominent real estate development, redevelopment and property management company spanning the Midwest made multiple donations totalling $6 million to his alma mater.
Satish and Yasmin Gupta donated $12 million to the University of Texas at Dallas, because it was their alma mater and the place where they fell in love. They donated to construct the new building for the college of business.
Late Mohinder Sambhi (1926-2015) gave $1 million to UCLA to establish the endowed chair in Indian music, named after his late wife Mohindar Brar Sambhi.
The Sikand family gave $1 million to California State University, Los Angeles, for a faculty endowment for research in urban sustainability to commemorate Gunjit Sikand, a former civil engineering professor at the university.
Gururaj Deshpande
Indian American entrepreneur and venture capitalist Gururaj Desh Deshpande, an alumnus of IIT-Madras, provided the founding grant for the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2002. Along with his wife Jaishree, Deshpande donated $20 million to launch the centre which helps MIT faculty and students commercialise breakthrough technologies and inventions by transforming promising ideas into innovative products and cutting-edge spinout companies. The centre also makes pivotal investments in research, and provides valuable industry expertise. Deshpande is a life member of the MIT Corporation, the board of trustees of MIT, and sits on the board of the MIT school of engineering dean’s advisory council. In September 2011, the Deshpande Foundation gave $2.5 million to the University of New Brunswick in Canada to launch the Pond-Deshpande Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
Mani L Bhaumik
Mani L. Bhaumik, physicist, author and philanthropist, is founder of the Mani L. Bhaumik Institute for Theoretical Physics, a centre for theoretical physics research and intellectual inquiry, at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). The goal is to provide an exceptional environment for excellence in theoretical physics research. Bhaumik, now 92 and an alumnus of IIT-Kharagpur, is a well-known laser physicist, and proud of having had Satyendra Nath Bose (of Bose-Einstein fame) as his academic advisor in India. The Bhaumik Institute provides support for postdoctoral researchers and graduate students, brings distinguished scholars to UCLA and organises workshops and conferences to facilitate the exchange of new ideas. Beginning with a huge $11 million gift in 2016, that was the largest in the history of both the UCLA division of physical sciences and the UCLA department of physics and astronomy, Bhaumik’s vision of a world-leading centre to support foundational work in quantum field theory, unification of forces and, more recently, foundational issues in quantum mechanics, has allowed UCLA to compete with the best universities in theoretical physics. In addition to a 2018 gift of $3 million, he also completed his pledges early – $15.26 million for current-use and endowed funds for the Bhaumik Institute and $1.175 million to support the construction of the UCLA Collaboratory.
Chandrika Tandon
Indian American businesswoman, philanthropist and musician Chandrika Tandon, alumnus of IIM Ahmedabad, and her engineer-turned-investor husband Ranjan Tandon, have donated $100 million for engineering at New York University in 2015. The gift, which is believed to be among the largest donations to education by members of the Indian American community, was principally to support faculty hiring and academic programmes and to build on the engineering school’s cross-disciplinary innovation and entrepreneurship and achieve new levels of academic excellence in engineering. It was re-named the NYU Tandon School of Engineering in recognition of the Tandons’ generosity. As the chairman of the board of NYU Tandon School of Engineering, Chandrika is a champion of STEM education. She is also a member of the board of overseers of the NYU Stern Business School, a member of the board of trustees of the NYU Langone Medical System and leads the NYU President’s Global Council. Her husband, Ranjan Tandon, is an engineer from IIT-Kanpur and a graduate of the Harvard Business School. He is founder and chair of Libra Advisors, a hedge fund he founded in 1990 that is now a family office.
Kiran & Pallavi Patel
Kiran C. Patel, doctor, philanthropist and serial entrepreneur and his wife Pallavi Patel made the largest ever philanthropic gift in the history of Nova Southeastern University (NSU), Florida, in 2017. Dr Kiran Patel, a Tampa-based cardiologist and his wife, paediatrician Dr Pallavi Patel, made the commitment from the Patel Family Foundation, which included a $50 million gift and an additional $150 million real estate and facility investment in a 325,000 square-foot medical education complex as part of NSU’s Tampa Bay regional campus. They have also gifted $30.5 million to the University of South Florida for the Patel Center for Global Solutions and College of Global Sustainability.
Mukund Padmanabhan
Indian-American scientist, researcher and hedge fund partner, Mukund Padmanabhan, gifted $2.5 million to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), for a state-of-the-art engineering lab dedicated to integrated microsystems in 2015. The donation by Padmanabhan, an UCLA alumnus and the founder of nonprofit Guru Krupa Foundation, was used to support the construction of new research facility in the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science. Padmanabhan had earlier made three donations of $500,000 each. He received a BS in electronics and electrical communication engineering from IIT Kharagpur and a MS and PhD in electrical engineering from UCLA. After UCLA, he worked in the area of speech recognition at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Lab from where he pivoted to Wall Street, and is currently a partner and researcher at hedge fund Renaissance Technologies in New York.
Vin (Vinod) Gupta
Indian American businessman and philanthropist and IIT-Kharagpur alumnus Vin Gupta, has donated $2 million to establish a curriculum for small business management at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. He has also donated an additional $500,000 to set up a scholarship fund for its science or engineering schools. In 2013, Gupta partnered with the United States department of state’s office of the global partnership initiative and the George Washington University School of Business to establish the Benjamin Kane Gupta fellows programme in the memory of his son. In 2014, he donated $1 million to the George Washington University Law School to establish the Ben Gupta Endowed Fund for international legal education. The scholarship supports students from developing countries seeking JD or LLM degrees, and those pursuing educational opportunities at the law school on a non-degree basis.
Madan Lal Sobti chair
The Madan Lal Sobti Chair for the study of contemporary India was established at the University of Pennsylvania; Penn Arts and Sciences, through the generosity of numerous Indian American alumni, parents, and friends of the university, including P.C. Chatterjee; Raman Kapur, Sreedhar Menon; Sunil Mittal; Dalip Pathak, Rajiv Sobti and Sanjiv Sobti, in 2003. The chair is named in honour of the Sobtis’ late father, Madan Lal Sobti, and supports in perpetuity a professorship held by the director of the Center for the Advanced study of India.
Sumir Chadha
A gift from Sumir Chadha of Princeton’s Class of 1993 helped establish the M.S. Chadha Center for Global India at Princeton University in 2018, which brings together scholars and students from all disciplines to broadly explore contemporary India, including its economy, politics and culture. The centre is named in honour of Chadha’s grandfather, a distinguished physician who served as the director general of health services in India. Chadha, who earned a BSE in computer science as an undergraduate, is the co-founder and managing director of WestBridge Capital Partners, a leading investment firm focused on India. He is based in Silicon Valley and serves on the boards of Princeton University and the Harvard Business School alumni association. He received an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BSE in computer science from Princeton University.
Monte Ahuja
Monte Ahuja, Ohio State alumnus; founder of Transtar Industries in Cleveland and currently chairman and CEO of MURA Holdings; donated $3.5 million to the Ohio State University to support student success and create the Monte Ahuja endowed dean’s chair. Ahuja, who earned his master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Ohio State in 1970, wanted to give back to his alma mater. Born in India and educated at Punjab Engineering College, he went to Columbus in December 1968 for graduate school and earned his master’s from the college of engineering. Ahuja then completed an MBA at Cleveland State University. Ahuja’s generosity has extended to Cleveland State University, the University Hospital System of Cleveland and Ursuline College. He had served as a trustee of the Cleveland State University board for nine years and its chairman for six years. In 2011, to show their appreciation, Cleveland State named its business school the Monte Ahuja College of Business.
Lakshmi Mittal
UK based steel magnate and executive chairman of ArcelorMittal, Lakshmi N. Mittal, and his family donated $25 million to Harvard University in 2017 to support an endowed fund for Harvard’s South Asia Institute, which was subsequently renamed Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute. The Mittal Institute engages in interdisciplinary research to advance and deepen the understanding of critical issues in South Asia and its neighbourhood.
Late Vijay Sanghvi (1935-2015), gave $2 million to fund University of Cincinnati’s endowed chair in cardiac imaging.
Sunil Puri, an alumni of Rockford University and founder and president of a prominent real estate development, redevelopment and property management company spanning the Midwest made multiple donations totalling $6 million to his alma mater.
Satish and Yasmin Gupta donated $12 million to the University of Texas at Dallas, because it was their alma mater and the place where they fell in love. They donated to construct the new building for the college of business.
Late Mohinder Sambhi (1926-2015) gave $1 million to UCLA to establish the endowed chair in Indian music, named after his late wife Mohindar Brar Sambhi.
The Sikand family gave $1 million to California State University, Los Angeles, for a faculty endowment for research in urban sustainability to commemorate Gunjit Sikand, a former civil engineering professor at the university.
