Billionaire venture capitalist John Doerr is donating $1.1 billion to Stanford University to create a new school focused on climate change and sustainability, the school said in an announcement on Wednesday.
The gift from Doerr and his wife Ann is the largest in the university’s history and will create the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, which is slated to launch this fall.
In the statement, Stanford said the new school will house traditional academic departments that concentrate on energy science and climate change, as well as a new sustainability accelerator focused “on developing near-term policy and technology solutions.”
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Their gift is the second-largest donation ever made to an academic institution, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, behind Michael Bloomberg’s $1.8 billion gift to Johns Hopkins University in 2018.
“Today’s real and pressing challenges — not least, solving our climate crisis — require that knowledge be channeled toward the building of practical, implementable solutions,” John and Ann Doerr said on Wednesday, adding that the school will be a “model for the interdisciplinary collaboration required to solve this existential challenge — and set a new standard for scholarship in the 21st century.”
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Doerr is the chairman of venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins and is estimated to have a net worth of roughly $11.1 billion, according to Forbes. Last year, Doerr published a book detailing his thoughts on how to prevent climate change and has said he believes figuring out how to stop global warming represents the “greatest economic opportunity of our lifetimes.”