Columbia Receives $200 Million Donation

Columbia Spectator
News

DANIELLA ZALCMAN�CDS








Michael Bloomberg, Dawn Greene, and Lee Bollinger
attend a press conference announcing Greene�s
$200 million donation toward the creation of a
building named for her late husband.


Columbia Receives $200 Million Donation
By Daniella ZalcmanSpectator Staff Writer
March 21, 2006

The wife of the late Jerome Greene, CC �26 and Law �28, has donated $200 million to Columbia University for the creation of the Jerome L. Greene Science Center as part of Columbia�s continuing Mind, Brain and Behavior Initiative.

University President Lee Bollinger announced the gift, the largest the University has ever received, at a press conference in Low Library Monday morning.

Dawn Greene�s donation, which is also the largest private gift ever received by an American university for a single facility, will fund the construction of a research center led by Nobel laureates and professors Eric Kandel and Richard Axel and professor Thomas Jessell, as part of Columbia�s proposed Manhattanville expansion.

�To have this kind of laboratory facility led by these great scientists and the others that they will bring in is an extraordinary thing,� Bollinger said. The new center will focus on neuroscientific research concerning brain behavior, gene function, diseases like Parkinson�s and Alzheimer�s, and disorders like autism and schizophrenia.

�Columbia has been strong in neuroscience historically, and this puts it into another league,� Kandel said.

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COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
The Jerome L. Greene Science Center, made possible
by a $200 million gift from Dawn Greene, will serve
as major step forward for Columbia�s proposed
Manhattanville campus.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Representative Charlie Rangel (D-Harlem) also attended the event, and each spoke briefly about the effect the new center would have on the future of scientific research.

Prior to this gift, the Greenes donated an estimated $40 million to University projects. Jerome Greene himself contributed to the Law School, helping to establish the Greene, Liebman, and Sovern Scholarships and the Jerome Greene Fund for Clinical Education, as well as giving his name to Jerome Greene Hall which houses the Columbia Law School. Dawn Greene has continued his philanthropic work since his death in 1999 with the Jerome L. Greene Foundation, funding endowments and research at the Mailman School of Public Health.

Bollinger spoke at length in the Low Rotunda where Greene, Bloomberg, Rangel, and Kandel sat with several other University professors and administrators.

�We will reinforce Columbia�s role as an international leader in neuroscience research by bringing together the latest minds and technology to explore the gaps in our knowledge,� Bollinger said.

�It [the Center] will also allow Columbia to reach out to other areas not conventionally touched by neuroscience, like the arts, economics, the law, psychology and sociology,� Kandel said. �We will be creating bridges between neuroscience and other disciplines concerned with the nature of the human mind.�

�The Jerome L. Greene Science Center, on our proposed Manhattanville campus, will forever symbolize our ongoing effort to understand the human organism,� said Bollinger, in a press release. �It will also, in very practical ways, lead to cures for diseases and a deeper grasp of our behavior as individuals and societies.�