Indian-American couple gifts $100 million to New York University

WASHINGTON: An Indian-American couple has announced a $100 million gift to New York University's School of Engineering in what is believed to be the singe-largest philanthropic donation by the community.

The gift — which will principally support faculty hiring and academic programs — is intended to build on the engineering school's existing practice of cross-disciplinary innovation and entrepreneurship and achieve new levels of academic excellence in engineering, NYU president John Sexton and Katepalli R Sreenivasan, dean of the School of Engineering, said of the announcement.

The school will be renamed the NYU Tandon School of Engineering in recognition of the Tandons' generosity and their belief in the school's mission and promise, they added. The University has agreed to a challenge from the donors to raise an additional, separate $50 million, which will be principally focused on scholarship aid.

Chandrika Tandon, who happens to be Pepsico CEO Indra Nooyi's sister and is also an accomplished singer, is a member of the board of overseers of NYU's business school, a member of the NYU board of trustees, and leads the NYU president's global council. A former partner at McKinsey and Company, she is chair of Tandon Capital Associates, a financial advisory firm she founded in 1992.

She also is a Grammy-nominated musician, with an album, Soul Call, nominated for Best Contemporary World Music in 2011. Her husband, Ranjan Tandon, is an engineer by training 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.

The Tandons' donation is believed to be the largest philanthropic gift by a member of the Indian-American community. Among other major donations in recent years, Harvard Business School in 2010 received a gift of $50 million from the Tatas, the largest from an international donor in the School's 102-year history.

Indian-American physician and entrepreneur couple Kiran and Pallavi Patel donated $17.5 million some years ago to the University of South Florida. More recently, Anand Mahindra gifted $10 million to Harvard University's humanities center in honor of his mother Indira Mahindra.

"We feel privileged to be able to participate in the transformation that is happening at NYU and at the School of Engineering. The imagination and inventiveness of the students and faculty as they worked together on real world problems; the cutting-edge work being done both within the school and collaboratively across schools in such diverse areas like the arts, medicine, education, incubators; the entrepreneurial spirit that pervades the place — all this inspired us so," Chandrika Tandon said about the donation.

"More broadly, Ranjan and I are great believers in STEM education, in the applied sciences, and in the analytic and creative disciplines that such an education develops. And we want to give back to the city that has given us so much. Our hope is that this gift will bring many more of us together to reinvent engineering, advance New York's efforts to become a science and tech capital, and foster the talents of young innovators, applied scientists, and entrepreneurs. We believe this is just the beginning," she added.

Engineering was only recently restored to NYU after a 40-year absence when NYU merged with Polytechnic University in 2014. It is among several major engineering schools in the US headed by Indian-American deans and chairs, including at one time or the other, MIT (Subra Suresh) and Harvard (Venky Narayanamurti).

Since affiliating, the University said it has invested approximately $100 million in engineering, with improvements in facilities, faculty hiring, admissions, and fundraising, and has also established the related Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP). This gift will accelerate the School of Engineering's academic advancement, enabling it to develop new areas of strength in engineering and to hire additional faculty.

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