The Largest Gift in Boston University History
September 14, 2017
Dear Friends,
I am writing you this morning to convey exciting news about our Campaign, Choose to Be Great. Five years ago we embarked on the first comprehensive campaign in Boston University’s history with the audacious goal of raising $1 billion in five years—a goal we met well ahead of schedule. Our campaign total has reached almost $1.3 billion—well beyond our original target and within a stone’s throw of the $1.5 billion goal that the Trustees set because of our success achieving the initial goal.
The impact of the campaign is tangible throughout the University, in 64 new endowed professorships, new scholarships and fellowships for undergraduate and graduate students, new facilities, and in endowed academic programs. The campaign has provided a wonderful platform from which to describe today’s Boston University to our alumni and friends. I am continuously inspired by the successes of the alumni I have met through the course of the campaign—successes built on the education received here. And I have been deeply gratified by the abiding commitment to Boston University that our alumni have expressed in myriad, tangible ways. To date, some 141,000 devoted alumni and friends have contributed to our campaign.
Today marks another milestone in the campaign and for Boston University. At 3:30 pm we will officially open our new Center for Integrated Life Sciences & Engineering. At the dedication ceremony we will announce that Trustee Rajen Kilachand (Questrom MBA’74, Hon.’14) has made a gift of $115 million to Boston University for research at the intersection of life sciences and engineering. The gift establishes a $100 million endowment that will support in perpetuity research in these important areas. The gift, which also supports the construction of the center, is the largest in Boston University’s history.
In recognition of the magnificent generosity of Mr. Kilachand, the center will be named the Rajen Kilachand Center for Integrated Life Sciences & Engineering. You will recall that in 2011 Mr. Kilachand endowed the Arvind and Chandan Nandlal Kilachand Honors College—in memory of his parents—and supported the renovation of Kilachand Hall with gifts of $35 million.
As you can see described in BU Today, the new Kilachand Center brings together life scientists, engineers, and physicians from the Medical and Charles River Campuses, and will eventually house about 160 researchers, postdoctoral scholars, and staff, as well as 270 graduate students. It is designed to encourage collaboration among the researchers housed there. These include the Biological Design Center, where genomic technologies are combined with engineering methodologies to understand biological pathways and use them to make new molecules and tissues, and the Center for Systems Neuroscience, where researchers explore the ways nerve cells in different regions of the brain interact to guide functions such as learning, memory, speech, perception, and attention. At the Center for Research in Sensory Communication & Emerging Neural Technology, neuroscientists and sensory physiologists will study hearing, speech, and language. The Kilachand Center also houses the Cognitive Neuroimaging Center and its new 3 Tesla MRI scanner.
Boston University is on a journey to continually increase the quality and impact of our research and education programs. Rajen Kilachand’s transformative gift, supporting the endowed fund and state-of-the-art facility that we are announcing—and celebrating—today moves us significantly farther along this path. We are deeply grateful to Mr. Kilachand for his support.
Sincerely,
Robert A. Brown
President