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August 28, 2024

New Haven-based Pierce Lab, scientific foundation to bestow $20M in gifts to Yale

Google Part of Science Hill at Yale University in New Haven
By Hanna Snyder Gambini

Yale University will receive nearly $20 million in donations from a local science and education-based foundation.

The John B. Pierce Laboratory Inc. and the John B. Pierce Foundation have pledged to donate Pierce’s assets to Yale through a series of gifts, totaling $20 million, within two years. 

The gifts will be used in perpetuity to sustain Pierce’s mission of promoting educational, technical or scientific work in certain fields.

The Pierce Foundation will soon mark its 100th anniversary, and trustees along with the management team “have been evaluating various strategic options to best position Pierce’s resources to preserve and fulfill its mission over the long term,” said Margaret Penny Mason, president of John B. Pierce Foundation and laboratory. 

Pierce has had an affiliation with the university for more than six decades, and the gifts “will result in greater scientific research productivity and strengthened impact of Pierce’s assets versus operating as an independent research laboratory,” Pierce Foundation officials said.

Pierce expects to wind down its laboratory research operations and foundation activities in 2025, and put up for sale the nearly 40,000-square-foot research facility, next to the Yale School of Medicine, in September. 

About one third of the facility currently houses several start-up businesses that have Yale roots or connections.

“Pierce continues to face significant headwinds and challenges in competing for and retaining research scientists and grants against larger and higher profile research organizations with greater resources and more advanced facilities,” Mason said. “Yale has the resources and a strong record of attracting leading professors with a multi-disciplinary nature, and their areas of practice often lead to grants and applications that address the real-world challenges of making human life more comfortable, and that directly tracks Pierce’s mission.”

Yale will allocate the Pierce professorships and graduate fellowships among the following Yale schools: the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the School of the Environment, the School of Medicine, the School of Public Health, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and/or the School of Architecture.

Pierce’s gift will permanently endow four to five professorships and several graduate fellowships at Yale.

Each of the new Yale positions will carry the John B. Pierce name, and the new Pierce professorships will undertake innovative research and teaching in fields that are the modern descendants of the academic fields laid out by Pierce more than a century ago, foundation officials said.

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