The school will be renamed the NYU Tandon School of Engineering.
An Indian American couple has donated $100 million to New York University’s school of engineering, which is believed to be the largest philanthropic gift by a member of the Indian American community.
In a joint statement, NYU president John Sexton and Katepalli R. Sreenivasan, dean of the school of engineering, announced the gift from Chandrika and Ranjan Tandon.
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.
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, the statement said.
Thanking the couple for their generous contribution to the school, Sexton said, “This will transform engineering at NYU and will have an impact that will reach far beyond its students and faculty, beyond even NYU”.
“It will boost New York City’s — and especially Brooklyn’s — growing tech sector and, most of all, it will yield generations of innovators who, connected to NYU’s global network”, he added.
The University has agreed to a challenge from the donors to raise an additional $50 million, which will be principally focused on scholarship aid.
“We feel privileged to be able to participate in the transformation that is happening at NYU and at the School of Engineering. As a trustee of NYU, I have had a front row seat to the energy and excitement of the Global Network University and the scale of possibility it presents,” said Chandrika Tandon.
Chandrika Tandon 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 is the sister of Indra Nooyi, CEO of Pepsico Inc.
She is also 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.