David Atkinson and his wife Patricia are giving Cornell $80 million to create the David R. Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, the University will announce Thursday evening. The gift is the largest individual gift ever given to a university for sustainability research, according to a University press release.
The new center will be “a permanent, major research center focusing on challenges in the global energy, environmental and economic development arenas,” the press release says. The center replaces a pilot program created in 2007 by a $3 million donation from Atkinson.
“The center will be a source of unbiased information, a catalyst bringing knowledge from different disciplines together to address sustainability, and a partner with entrepreneurs, businesses, NGOs and governments to magnify the impact of the knowledge and ingenuity at Cornell in moving society toward a more sustainable future,” Atkinson said, according to the statement. […]
“Chemists are meeting economists, biologists are meeting sociologists, and so on, and the faculty is coalescing Cornell into a living and learning laboratory for sustainability,” said Prof. Frank DiSalvo, chemistry, the center’s director.
Read the full story at the Cornell Daily Sun.
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