Washington: An Indian-origin couple - Chandrika and Ranjan Tandon - has donated $100 million to New York University's School of Engineering. Chandrika Tandon, is Pepsico CEO Indra Nooyi's sister and is also an accomplished singer, 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 Tandon's gift will principally support faculty hiring and academic programmes. The school will be re-named the NYU Tandon School of Engineering in recognition of the Tandons' generosity and their belief in the school's mission and promise, NYU president John Sexton and Katepalli R Sreenivasan, dean of the School of Engineering, said of the announcement.
It 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, they added.
The Tandons' donation is believed to be the largest philanthropic act 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 centre in honour 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 about the donation.
