One of the most successful pharmacist couples in the world are to use their wealth to help students in financial need achieve their dreams at the alma mater which helped launch their careers, De Montfort University Leicester (DMU).
Dr Vijay Patel, Chief Executive Officer of Waymade Healthcare, and his wife Smita will make the single biggest donation by individuals in DMU’s history to provide a series of bursaries and pay for cutting-edge equipment for the university’s Pharmacy department.
Dr Patel, a graduate of DMU’s Leicester School of Pharmacy, and Mrs Patel – herself a pharmacy graduate with first class honours – will donate £1million to help financially-disadvantaged students and to pay for an extruder, a specialist machine capable of producing medicine at a very high rate.
Dr Patel said he wanted to give something back to the university which helped him achieve his success.
He said: “It was at De Montfort University where I learned many of the skills which have helped define my career. Not only academic skills but confidence and ambition, the feeling that I could go into the world and make the future I wanted for myself.
“Education and the university experience is the bedrock for what we have achieved and we want to be able to help make sure as many people as possible have the chance to experience this.”
The bursaries awarded through Dr Patel’s donation will be known as Waymade Scholarships and be available to full-time and part-time undergraduate students, awarded annually from the start of the 2016-17 academic year.
In recognition of this donation, the new building to house the Faculty of Art, Design and Humanities will be named the Vijay Patel Building.
A newly refurbished laboratory in the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences will be named after Dr Patel’s wife, Smita.
