That’s $350 million, all from graduates Dr. Gerald Lok-chung Chan and Ronnie Chi-chung Chan — so much money that Harvard has decided to rename an entire school after their father: The T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Matthew R. Zubrow at The Dartmouth Review has the story:

Harvard Continues Trend of Large Collegiate Donations

On Monday, September 8th, Harvard University ecstatically announced that it had received the single largest gift in its three hundred and seventy-eight year history. Brothers Dr. Gerald Lok-chung Chan and Ronnie Chi-chung Chan of Hong Kong principally donated the $350 million unrestricted contribution through their education-focused charity, the Morningside Foundation. The Morningside Foundation is the philanthropic unit of the Chans’ private equity and venture capital firm, the Morningside Group.

The money will go to Harvard’s School of Public Health, from which Dr. Gerald Chan obtained two degrees in the seventies—a master’s in medical radiological physics and a doctorate in radiology. After producing substantial post-doctoral research he chose, however, to enter the fields of business and finance rather than that of medicine. His deep technical knowledge, however, was later used quite extensively in deciding some of Dr. Chan’s biotechnology-related investments. Dr. Gerald Chan chose not to follow the footsteps of his wealthy, real estate mogul father, the late Chan Tseng-His – in whose honor the targeted school at Harvard will be renamed. Dr. Gerald Chan instead went into entrepreneurship, venture capital, and private equity by founding the aforementioned Morningside Group with his brother in 1986.

By astutely investing in mostly biotech and technology companies which did everything from developing water filtration membranes, solar-paneled roofing, complete clones of human DNA, systems for targeting cancer, and a mobile app to aid in the early detection of Autism (and also by being one of the first to invest heavily in Chinese tech companies), Chan used Morningside to grow his personal fortune considerably, and the group now has a market capitalization of more than $7.5 billion. Chan’s brother Ronnie took over the real estate company that their father founded, the Hang Lung Group, which is one of the largest developers in Hong Kong. He presently serves as its chairman. Together, Gerald, who now resides in Newton, Massachusetts, and Ronnie, who still lives in their native Hong Kong, are estimated to be worth upwards of $3 billion dollars according to Forbes. The tycoon also has made headlines recently for gradually buying up more than $100 million worth of Harvard Square real estate. Significantly, the rebranding of the institution as the T H Chan School of Public Health marks the first time that Harvard will be naming one of its schools in recognition of a gift and only the second school there to bear the name of an individual, after the John F. Kennedy School of Government, which was named as thus in 1966.