Cornell Receives $100 Million Donation From Ann Bowers

Cornell University in Ithaca, NY announced it has a received a $100 million-plus donation from alumnus Ann S. Bowers ’59 that will create a new College of Computing and Information Science (CIS) in her name.

(Photo above: Ann Bowers at a Cornell event in 2017. Cornell Chronicle)

The exact amount of the donation wasn’t released but only described as a nine-figure gift.

Martha Pollack, President of Cornell, said in a statement, “This is a transformational gift that will ensure capacity for CIS to continue its exceptional growth, and to further build its preeminence in the fields of computing, information science, statistics and data science. The gift will also provide support for the construction of a new building that will create much needed space for current and future faculty and students.”

Bowers was one of the first human resource executives at tech companies Intel and Apple in Silicon Valley. She was also married to Robert Noyce, a founder of Intel and Fairchild Semiconductor. Noyce passed away in 1990.

Her massive donation will create the Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science at Cornell that will support faculty and a new building for the school. The building is sorely needed since nearly half of undergraduates at Cornell are taking at least one class in the field, which has seen increased enrollment over the past several years.

This will be the first building on the Cornell campus named after a woman and according to the University, 43% of CIS majors are women, above the national average.