By ALLISSA KLINE AND TRACEY DRURY
akline@bizjournals.com | 716-541-1612

An anonymous donation of $40 million to the University at Buffalo will be used to jump-start the brand-new Clinical Translational Research Center on the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus and help UB push forward with its plans to construct a new medical school.

The gift  was scheduled to be announced at 10:30 a.m. Wednesday at the New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics & Life Sciences in downtown Buffalo. It is the single largest donation from an individual in UB's history. It tops a $10 million gift made in 2008 by UB Council Chairman Jeremy Jacobs and $10.8 million in donations made by UB alum John Kapoor.

"This is really a tremendously exciting and historic gift for UB," President Satish Tripathi said earlier this week. "It is a kind of inspirational example of the appreciation that alumni have for UB ... and it provides recognition that UB is a major public research institution. It opens other doors."

The donor is a deceased physician who earned his medical degree from UB during World War II, according to university officials. He made his fortune by investing in the financial markets, in hopes of one day being able to make a single gift to his alma mater, UB said.

The donor, who will remain anonymous, requested that his gift be used for the priorities of UB's medical school dean. Michael Cain, dean of the  School of Medicine & Biomedical Sciences, said an unrestricted gift is the most useful kind of gift.

"It's the best (kind) of philanthropy in which donors provide funds that are really unrestricted and can be used by university leadership to fulfill the goals needing to be fulfilled at certain points of time," Cain said. "It becomes a very valuable resource because, as you fulfill your strategic plan, you have funds that can be used for teaching, for research, to help support infrastructure and you can use the monies to fund those different components with flexibility."

Part of the money will be used to hire 28 new physician scientists, along with their individual staff and technicians, to work in the 32 new labs at the research center. It will also pay for top-of-the-line equipment in the research center. In total, between $18 million and $20 million will be spent on equipment and buildings, Cain said. The research center will be shared with Kaleida Health's Heart & Brain Center.

In recent years, pieces of the medical school have moved downtown, including the Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics & Biomedical Sciences and co-located space at Roswell Park Cancer Institute and Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute. Some 30 existing faculty are set to move downtown to work in the new research center, set to open in six or seven months. This summer, UB identified a parking lot of Main Street between High and Goodrich streets as the likely site for a combined facility to house a new Women & Children's Hospital and UB's medical school.

An endowment will be established for part of the gift, but it is unclear how much of the money will be endowed. A university spokesperson said the donor did not specify any sort of endowment requirements. Currently, UB's endowment fund totals $428.9 million, the spokesperson said.

A donation of this magnitude doesn't happen overnight, Tripathi said. He estimated that discussions between the donor and the university began eight or 10 years ago.