Andlinger ’52 gives $100 million for environmental center

Andlinger’s gift, which will fund the Gerhard R. Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment at the engineering school, is one of the biggest single alumni donations in the University’s history. Only two donations — a $100 million donation from Gordon Wu ’58 in 1996 and a $101 million donation from Peter Lewis ’55 announced in 2006 — have equaled or exceeded the size of the Andlinger donation, Director of Engineering Communications Steven Schultz said. Andlinger also donated $25 million in 2000 to establish the Andlinger Center for the Humanities.

“My hope in establishing this center [for energy and the environment] is to bring those strengths together and focus them on finding ‘cleantech’ solutions to the most important problems facing our society today,” Andlinger said in a University statement. “The work of the center will help create a better world for our children and grandchildren, which I see as a personal as well as institutional responsibility.”

Andlinger’s new gift is joined by a $4.5 million gift from Thomas Barron ’74 and his wife, Currie, which will support the Princeton Environmental Institute in its efforts to bridge environmental studies and the humanities. Barron, who was a successful businessman in New York City, now writes novels and works of non-fiction about nature and conservation.

The Barron funds will also create an endowed professorship and a student prize and is the only gift that is not specifically directed to the engineering school.

In addition to Andlinger’s gift, the engineering school will receive a $1 million Fund for Innovation in Energy and the Environment at Princeton, a gift from venture capitalist Paul Maeder ’75. The dean of the school will be able to use the funding to support non-traditional research by faculty members.

Dwight Anderson ’89, another New York investment manager, contributed funds that will go toward an endowed engineering professorship, which aims to focus on teaching and researching issues related to energy and the environment.

Schultz explained that “there is no question” that the focus of the four gifts on environmental research is due in part to the University’s focus on fundraising in that area under the Aspire campaign. According to the campaign’s website, one of the six “strategic areas” of the campaign is “engineering and a sustainable society,” which includes an emphasis on “energy and the environment.”

“Absolutely there’s a concerted effort to raise money in this area,” Schultz said. “The development people work with [potential donors] to find out what the interest of those people are and work with them to meet our needs.”

Plans for the new Andlinger Center

President Tilghman said in an interview Tuesday that the budget for constructing and funding the new Andlinger Center will be about $375 million. Tilghman has plans to hire 12 to 14 new faculty members to work, teach and conduct research in the center and to establish an “innovation fund,” which will grant faculty money to “try out new ideas” in the area of sustainable energy research.

The Andlinger Center will not constitute a new department in the engineering school, but will be an “inherently multi-disciplinary effort” that will involve “every [engineering school] department at some level,” in addition to some departments outside the engineering school, Tilghman said.

The new positions opened up by the construction of the center will be “weighted towards junior faculty,” Tilghman said, to provide scientists earlier in their in careers with research opportunities. “This is an area where we want to be supporting younger professors as well as established professors,” she explained.

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Tilghman said she hopes to raise the additional $275 million needed to construct and fund the program through additional fundraising, but said she also plans to dedicate some of the University’s “unrestricted resources” — funds the University possesses not yet tied to any specific projects — to meet the goal.

The center will be located between the E-Quad and Bowen Hall, the purple materials science building on Prospect Avenue, Tilghman explained. The location was marked as an area for a potential “Engineering Expansion” in the Campus Plan released in January.

Engineering Dean H. Vincent Poor GS ’77 said in an e-mail that he expects the Andlinger Center to integrate well into the rest of the engineering school.

“The Andlinger center will play a major role in the school, in bringing together researchers and students from many areas of engineering and other disciplines with a common interest in energy and the environment,” Poor said.

Poor emphasized that the physical proximity of the Center to the E-Quad would make interaction easy. “This energy and environment neighborhood will be connected to the E-Quad, and will be readily accessible from our other buildings as well, which will make it relatively easy for faculty, students, and staff to interact with the Center, and participate in the Center’s programs,” he said.

Careers in investment, interest in the environment

All four donors led successful careers as investors before deciding to donate some of their earnings to aiding the environment.

Andlinger came to Princeton in 1948 from his native Austria after winning a New York Herald Tribune essay contest at the age of 19. He served in the Army, pursued a long career as a business executive and is now the chairman of his own private investment corporation.

Andlinger’s son, Merrick Andlinger ’80, said in an e-mail that his father became interested in energy research and environmental sustainability through his work in the investment corporation, Andlinger & Company, which the elder Andlinger founded in 1976.

“I believe that some of the investment work we have done at Andlinger & Co. helped Gerry to see the magnitude of issues surrounding climate change, carbon trading, energy usage and clean water,” said the younger Andlinger, who serves as president of the corporation. “Starting in 2002, Andlinger & Co began to invest in these areas.”

The corporation focuses on energy, emissions reduction and waste-recovery operations.

Barron, meanwhile, managed a venture capital business in New York before being motivated by “his passion for the wonders of nature [and] his deep concern for humanity and our fragile planet” to move to Colorado and become a writer and conservationist, according to Barron’s website.

Anderson runs Ospraie Management, the commodities hedge fund that he founded in 2000. He decided to support environmental research at Princeton to “help bring to campus a leading expert in the intricacies of the energy problem,” Anderson said in a statement on the University website.

Maeder, a co-founder of Highland Capital Partners, was interested in energy and environmental issues since his days at the engineering school. According to a statement on the University website, Maeder’s interest began in a class by mechanical and aerospace engineering professor Robert Socolow.

“As much as he talked about complex variables, he could never stop talking about energy issues,” Maeder said in the statement. “He absolutely transformed my thinking, and I haven’t forgotten it for the last 30 years.”