University of California, Berkeley recently announced Li Ka Shing Foundation has given $40 million to establish a research center focused on new scientific fields - including stem cell biology and brain imaging - that could provide solutions to today's major health problems.
In recognition of Li's generosity, the university will name the new facility the Li Ka Shing Center for Biomedical and Health Sciences.
The donation is the largest international gift in the history of UC Berkeley and will allow the campus to start planning for the Li Ka Shing Center for Biomedical and Health Sciences, which will replace Warren Hall, current home of the School of Public Health. Groundbreaking for the $160 million research building, one of the cornerstones of the campus's Health Sciences Initiative, is slated for 2007, with construction to be completed in 2009.
The Li center will house the Henry H. Wheeler Jr. Brain Imaging Center, part of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, as well as scientists tackling the complexities of cancer, brain diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, infectious diseases such as the worldwide killers HIV and dengue fever, and stem cell biology.
Li Ka-shing, one of the world's leading philanthropists and entrepreneurs, maintains a long-standing commitment to the advancement of education and the healthcare sciences, in part because he was forced to abandon his formal education at the age of 12 when his father died of illness. In 1980, he established the Li Ka Shing Foundation to coordinate support of education and medical care as "twin pillars of society." Last month, he donated $128 million, the largest contribution in the history of Asia, to the medical program at the University of Hong Kong.
Li's involvement with UC Berkeley started in 1998 when the foundation provided $100,000 for two years of support for the Berkeley Scholars Program. Prior to this latest gift, the foundation's contributions to UC Berkeley totaled $1.4 million, including an endowment for the Li Ka Shing Chair in Health Management at the Haas School of Business.
The campus's Health Sciences Initiative was launched in 1999 to apply state-of-the-art tools in the physical sciences and engineering to the most pressing problems of biomedicine.