Carnegie Mellon receives $25M gift for computational biology from trustee and wife

Carnegie Mellon University has received a $25 million gift from longtime Trustee Ray Lane and his wife, Stephanie, to support the institution’s Computational Biology Department.

Carnegie Mellon President Farnam Jahanian announced the gift in a note to campus Monday afternoon. He called it a “monumental investment” in an expanding area of science, one of growing visibility at the university.

The couple’s donation “will support two important priorities: creating an endowment to fuel the department’s strategic growth and providing the funding to establish the department’s future home in the new Richard King Mellon Hall of Sciences,” Jahanian wrote.

“In recognition of this investment and their prior support of the program, CMU will name the department the Ray and Stephanie Lane Computational Biology Department,” Jahanian added.

It will be the first named academic department at the 123-year-old university.

Jahanian called the couple “passionate advocates for the power and possibilities of computational biology.”

Having built a career in the tech industry, Ray served as president and chief operating officer of Oracle in the 1990s and executive chairman at Hewlett-Packard and managing partner at Kleiner Perkins, Jahanian said.

He now serves as the managing partner of GreatPoint Ventures.

Lane has served on Carnegie Mellon’s board of trustees, including as the former chair, for three decades.

The endowed fund being created “will support Carnegie Mellon’s faculty scholars in realizing life-changing discoveries and treatments while also expanding resources for talent recruitment and retention and innovative academic programming,” Jahanian wrote.

The department’s new home on Forbes Avenue is expected to be under construction next year. It is pegged to open in 2027.

The couple previously created the Ray and Stephanie Lane Professorship in Computational Biology, the Ray and Stephanie Lane Post-Doctoral Program in Computational Biology and the Raymond Lane Fellowship in Computational Biology, Jahanian said.