August 27, 2024
John B. Pierce Laboratory and Foundation to Gift $20 Million to Yale University
In a move to preserve and promote our mission, The John B. Pierce Laboratory, Inc. and The John B. Pierce Foundation (Pierce) have signed a letter of intent with Yale University (Yale) to donate Pierce’s assets to Yale through a series of gift transactions.
The total gift contribution is expected to be $20 million and should be fully funded to Yale within 24 months. These gifts will ensure that our assets will be used in perpetuity to sustain Pierce’s mission of promoting educational, technical, or scientific work in certain fields.
While Yale and Pierce have been formally affiliated for almost 60 years, Pierce’s gifts to Yale represent a fundamental change in the direction of Pierce away from being an independent, direct research laboratory. We expect that aligning the Pierce assets with Yale will result in greater scientific research productivity and strengthened impact of Pierce’s assets versus operating as an independent research laboratory.
“As the 100th anniversary of the Pierce Foundation approaches, our Trustees and management team have been evaluating various strategic options to best position Pierce’s resources to preserve and fulfill its mission over the long term,” said Margaret Penny Mason, President of John B. Pierce Foundation and The John B. Pierce Laboratory, Inc. “This transaction with Yale will provide the scale, stability and structure to assure that the Pierce mission is fulfilled in perpetuity,” Mason said.
“Pierce continues to face significant headwinds and challenges in competing for and retaining research scientists and grants against larger and higher profile research organizations with greater resources and more advanced facilities,” Mason said. “Yale has the resources and a strong record of attracting leading professors with a multi-disciplinary nature, and their areas of practice often lead to grants and applications that address the real-world challenges of making human life more comfortable, and that directly tracks Pierce’s mission.”
Pierce’s gift will permanently endow four to five professorships and several graduate fellowships at Yale. Each of the new Yale positions will carry the John B. Pierce name, and the new Pierce professorships will undertake innovative research and teaching in fields that are the modern descendants of the academic fields laid out by the Foundation and the Laboratory’s benefactor, John B. Pierce, more than a century ago.
As part of the gift agreement, Yale will allocate the Pierce professorships and graduate fellowships among the following Yale schools: the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the School of the Environment, the School of Medicine, the School of Public Health, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and/or the School of Architecture.
In connection with Pierce’s change in direction, we expect to wind down our Laboratory’s research operations and Foundation activities in 2025.
In addition, the Laboratory’s almost 40,000 square foot research facility will be put up for sale in the open market; marketing will begin in September. That facility is located next to the Yale School of Medicine and about one third of the facility currently houses several start-up businesses that have strong Yale roots or connections.
