Transforming Healthcare
On September 18, 2017, the University of California, Irvine, announced the largest gift in its history: $200 million from Susan & Henry Samueli, to name a first-of-its-kind College of Health Sciences focused on interdisciplinary integrative health. The far-reaching donation—the seventh-largest to a single public university—positions UCI as a bold, new leader in population health, patient care, education and research.
The Susan & Henry Samueli College of Health Sciences is now a vibrant home to faculty, students and staff of the UCI schools of medicine, nursing, pharmacy & pharmaceutical sciences, public & population health, the Susan Samueli Integrative Health Institute and other centers of excellence. Professionals in these schools and units will work with colleagues in UCI’s schools of engineering, law, business, computer science, social sciences, physical sciences and biological sciences and across the UCI Health system to improve medical care and study the future of human health.
We must change what we mean by ‘healthcare’ and how we train all who provide care, including physicians, nurses and pharmacists.
Susan Samueli
We are very excited for the UCI College of Health Sciences to become a national model for integrative health. We believe this model will eventually become the standard approach for promoting health and well-being in our society.
Henry Samueli
Susan and Henry Samueli’s dedication, their vision for what is possible and their deep generosity will help UCI set a standard that, over time, other medical centers in the U.S. can follow.
UCI Chancellor Howard Gillman
Our students, scientists and practitioners work across disciplines with open minds… [to] provide cutting-edge care that’s patient-centered, science-based, transdisciplinary and team-delivered.
Dr. Steve Goldstein, vice chancellor for Health Affairs
The Samueli Legacy
For nearly 20 years, Henry and Susan Samueli have played a major role in UCI’s growth, and their $200 million pledge for the health sciences is merely a capstone to their commitment to philanthropy. Through generous gifts by their foundation and other holdings, the Samuelis have previously donated more than $70 million to UCI.
For Converged Science
Their legacy of giving can be seen across campus, especially at the Henry Samueli School of Engineering, which benefits from a $30 million gift from the Samueli Foundation that helped fund a state-of-the-art convergent science building, expanding UCI’s ability to conduct large-scale, collaborative and cross-disciplinary research in engineering, computing and physical sciences.
The Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Building (ISEB) serves UCI’s Henry Samueli School of Engineering, the Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Science, and the School of Physical Sciences. Inspired by the University’s commitment to interdisciplinary science and engineering research and its potential to solve the challenges of today and the future, the building is a catalyst for research innovation as well as a new model of cross-disciplinary collaboration. Every aspect of the building’s design is conceived to optimize research functionality, foster social performance and enrich the overall campus experience.
In 1999, the Henry Samueli School of Engineering received a $20 million naming gift, which in part endowed 10 chairs and professorships and funded two scholarships and one graduate fellowship. In addition, a $2 million endowment from the Samueli Foundation established the UCI/Israeli Scholar Exchange Endowment for Engineering Science Program in 2007, which supports research activities, international collaborations and educational activities with Israeli universities to build bridges between UCI engineers and their Israeli counterparts, solidifying the Samueli School’s role as a global leader among engineering schools.
To date, the exchange program has supported six international engineering conferences. The annual conferences, which rotate between UCI and Israel, each feature an area of emerging technology. Past conferences advanced discussion about communications, medical technologies and artificial intelligence.
Upon launching the program, Henry Samueli said his hope was that it would “build new bridges between the engineering industry and the world’s great research universities, ultimately benefiting both science and industry.”
For Integrative Health
The Susan Samueli Integrative Health Institute, embedded within the new Susan & Henry College of Health Sciences’ 110,000-square-foot complex at the corner of California Avenue and Michael Drake Drive, opened its doors to patients in fall 2022. The Institute emerged from a long-standing commitment to integrative medicine. In 2001, Susan and Henry Samueli gave $5.7 million to establish the Institute’s first iteration: UCI’s Susan Samueli Center for Integrative Medicine. With their subsequent gift to the colleage of health sciences, the center became the Susan Samueli Integrative Health Institute and positioned UCI to become the preeminent national and international academic institution for pioneering, multidisciplinary research and developing education and healthcare practices for whole-person care.
Other Philanthropy
The Samuelis have also made major donations to UCLA, naming the Henry Samueli School of Engineering & Applied Science, and Chapman University, creating the Sala & Aron Samueli Holocaust Memorial Library. They helped found the Samueli Academy, a public charter high school in Santa Ana for community, underserved and foster teens. Since 1998, when their foundation was started, the Samuelis have committed over $500 million to philanthropy, primarily in the areas of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education, integrative health, youth services, youth hockey and Jewish culture.
