A $20 million gift to Cornell from an alumnus will launch major new instructional and research initiatives in science and engineering and provide state-of-the-art facilities in growing technologies for electronic and photonic devices, biotechnology and advanced materials processing.
President Hunter R. Rawlings announced the gift from David A. Duffield, president, chief executive officer, chairman and founder of PeopleSoft Inc. of Pleasanton, Calif., a leading developer of software for manufacturing, distribution, financial and human resource management and for higher education, at the annual Cornell President's Circle Dinner in New York City, Wednesday evening. Duffield has a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering (1963) and a master's degree in business administration (1964) from Cornell.
Duffield's gift, one of the largest ever presented to Cornell, will be the lead gift in support of the construction of a new campus facility, initially called the Engineering Research and Instructional Facility and now to be named after Duffield, that will include flexible laboratory space and multimedia classrooms for training the next generation of scientists and engineers at the nanostructure frontier -- the understanding of materials at the atomic and molecular level that make technological advances possible.
Duffield Hall, which ultimately will cost some $40 million, will be built on Cornell's Ithaca campus. Additional fund-raising is underway in support of the project.
"David Duffield's leadership gift enables us to begin a major new academic initiative in critical technologies," said Rawlings. "We are grateful for his vision and his confidence in Cornell. Our students and faculty will benefit from Dave's generosity for generations to come."
"I am very pleased to be able to share some of PeopleSoft's success with Cornell University," said Duffield. "It is no secret that Cornell graduates -- and I had the pleasure of graduating twice -- keep a very warm place in their hearts for this superb institution. The education, both academic and social, that I received at Cornell enabled me to develop technical, analytical, interpersonal and important decision-making skills which have served me well as an entrepreneur and business person. I am also proud of the fact that Cornell University has become a strategic partner of PeopleSoft in the college and university marketplace."
The new facility will allow Cornell to train the next generation of engineers with faculty doing leading-edge research that will be of keen interest to industry in a facility that closely resembles that used by industry -- with clean rooms that eliminate contamination and are shielded from vibration and electromagnetic interference, the newest technology to meet and exceed environmental standards and flexible space to allow researchers to adapt to changing needs. It will provide an interactive environment that will bring together multiple academic disciplines within engineering and related fields and will be a major focus of Cornell engineering education for the next decade and beyond.
"Duffield Hall will enable Cornell to keep pace with the changing demands of interdisciplinary science and engineering required for education and research as we enter the next century and for the next 25 years," said John Hopcroft, the Joseph Silbert Dean of Engineering at Cornell. "The new building will meet the research and instructional requirements of Cornell's faculty and students for the next few decades. The interdisciplinary nature of science and engineering education and research that we will undertake in this new facility will give us a strong competitive advantage."
Important areas such as unique materials, optical communication links, better and faster information storage, miniature robots for probing at the atomic level, and devices for diagnostics or minuscule prosthetics all will be the focus of research and instruction in the new facility.
Such goals require a new way of doing research, Hopcroft said. "The new mode of operation, involving interdepartmental faculty cooperation, is replacing one in which individual faculty members maintain a research program separate from others. A facility for the next 25 years must support complex tasks that require sophisticated teams of faculty and students. The Duffield building will be that facility."
Existing facilities, such as the Cornell Nanofabrication Facility and the Materials Science Center, are already leaders in advanced interdisciplinary research but are at capacity and cannot be expanded. The new facility will allow researchers to build on the considerable strengths of Cornell's existing expertise. It will accommodate many newer, more advanced analytical instruments, some currently available and others on the horizon.
"The new facility will give us a cost-effective means of responding to industry demands, pushing the envelope of research in critical areas and educating future scientists and engineers for the new millennium," Hopcroft said.
Duffield has made significant technical and functional contributions to the development of enterprise applications software over the last 20 years. He directs PeopleSoft's management team and sets the tone for the company's hardworking, yet casual, corporate culture. PeopleSoft, named by Fortune magazine in 1994, 1995 and 1996 as one of the fastest-growing companies in America, is known for its "outrageous customer service."
Duffield established two mainframe application software companies before founding PeopleSoft: He was president, chair and chief product architect at Integral Systems, a California-based vendor of the first DB2-based human resource and accounting systems that grew under his leadership into a multi-product, international concern with revenues of $57 million; and he was a co-founder of Information Associates, where he was instrumental in the development of systems for the higher education market.
He began his career at IBM as a marketing representative and systems engineer.