Students at the nation’s top universities may be familiar with the name K. Lisa Yang, it adorns science centers at Harvard, MIT, and Cornell. The retired investment banker, who donated a total of $74.5 million last year, has become a major funder of academic research aimed at preserving the planet’s ecosystems and helping people who are physically or cognitively disabled.
In February, she gifted Harvard University $30 million to set up a Brain-Body Center that would function as a sister to the one she established at MIT in 2022. And in 2024, she donated $35 million to endow a wildlife health center at Cornell and $28 million to launch an engineering and research center at MIT—the latest piece in a $200 million six-center research collective she started in 2017 with the Center for Autism Research (cofounded with her ex-husband Hock E. Tan).
“The things that we're most passionate about are the things that touch our own lives,” says Yang, who has two children on the autism spectrum.
Her research investments, which span neuroscience, therapeutics, computational modeling, and bionics, are already paying off. Her Center for Bionics at MIT is developing a promising new type of prosthesis controlled by the brain. And in February, the first human clinical trials began on a gene therapy to reverse a debilitating kind of autism caused by a gene mutation, which her Center for Autism Research helped support. Previous tests in primates restored cognitive, behavioral, and motor functions with no side effects, Yang says.
“That’s a really big deal and one of the things I’m very proud of,” Yang says.