Cockrell School of Engineering
Previously known as the College of Engineering, on July 11, 2007, the University of Texas at Austin renamed the College after 1936 graduate Ernest Cockrell Jr., whose family has over the past 30 years helped to build a $140 million endowment for the College.
Peter O'Donnell (Texas)
In 1957, O'Donnell and his wife, the former Edith Jones (born c. 1926), a graduate in psychology from the University of Texas at Austin, founded the O'Donnell Foundation, with the principal goal of improving higher education in Texas. He is the president and she the secretary of the foundation. The two have contributed tens of millions of dollars, much of it anonymously, toward various educational entities, both public and private. The O'Donnell Foundation is the fifth largest independent foundation in Dallas. In 1983, the UT regents established the Peter O'Donnell, Jr., Centennial Chair in Computing Systems."No one in history has had a greater impact on science and engineering in Texas than Peter O'Donnell," said J. Tinsley Oden, the mathematician and engineering professor and director of the UT Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences.