The fund was teased by chancellor Nicholas S. Zeppos during a recent speech.
Vanderbilt University, a private American research university based in Nashville, Tennessee and founded by railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt with a $1m donation in 1873, is to launch a $50m university venture capital fund.
The announcement was made during the spring assembly speech by chancellor Zeppos, who gave no details on the exact date and instead referred to the institution’s current search for a new provost. It will be the latter’s honour and task to officially announce the fund.
This is the second fund to finance strategic collaboration across campus that the university will have launched, as it previously launched a $100m fund about 12 years ago. That fund allowed the institution to grow significantly by creating the Vanderbilt Institute for Nanoscale Science and Engineering, the Vanderbilt Institute of Chemical Biology and four projects focused on research in proteomics and functional biology. It also provided seed funding for 11 projects with five-year timespans.
The university is also currently refining its strategies in four areas, namely the undergraduate residential experience, trans-institutional programs, health care solutions, and educational technologies.
Chancellor Zeppos said: “The fund will be generous in size and broad in scope, and I ask you all to consider: what are the best new ways to teach and discover at the research university of the 21st century?” He added that refining the university’s strategies is a complex but continuing process and that “it is time to invest in these ideas, the people, as well as the places.”
