Jeremy Jacobs stands out for his financial contributions to the University at Buffalo to help find cures for vascular disease.
Referring to SportsBusiness Journal’s “Champions” series, school President Satish Tripathi said, “He’s our champion, too.”
Tripathi speaks from the heart about Jacobs’ benevolence. Delaware North’s chairman is a 1960 graduate of UB’s School of Management, and over the years he has donated more than $50 million to his hometown university.
Tripathi first got to know Jacobs after becoming provost in 2004. Jacobs has served as chair for a few school programs, including the UB Foundation, the school’s nonprofit fundraising group, and the UB Council, which helps select the school’s president. For the past five years, they’ve worked closely together to help shape the school’s future.
“Jerry really is somebody who, first of all, is our most distinguished alumni, and our most steadfast supporter,” Tripathi said. “But it’s not only his philanthropy. He’s providing insight over how we go out and raise further funds for university causes.”
A key driver for Jacobs’ donations has been to keep his brother’s memory alive. The late Dr. Lawrence Jacobs was a renowned neurologist and chairman of UB’s neurology department. One of Jeremy Jacobs’ first gifts to the school was a $10 million donation to form the Jacobs Institute in 2008, a nonprofit group dedicated to improving the treatment of vascular disease. The institute, which opened in 2012, honors Lawrence Jacobs, a pioneer in the use of interferon, a protein produced by white blood cells to fight infection, to help treat multiple sclerosis. He died of cancer in 2001.
Most recently, Jacobs’ gift of $30 million in September 2015, the second-largest donation in school history, helps fund the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, UB’s medical school renamed for the Jacobs family.
His latest donation is tied to the school’s decision five years ago to move its medical school from the main campus to downtown Buffalo to put it closer to the city’s hospitals and UB’s Buffalo-Niagara medical campus. The $375 million facility is under construction and will open in 2017. Jacobs’ donation is designed to boost the school’s recruiting of top medical professionals.
It has been a major endeavor for the school to build downtown, but the project has helped change the “whole tenor” in terms of the city’s redevelopment, Tripathi said.
The same is true for Delaware North’s new $110 million headquarters, which opened last fall about a mile southwest of the new medical school site. The gleaming 12-story building has seven floors of office space. It sits above the 119-room Westin Buffalo Hotel, a full-service restaurant and 18,000 square feet of retail space. Delaware North plans to run the hotel, and Patina Restaurant Group, one of its food-service subsidiaries, will operate the restaurant.
“He has a commitment to downtown,” Tripathi said. “They could have moved anywhere with their headquarters — they have businesses all over the world. His family, and Jerry in particular, have been very strongly advocating the growth of downtown, not only by doing what they do through Delaware North but also promoting UB’s interests and other companies that are there.”
