How A Former Citigroup Chairman’s $185 Million Gift For Neuroscience Has Already Led To…

Five years ago, philanthropists Sanford I. “Sandy” and Joan Weill announced a $185 million donation for neuroscience at UC San Francisco. Their goal: create a neuroscience center that would accelerate understanding of the brain and support the development of treatments for disorders such as autism, depression and schizophrenia.

Last week, scientists finished moving into the UCSF Weill Neurosciences Building, a new six-story structure that houses the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences, encompassing both researchers and patient care at the university’s Mission Bay campus in San Francisco.

“One of the things we wanted was to have psychiatry become part of neuroscience,” Sandy Weill, the 88-year-old former CEO and chairman of Citigroup, explains during an interview at the couple’s hilltop home in Sonoma, north of San Francisco. The Weills have been keen to minimize the stigma that has been attached to mental health in our society. They also wanted the building to be an architecturally pleasing, welcome place for researchers to work.

Exciting advances in research from those affiliated with the Weill Institute have already emerged. Dr. Edward Chang, chairman of neurological surgery at UCSF, and colleagues David Moses, Sean Metzger and Jessie R. Liu, published research in the New England Journal of Medicine over the summer about their work to implant a device in a paralyzed man’s brain that has enabled him to speak for the first time since he suffered a stroke in 2003; an article in the New York Times detailed the process. In another hopeful development, Dr. Katherine Scangos, assistant professor of psychiatry at UCSF, working with Dr. Chang, achieved success implanting a device in the brain of a woman with severe treatment-resistant depression—a sort of “pacemaker for the brain”—that put the woman’s depression at bay. Most recently, researchers Samuel Pleasure and Christopher Bartley published a study in JAMA Neuroscience examining how immune responses to Covid-19 may have led to severe psychiatric symptoms in three teenagers.

“The big vision for neuroscience at UCSF has been to be on the cutting edge of science related to human health, and to bring the science to the clinic and the community,” explains Dr. Matthew State, who chairs UCSF’s department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. “There’s been tremendous progress. But neurologists would tell you that there’s more that they don’t know than they do know. There are still a lot of complex and challenging problems to work out.” 

Seeking to expand collaboration among researchers, in November 2019 the Weills announced the Weill Neurohub, a research network with UCSF, UC Berkeley and the University of Washington. The network, funded with a new $106 million pledge from the Weill Family Foundation, brings together neuroscientists with researchers in other disciplines—engineering, computer science, physics, chemistry and mathematics—to accelerate developments to treat disease of the brain and the nervous system.

The Neurohub idea was birthed after a boat trip organized by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen. Before he died of cancer in October 2018, Allen had invited about 150 people on a trip around China and Japan on a yacht he’d chartered, a sort of symposium at sea with lectures and entertainment. (Allen had asked his sister Jody Allen to make sure the trip happened even if he wasn’t alive for it—and she did, the Weills say.) On that trip, in March 2019, the Weills met Tom Daniel, a professor of biology from the University of Washington, who introduced them to Univ. of Washington President Ana Mari Cauce, a Cuban immigrant with a doctorate in psychology.

“We just hit it off,” recalls Sandy Weill, who loved the idea of uniting three world class public institutions—UCSF, UC Berkeley and Univ. of Washington—in part because they are in regions of the U.S. home to companies making a difference in the world, including in health and biomedicine.  

Joan Weill has worked to create connections among the various arms of research— neuroscience, neurosurgery and psychiatry. On one occasion before the pandemic, despite concern from the head of the neuroscience department that it wouldn’t fly, Joan hosted a square dance party at the couple’s Sonoma home for neuroscience and psychiatry researchers and their spouses. “I grew up in North Hollywood and we used to square dance,” says Joan. “It’s a great way to get people together. I would do it again.”

Sandy admires the collaboration he’s seen among the researchers at UCSF. “They really believe in collaboration. I was used to places where how you got ahead was you knocked down the person in the next room,” he says.

Sandy Weill, who grew up in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn, graduated from Cornell University and worked for decades in stock brokerages and the securities business, first at Bear Stearns and then at firms he founded with others before leading American Express. His biggest deal was the $76 billion merger of insurance giant Travelers Group with Citicorp in 1998 to form Citigroup. He served as CEO until 2003 and chairman until 2006. He first appeared on The Forbes 400 list in 1997 with an estimated net worth of $725 million based on his Travelers’ stock, and became a billionaire in 1999. Because the Weills have pledged some $1 billion to institutions including Cornell University, UC San Francisco and Carnegie Hall, Forbes estimates that Sandy Weill is no longer a billionaire. A spokesman says Weill won’t comment on his net worth.

The Weills have come a long way since they started their foundation in 1967. “I have the original checkbook where we made 3 gifts in our first year of existence. Two of the gifts were for $10 each and one was for $100,” Sandy recalls. In 1998 they met with the dean of Cornell’s medical school, who told the Weills he wanted to name the school after them. Sandy asked what that would require, and eventually the dean told them it would need to be the biggest donation that the university had gotten—it had to be a nine-figure-gift.

“We decided to do it,” says Sandy. “Philanthropy isn’t just giving money. It’s about being involved personally and using whatever we know to be helpful. Our experiences in life have been very different from a lot of the great people who understand medicine and data, and we felt really terrific about it.”

The Weills, signatories of the Giving Pledge, eventually pledged $600 million to Cornell. Their gifts to UCSF will reach nearly $300 million. Some of the donations have come from the Weill Family Foundation. The couple have made direct donations as well.