Engineer Ross M. Brown, who built and sold an industrial conglomerate for more than $400 million, is donating nearly all his wealth to promising mid-career chemistry and physics professors at a range of universities.

Caltech announced Friday morning that engineering entrepreneur and alumnus Ross M. Brown is donating $400 million to the university to support fundamental science research. However, there’s an unusual element to the generous gift, called the Ross Brown Investigators Program: It’s designed to support mid-career physics and chemistry professors–but the academics getting the financial awards won’t be at Caltech.

This is the first large gift of its kind where the recipient of the donation will turn around and give nearly all of it to faculty at other universities. “Caltech won't be eligible to receive any of the investigator awards, just because of the conflict of interest, nor will they be allowed to sit on the science advisory board. So it's really Caltech’s general interest in science itself that has led them to get to where they are,” explains Brown, who graduated from Caltech in 1956 with a degree in mechanical engineering and obtained a master's degree from the Pasadena, California university the following year.

Caltech will administer the program, while an independent review board will choose eight fellows annually from more than a dozen invited universities across the country. Each chosen investigator will receive a $2 million, five-year fellowship. Caltech will administer the program until 2070, assuming sufficient returns on invested funds.

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