Two Rice University alumni with engineering degrees — he a famed venture capitalist, she an environmental activist — have given their alma mater $15 million to transform the way engineers are educated.

The gift from the Benificus Foundation, a private charitable organization set up by alumni John and Ann Doerr, will fund the new Rice Center for Engineering Leadership and raise the bar for engineering educators nationwide. The center’s mission is to broaden Rice engineering education by incorporating current and emerging crises facing society and developing personal leadership skills needed to solve pressing global problems. The gift supports Rice’s Centennial Campaign, which was launched today.

John Doerr’s passion for engineering leadership has led him on a remarkable journey since his graduation from Rice, where he earned undergraduate and master’s degrees in electrical engineering before adding an MBA at Harvard, which recently gave him its highest honor, an Alumni Achievement Award.

He started his career at Intel as an engineer, marketer, and top-ranked sales executive. At venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, he has become an entrepreneurial force as an early champion of Google and Amazon, among many other companies. His ability to recognize and help entrepreneurs commercialize innovation into winning products and services has placed him at No. 1 this year on Forbes Magazine’s Midas list of the world’s top 100 tech dealmakers.

Doerr’s interests as an entrepreneur and philanthropist extend to innovative green technology, urban public education, fighting poverty, and the advancement of women as leaders.

Ann Doerr, who earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering at Rice, is an environmental activist and a trustee of the New York-based Environmental Defense Fund.

The gift brings the Doerrs’ commitment to the Centennial Campaign to $22.5 million. A matching component of their donation could bring an additional $10 million to the center. Their other recent donations funded computational cancer research administered by the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology and two endowed chairs, one named for Kennedy’s parents and currently held by Professor Krishna Palem and one held by Professor Keith Cooper.

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