The school announced Monday that UC Irvine will receive a $35.5 million gift from the estate of alumni Paul and Joe Butterworth.
This donation, the largest alumni gift in the university’s history, will support the Donald Brin College of Information and Computer Science. It will fund research initiatives and support students through awards, fellowships and scholarships, university officials said in a press release.
Paul Butterworth was one of the first graduates of UC Irvine’s computer science program in the mid-1970s, according to the university. He has co-founded the enterprise software company Vantiq.
Butterworth majored in engineering before switching to computer science and earned his bachelor’s degree in 1974.
“UCI is where I began my career as a computer scientist and software engineer,” he said in a statement. “While I was at UCI, I met another guy who was a graduate student at the time, and we ended up working together well into the 1980s. You could say UCI is where my success really began.”
Butterworth said he would not have been able to finish his studies without the financial support he received in college.
I was thinking of not going to university unless I got financial aid, because I didn’t have any money. But when the UCI came up with a package to help, it made all the difference in the world,” he said. “That’s what inspired us to pledge support to students — so they can pursue their dreams despite their financial situations.”
Jo Butterworth received her bachelor’s degree in 1975 from the School of Social Sciences at the University of California, Irvine.
Chancellor Howard Gilman described the Butterworth pupils as “our institution’s greatest student heroes”.
In addition to co-founding Vantiq, Paul Butterworth co-founded cloud platform development company Emotive and has served in computer engineering and technology roles at Oracle, Sun, and Ingres. According to the university, it has been part of the computer science industry for the past 50 years.
“Universities have been a catalyst for all this progress, because that’s where the basic technologies were developed,” Butterworth said. “That’s why Joe and I are committed to supporting UCI and its students: education is where we can make the biggest impact.”