Seymour Schulich donates $100 million to create scholarships in STEM disciplines

A $100-million donation from Canadian mining and oil sands industrialist Seymour Schulich will give graduating high school students in Canada and Israel the chance to compete for scholarships in science, technology engineering and mathematics (STEM). The donation is the second largest endowment for post-secondary education after a $105-million endowment to McMaster Univ by Michael deGroote in 2003 (R$, January 28/04).

In announcing the endowment, Schulich said he hoped the scholarships would become the Canadian equivalent to the Rhodes Scholarship.

The endowment will support the awarding of 75 Schulich Leader Scholarships (SCS) annually, worth $60,000 over four years when the program is fully implemented by 2014. One candidate can be nominated from each of 1,300 Canadian and 300 Israeli high schools, with a selection committee making the final award decisions. The scholarships will be administered by the United Jewish Appeal Federation of Greater Toronto, which has no history of activity in the area of STEM.

Twenty Canadian and five Israeli universities will be invited to participate in the program's first year (2012) when an initial 25 scholarships will be awarded.

Schulich has a long history of philanthropic activity, with several university schools, hospitals and technical institutes named in his honour. These include York Univ (Schulich School of Business), Univ of Western Ontario (Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry), Univ of Calgary (Schulich School of Engineering), Dalhousie Univ (Schulich School of Law), McGill Univ (Schulich School of Music), and Nipissing Univ (Schulich School of Education), Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre (Schulich Heart Centre), the Univ of Nevada and Technion (Israel Institute of Technology).

Schulich received a MSc and MBA from McGill Univ in the 1960s before launching a business career, first in pension fund management (Beutel, Goodman & Company Ltd) and then in mining where he made millions pioneering the concept of royalty payments. More recently, he made a major investment in Canadian Oil Sands Trust, which owns 37% of Syncrude Canada Ltd.

His first major success in the mining sector (Franco-Nevada ) merged with two other firms in 2002 to create Newmont Mining Corp, Denver CO, one of the world's largest producers of gold.

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