UC San Diego’s push to raise a record $2 billion in private donations got a big lift Saturday when a scientist who helped turn Facebook into a social-media giant gave the campus $75 million.

Taner Halicioglu’s gift is meant to make the campus a national leader in data science and to launch the public phase of a capital campaign that’s already produced almost $1 billion.

The contribution comes as the university begins one of its biggest expansions, a $1.6 billion construction program that includes housing, classrooms, research space and a student center that also will be a station for the Blue Line Trolley, which is slated to start serving the campus in 2021.

Taner Halicioglu is donating $75 million to UC San Diego to make his alma mater a national leader in data science. (Erik Jepsen / UC San Diego)


The school’s enrollment has soared by 6,500 students since 2012, and is expected to increase by 4,000 more within three years. By then, the total would be 40,000 students.

“If you were to go to sleep today and wake up in five years, you would not recognize this campus,” said UC San Diego Chancellor Pradeep Khosla.

The Halicioglu gift is the largest the university has ever received from one of its graduates, and it pushes the total raised during the current capital campaign to about $991 million. UC San Diego is roughly halfway through the 10-year campaign.


The donation also means the school has raised about $302 million in the current fiscal year, approximately $89 million more than it has ever generated in a single year.

UC San Diego Chancellor Pradeep Khosla is guiding the largest private fundraising campaign in the school’s history, and a construction campaign that will enable the campus to add at least 4,000 students by 2020. (Eduardo Contreras/UT)

Khosla has focused on fundraising since he became chancellor in 2012, largely to cope with enrollment growth and the desire to keep UC San Diego among the nation’s top 10 research schools.

When he arrived, the university’s fundraising operation was limping along, having wound down from a previous campaign that raised about $1 billion during a seven-year period.


Khosla hired Steve Gamer, a respected fundraiser, to lead the next capital campaign. Gamer resigned in April 2016 after barely two years on the job, for reasons the school has never fully explained.

While UC San Diego hasn’t reached the ranks of elite fundraising universities, its ability to attract donations has clearly improved.

In October, Khosla, a native of India, convinced India’s Tata Trusts to donate $70 million to the school for the study and development of new ways to edit genes to fight disease.

UC San Diego plans to build the North Torrey Pines Living and Learning complex, which will have two, separate buildings for the humanities and social sciences, and housing for 2,000 students. (UC San Diego )


Khosla also began negotiating a major gift from Halicioglu, who earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science at UC San Diego in 1996.

Halicioglu (pronounced Haw-li-dji-o-loo) joined Facebook in 2004, the year it was founded. He was the company’s first full-time employee. Halicioglu was instrumental in developing the hardware infrastructure that made it possible for Facebook to handle explosive growth. The company now has about 1.8 billion users worldwide.

Halicioglu left Facebook in 2009 and served as a lead reliability engineer at Blizzard Entertainment in Irvine before returning to UC San Diego in 2013 as a lecturer in computer science. Halicioglu, 42, also is co-founder and a partner in Seed San Diego, which supports start-ups.


In 2015, he gave his alma mater $2 million to enrich its computer science offerings. He later began thinking about a “transformative” gift in data science, which involves collecting, analyzing, comparing and storing data of all kinds.

The field is experiencing phenomenal growth due to advances by companies such as San Diego’s Qualcomm, a chipmaker, and Illumina, whose rapid gene-sequencing machines have left scientists swimming in data.

“I’ve seen more and more evidence that start-ups in areas like biotech and software need data scientists,” Halicioglu said. “It is hard to find people who are good at knowing what data to collect, how to store and analyze this data, and how to present or act on it.”

His $75 million will be used to train students and support faculty at the newly created Halicioglu Institute of Data Science. The institute will be deeply cross-disciplinary, involving people from computer science, cognitive science, mathematics and other fields.


Halicioglu said there are great opportunities to make advances in fields like personalized medicine. “You don’t want to wait months to figure things out. You want to get your genome or microbiome sequenced and analyzed, and have the results compared to people who have similar symptoms or results as you so you can act on the information.

“There’s a lot of breadth and depth in data science. You have to ask, ‘What are the best ways to collect data?, and, ‘What types of data should I collect?’ and, ‘And how do I present data so that it’s understandable?’ and, ‘And what’s the best way to store data so that it is accessible later?’ There’s so many layers to this.”

Such remarks come spilling out when he talks about data science. Discussing his own philanthropy doesn’t come as easily.

“It’s about the students. It’s not about me,” Halicioglu said. “My biggest emotion at the moment is the surrealness of the fact that I’m in a position to make a gift like this.”


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