WORCESTER, Mass. - UMass Medical School will be renamed the UMass Chan Medical School following a $175 million donation from the Morningside Foundation and the Chan family of investors.

The historic donation will more than double the school’s endowment. The gift is unrestricted.

“This gift is a powerful statement about the stature—and the potential—of our medical school, a very special place. The confidence this historic gift conveys about our medical school is breathtaking, permitting us to recruit renowned and innovative faculty, conduct more breakthrough biomedical research, offer financial support to highly qualified and diverse students; and be ever more expansive in fulfilling our public service mission,” UMass Medical School Chancellor Michael Collins said in making the announcement.

UMass Medical's three graduate schools will also be renamed. They will be known as the T.H. Chan School of Medicine; the Tan Chingfen Graduate School of Nursing; and the Morningside Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. 

The Morningside Foundation said in a statement that, “The Morningside Foundation and the Chan family are proud to honor their patriarch and matriarch’s legacy and their deep commitment to the advancement of health and education. There is a powerful alchemy and very special culture at UMass Medical School in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

UMass Medical School was founded in 1962. Its first class of medical students graduated in 1974. In 1979, a PhD program in the biomedical sciences was established, followed by the Graduate School of Nursing, which opened in 1986.