Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon.com, and his wife, MacKenzie, will donate $15 million to Princeton University to create a center in the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. The gift will establish the Bezos Center for Neural Circuit Dynamics.
Jeff Bezos was an electrical engineering and computer science major at Princeton who graduated in 1986. MacKenzie Bezos was an English major at Princeton in the Class of 1992.
Princeton President Shirley Tilghman said the Bezos Center “will bring the university’s strengths to bear on a frontier of scientific knowledge that has far-reaching implications for the understanding of behavior and the treatment of neurological disorders.”
According to the university, researchers at the Bezos Center will look for patterns of activity that reveal, for example, how decisions are made or memories are recalled. Researchers will collaborate with the Princeton Institute for Computational Science and Engineering, a consortium of scientists and engineers who use high-end computing in their research, as well as the university’s theoretical and computational neuroscientists, who will test theories of brain function.
The home of the Bezos Center will be within a new complex under construction off Washington Road, on the south edge of Princeton’s campus near the Icahn Laboratory. It will house the Princeton Neuroscience Institute and the Department of Psychology. The facility is expected to open in the summer of 2013.
