Cornell University has announced that its College of Human Ecology (CHE) has received a $10 million commitment from Joan Klein Jacobs ’54 and Irwin M. Jacobs (’54, BEE ’56) in support of the college’s new Center for Precision Nutrition and Health.

The gift will endow the center’s executive directorship, two postdoctoral fellowships, and funds designed to advance faculty innovation and student experiential learning, all named after Joan Jacobs. In addition, the gift will expand the center’s portfolio of research and programs in the emerging field of precision nutrition, which delivers tailored dietary recommendations based on a person’s genetics, gut microbes, and other biological, environmental, and social factors.

The couple’s previous gifts to the university include naming gifts for the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech, the Jacobs Scholarships in Engineering and Jacobs Fellowships in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and the Jacobs Professorship and Fellowship in Human Ecology, as well as sponsoring the Jacobs Challenge to raise additional endowed professorships in Human Ecology.

“With one of the nation’s largest and most prolific academic research and training programs in nutritional sciences, Cornell is a major driver of the research, and the translation to impact, necessary to achieve precision nutrition’s full potential for human health,” said Cornell University president Martha E. Pollack. “This extraordinary gift will empower the next generation of nutritional scientists to leverage advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science to improve lives.”

(Photo credit: Getty Images/Studio CJ)