The University of Texas at Austin has announced a $20 million gift from the Wong family to create a new eye institute at the university's Dell Medical School.

The gift will be used by the school to establish the Mitchel and Shannon Wong Eye Institute, which will train future ophthalmologists and provide patients with the best medical and surgical eye care possible. In recognition of the gift, the institute will be named for father-and-son ophthalmologists Mitchel and Shannon Wong, who are well-known in the as physicians and philanthropists in the Austin area.

Mitchel Wong's family moved to the Texas capital in the 1930s and opened a grocery store there. Wong enrolled at UT in 1957 and graduated in 1960, trained at Baylor College of Medicine, and returned to open Austin Eye in 1969. His son Shannon, who grew up in Austin, returned to the city after college and medical school to join his father’s practice in 1997.

"The Wong family's medical contributions to Austin go back decades," said UT president Gregory L. Fenves. "Their transformational gift to the Dell Medical School ensures that the family legacy will extend for all the generations to come."