The University of Massachusetts has announced a $175 million gift from the Chan family and the Morningside Foundation to UMass Medical School.

The unrestricted gift will more than double the medical school's endowment and boost the overall university endowment of about $1 billion. In recognition of the gift, UMass Medical School will be renamed the T.H. Chan School of Medicine in honor of the late patriarch of the Chan family, who was deeply committed to supporting higher education; the Graduate School of Nursing will be renamed for the family's matriarch, Tan Chingfen, a nurse who administered vaccines to neighborhood children in the 1950s; and the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences will be renamed after the Morningside Foundation. UMass Medical has a particular focus on primary care, a specialty that suffers from a shortage of doctors, according to the university.

"It makes a lot of sense to support the public universities," said billionaire investor Gerald Chan, who owns several properties in Harvard Square. "The private [universities] have such abundant resources. On the margin, any incremental giving probably won't mean as much as it does to the publics that are so starved for resources."

"This gift is a powerful statement about the stature — and the potential — of our medical school, a very special place," said Michael F. Collins, chancellor of the medical school. "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."