The University of California, Santa Barbara has announced a $65 million gift from billionaire investor Charles Munger to construct a housing facility for scientists visiting the campus-based Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Construction on the three-story KITP residence is expected to begin this month and is scheduled to be completed in 2016. It is hoped the facility, which will feature a variety of common areas for informal and impromptu gatherings, will foster the kinds of interactions between and among visiting scientists that are the cornerstone of theoretical science.

The gift from the 90-year-old vice chair of Berkshire Hathaway, Inc. includes at least one hundred Class A shares in the Omaha-based company, Bloomberg.com reports. Munger, whose grandson Charles studied at UCSB, has a long history of supporting educational institutions, including Harvard-Westlake, a Los Angeles-area prep school, and the University of Michigan, where Munger studied mathematics in the 1940s. Last year, he pledged securities valued at $110 million to U-M, the largest gift in the university's history.

"[P]hysicists gain enormously from knowing one another and talking to one another and trusting one another," said Munger, who took a single physics course during college that inspired a lifelong fascination with and appreciation for the discipline. "That's been recognized for a great many decades, but for a long time it just wasn’t feasible. Now we can get people together from all over the world and these people can cross-fertilize each other. Physics is getting so hard now, they need all the help they can get....This isn't a field where we want to be behind."