The University of Texas at Austin has announced a $38.5 million estate gift from alumna Lorraine "Casey" Stengl ('39) in support of biodiversity and ecology programs in the College of Natural Sciences.

A former physician and one of the first female graduates of the university's chemistry program, Stengl donated approximately $4.3 million to her alma mater during her lifetime. The estate gift, coupled with a bequest of $2 million from Stengl's partner, Lorraine Wyer, who died in 2014, boosts the couple's total support for the university to nearly $45 million.

The Stengl-Wyer Endowment, the largest endowment dedicated to the College of Natural Sciences, will help fund the Stengl Lost Pines Biological Station — a nearly six-hundred-acre tract of land donated by Stengl and Wyer in 1991 and added to in 2015 that the university uses for long-term biological research and educational programming — as well as new initiatives in the Department of Integrative Biology and other life sciences. The endowment also will support the university's biological collections, a new fellowship program, graduate students and undergrads majoring in biology, and a series of competitive grants aimed at helping faculty members conduct research on organisms in their natural habitats.

"The transformative impact of Dr. Stengl's gift is a result of her passion for nature and the life sciences," said Paul Goldbart, dean of the College of Natural Sciences. "Her legacy will forevermore support the highest-level research and education into the diversity of life and interactions between living things and their natural environments in Texas and far beyond."

"Lorraine Stengl's estate gift builds on her already peerless legacy of supporting the natural sciences at UT," said UT president Gregory L. Fenves. "Because of the Stengl-Wyer Endowment, students will benefit from extraordinary new fieldwork opportunities, and faculty members will have access to hundreds of acres of preserved land for research and discovery."