Saturday, October 16, 2010

Cogent's Ming Hsieh Gives Another $50M To USC

The University of Southern California announced Friday, in conjunction with the inauguration of new president C. L. Max Nikias, that Ming Hsieh, the founder of Monrovia-based COgent, has donated $50M to endow a new instute focused on nano-medicine for cancer. USC said it would create the Ming Hsieh Institute for Research on Engineering-Medicine for Cancer as a result of the gift. Hsieh has donated over $85M to USC's endowments in the past five years. Hsieh founded Cogent, a maker of automated fingerprint identification readers used by law enforcement agencies and others, in 1990. Cogent went public in 2004, making Hsieh--who owned 100 percent of Cogent before the IPO--a billionaire. Hsieh had previously donated $35M to the USC Viterbi School of Engineering to rename the school's Electrical Engineering department the USC Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering. Cogent was recently sold to 3M for $943M.