$4.8M Gift Targets STEM At St. Mark's
St. Mark's School has received a $4.8-million gift from an alumnus and his wife that will help fund a proposed facility targeted at STEM education, the Southborough school announced Tuesday.
The gift is from Edward Taft and his wife, Pamela. Mr. Taft, who graduated from St. Mark's in 1969, is a former employee of the famed Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in California, where much of today's personal computing technology was developed. He helped develop the PostScript programming language, a key technology that enabled desktop publishing, and the now widely used Portable Document Format (PDF), a product of Adobe Systems, for whom Taft started working for in 1984, according to a statement from St. Mark's.
"Ed and Pamela truly embody St. Mark's mission of educating students for lives of leadership and service," said Head of School John C. Warren. "St. Mark's nurtured Ed's passion for technology during his student years. Now, Ed and Pamela want to help future generations of St. Markers discover and innovate through this incredibly generous gift."
Mr. Taft served on St. Mark's board of trustees from 2006 to 2012 and has been an adviser to the school's STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) Initiative. "My particular interest was in helping to integrate STEM skills throughout the entire curriculum, not just in science and engineering," Taft said.
Renovation and construction on the STEM facility is expected to begin in the summer of 2013 and projected to be completed by fall 2014.
WBJ Web Partners
Most Recent
Most Recent
0 Comments