SALISBURY COVE – Kathryn W. Davis, long-time summer resident of Mount Desert Island, has given the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory $1 million, the largest private gift in the Lab’s history. Mrs. Davis celebrated her 100th birthday on February 25, 2007 and said she was making several personally meaningful gifts to commemorate the event. Terence Boylan, Chairman of MDIBL’s Board of Trustees, said, “This is a magnificent act of generosity and we are grateful to Kathryn Davis for honoring MDIBL in this way. Her gift will allow us to greatly enhance and expand our year-round program and fully integrate it with our traditional seasonal program.” Mrs. Davis, a resident of Northeast Harbor, Maine, and Jupiter Island, Florida, is a noted philanthropist and supporter of the arts, education, biomedical research, conservation and the environment, global peace initiatives, and representative government. She has spent her life working to improve American understanding of world culture and politics, especially those of Russia. She was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania in 1907 and received her B.A. from Wellesley College in 1928. She was awarded an M.A. in International Relations from Columbia University in 1931 and a Ph.D. from the University of Geneva, Switzerland in 1934. Her husband, Shelby Cullom Davis, was ambassador to Switzerland from 1969 to 1975. Dr. John Forrest, Director of MDIBL, comments, “Mrs. Davis has been a long-time advocate of the laboratory. She has met with our students and scientists, questioned them about their projects, shared stories about her own education and given insightful perspectives on contemporary science. In making the largest private gift to MDIBL in our 109 year history, Mrs. Davis is ensuring the future of our scientific efforts.” This past fall, Mrs. Davis was presented with the Woodrow Wilson Award for Distinguished Public Service along with the EastWest Institute Peace and Conflict Prevention Prize, in recognition of a lifetime of devotion to making the world a safer place. She is a partner of Shelby Cullom Davis & Company, an investment firm founded by her husband, and chair and trustee of the Shelby Cullom Davis Foundation, which she and her husband established following Soviet development of nuclear capabilities in hopes that greater communication would lessen the likelihood of war. Mrs. Davis exhibited her adventurous spirit early on. She remembers accompanying her mother on a suffragette march when she was four, and at twenty-two she and her sister explored Russia, riding across the Caucasus on horseback. She started oil painting in her nineties and considers herself “a very fast Impressionist.” Of her gift to MDIBL, she says, “I am proud to support the sciences in such a special place as Mount Desert Island, my summer Shangri-La. I am pleased that the Lab has such year-round meaning to the area, and that during the summer the Lab is a magnetic force attracting eminent scientists from so many places to share ideas and then take those ideas back to their own centers of scientific inquiry and learning. Finally, I am pleased that the Lab involves some of the Davis United World College Scholars supported by my son Shelby at the College of the Atlantic." Download this release (PDF, 92k) |
