2 Investors Give $35 Million to Brown

Brown University has some well-placed friends in Silicon Valley.

Two technology investors have given a combined $35 million to Brown to help expand its School of Engineering, the university announced on Wednesday.

The donors, Theresia Gouw, a managing partner of the venture capital firm Accel Partners, and Charles H. Giancarlo, a managing director of the private equity firm Silver Lake, both received undergraduate engineering degrees from Brown. Their gifts, part of a new $44 million pool of donations, kick off a $160 million fund-raising effort for the engineering school.

The money will help Brown build a new facility for the school, which was established in 1847. It will also go toward setting up a “center for entrepreneurship” in the school.

The two investors are not the only financiers to have supported Brown. Brian T. Moynihan, the chief executive of Bank of America, is a trustee of the university. Steven A. Cohen, the hedge fund manager dealing with a government investigation into suspicious trading, is also a trustee.

Ms. Gouw, who graduated in 1990 from Brown and is on the board of fellows, is among the few high-ranking female investors in Silicon Valley. She said her gift honored Barrett Hazeltine, a longtime engineering professor at Brown.

“I feel very fortunate to have gone from a first-generation immigrant on financial aid to being in a position to support the school that has been so significant in shaping my life and career,” Ms. Gouw said in a statement released by the university.

Mr. Giancarlo, a trustee of Brown who graduated in 1979, was an executive at Cisco Systems before joining Silver Lake in 2007. He made the gift with his wife, Dianne.

Silver Lake, which focuses on technology, has made headlines recently with a controversial offer to buy Dell.

Brown enjoys support in financial circles, but much Silicon Valley money has flowed to Stanford, which is near the headquarters of many technology firms. Last year, Stanford became the first university to raise more than $1 billion in a single year, according to a fund-raising survey.

A significant number of Brown students dream of striking it rich in the business world, according to a recent article in The Brown Daily Herald.

Economics was the most popular concentration in 2012, the article said, citing data from the university’s Office of Institutional Research. That’s due in part to “genuine intellectual interest,” Louis Putterman, director of undergraduate studies in the economics department, told the newspaper.

But he also said students were intrigued by “stories of large fortunes being made on Wall Street.”