Johns Hopkins India Institute renamed to honor transformational gift

Noted businessmen and philanthropists Raj Gupta and Steven Klinsky have made a joint $10 million gift to Johns Hopkins' multidisciplinary India Institute, which will be renamed in their honor.

The Gupta-Klinsky India Institute at Johns Hopkins University, or GKII, will mobilize Hopkins faculty, staff, students, and alumni in their research and partnership with government, academia, the private sector, and NGOs across India to advance human knowledge and develop bold, world-changing ideas.

"For nearly a century, Hopkins has trained health care professionals and partnered with the Indian government to improve and save lives," said Ron Daniels, president of Johns Hopkins University. "Our recently launched India Institute is designed to unite our efforts across our entire university. We are truly grateful to Raj Gupta and Steven Klinsky, whose generosity will ensure the best scholars and practitioners can pursue this critical work in India, at Hopkins, and around the world."

The institute is directly overseen by Sunil Kumar, university provost and senior vice president for academic affairs, with a faculty steering committee that advises its operations and represents several academic divisions, including the Bloomberg School of Public Health, the School of Medicine, the Whiting School of Engineering, the School of Nursing, the Carey Business School, the School of Advanced International Studies, and the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences.

"We are excited about the future for GKII," said Kumar, who will be part of a JHU delegation on a tour of India from April 3-8 to officially launch the Gupta-Klinsky India Institute. "Raj Gupta and Steven Klinsky have seen the great potential in the institute, and their investment will transform our work, allowing us to enhance existing partnerships and to develop new ones across India, across health and many other fields."

Faculty affiliated with GKII include experts in medicine, public health, nursing, engineering, economics, business, data science, artificial intelligence, public policy, social sciences, and humanities. More than 150 Johns Hopkins faculty members and researchers are involved in India-related work currently, with more than $205 million of investment in programs and 100 in-country partners in the past five years.

"India is in a unique position to change people's health around the world," said David Peters, chair of the Department of International Health at the Bloomberg School and co-chair of the institute's faculty steering committee. "It is tackling a major portion of the world's changing disease burden and has the innovation, entrepreneurship, institutional capabilities, and intellectual capital to address the most complex and challenging issues of health, well-being, and social justice facing our world—and Johns Hopkins complements that potential and ambition like no other university. Without the generous support of Mr. Gupta and Mr. Klinsky, we simply could not seize this moment to create something that inspires and connects so many people and resources across India and the U.S."

Raj L. Gupta and his wife Kamla Gupta are longtime supporters of India-related initiatives at Johns Hopkins and previously established the Raj and Kamla Gupta Professorship in Infectious Diseases at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Raj Gupta is an Indian-American businessman who came to the United States from the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, and he has chaired multiple international companies in the chemical, medical, automotive, and private equity industries. Gupta is a past chairman of the American Chemistry Council and the Society of Chemical Industry, America Section.

Steve Klinsky and his wife, Maureen Sherry, have supported numerous non-profit organizations, chiefly in the fields of education, global health, and the environment. Steve Klinsky established New Mountain Capital in 1999, which has built or founded more than 60 businesses, and where he and Raj Gupta have been colleagues since 2010. Prior to that, Klinsky was a co-founder of the Leveraged Buyout Group of Goldman Sachs and a partner of Forstmann Little & Company. Sherry is a best-selling novelist and screenwriter.

"My wife Maureen and our family look to support innovation paired with the ability to make large-scale impact," Klinsky said. "The combination of broad expertise at Johns Hopkins and its partners in India, from health disciplines to humanities and engineering, promises to generate new lessons and opportunities that will benefit people in greatest need all over the world. And we believe India offers a uniquely consequential setting for this work."

Added Gupta: "Through deep partnerships across the subcontinent, GKII will put Hopkins in a position to help uncover and share knowledge with the world—from insights into combating diseases like tuberculosis to explorations of health policy and beyond. It's a great honor to embark on this journey with Steve and to partner with Johns Hopkins in this way."