On Wednesday, October 14, UT Southwestern renamed its Outpatient Building on the West Campus. The new name on the building is the William T. Solomon Outpatient Building, and it honors a man who never founded the fortune behind it. William “Bill” Solomon has run the O’Donnell Foundation since 2016. The renaming came the same week the foundation announced it is finished: it will give its remaining assets to UT Southwestern Medical Center and close, ending a run of giving that reaches back to 1957 and totals nearly $400 million.
That total makes the O’Donnell Foundation the largest donor in UT Southwestern’s history. Edith and Peter O’Donnell Jr. built that record while trying to stay out of it. Solomon, a longtime friend who succeeded Peter O’Donnell as the foundation’s leader, told the medical center the couple were so consistent about keeping their names out of headlines that staff nicknamed them “Mr. and Mrs. O’nonymous.” The foundation has not disclosed a dollar figure for the final transfer of assets. What it has disclosed is the shape of the ending: give everything left to one institution, and stop.
One Institution, Sixty-Nine Years
Most large foundations spread money across a map of grantees. The O’Donnells concentrated theirs. From 1957 forward, the foundation treated UT Southwestern as a long position, held through changes in medicine that nobody in 1957 could have predicted, and added to decade after decade.
The record reads like a tour of what sustained money can do inside a single medical center. In 1981 the foundation endowed the Center for Human Nutrition, funding research into how diet prevents and treats chronic disease. It backed Michael Brown and Joseph Goldstein, whose work on cholesterol regulation won the 1985 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. It helped create the Endowed Scholars Program in Medical Science for young investigators, and it helped pay for a clinical records system that made UT Southwestern one of the first academic medical centers in the country to run an integrated electronic medical record.
The later gifts changed scale. In 2015 the O’Donnells gave the lead gift for the Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute. In 2022 the foundation endowed the Peter O’Donnell Jr. School of Public Health, a move from funding individual discoveries to funding the health of whole populations. Dr. Saad B. Omer, the school’s dean, said the gift let the school hire senior scientists and recruit students whose work will shape the field for the next 50 years. Goldstein, now chair of Molecular Genetics, called the couple “maestros of philanthropy” and credited their habit of choosing projects on excellence alone.
Read in sequence, the gifts trace a widening circle: a nutrition center, two Nobel laureates, a generation of young researchers, then an institute for the brain, then a school for populations. Each gift bought something the previous one had made possible. That compounding is what loyalty purchases and scattered giving rarely does.
The Steward Gets the Building
Solomon’s name on the outpatient building is the tell of this story. The donors are dead. The foundation is closing. The person being honored is the trustee who carried their instructions across the finish line, with approval from the University of Texas System.
Solomon served the foundation as trustee, then as its Chairman, President, and CEO from 2016. He and his wife, Gay, are donors in their own right: they endowed the Division of General Internal Medicine at UT Southwestern, which bears their names, and supported construction of the William P. Clements Jr. University Hospital. He also chaired the Board of Trustees of Southwestern Medical Foundation, the foundation that holds and manages gifts for the medical center. Michael McMahan, Southwestern Medical Foundation’s president and CEO, credited Solomon with advancing the O’Donnells’ legacy with care and conviction.
There is a lesson in the naming for any family building a giving vehicle. The O’Donnells planned for their own absence. They chose a steward, trusted him with the endgame, and the endgame is now public: remaining assets to UT Southwestern, plus a recent gift of oil-producing land in West Texas to Southwestern Medical Foundation, with the land’s annual earnings directed to the medical center. The Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute and the Peter O’Donnell Jr. School of Public Health keep the family name in daily use on campus, on the work rather than on a gala wall.
What Dallas Does With an Ending Like This
The O’Donnell ending belongs in that record because it is the rare foundation finale with nothing left ambiguous: the money has a destination, the land has a job, and the steward has a building.
UT Southwestern president Daniel K. Podolsky said Peter and Edith understood the value of gathering strong researchers and letting them work. The campus gives the count: six Nobel Prizes among its faculty, according to the medical center, and two of those laureates, Brown and Goldstein, did their prize-winning work with O’Donnell support behind them.
The foundation’s doors will close. The West Texas land will keep producing, and its earnings will keep arriving at a medical center in Dallas every year, from a couple who asked not to be thanked in print.
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