Sandy and Joan Weill give $120 million, the largest gift ever to veterinary medicine

On 28 January 2026 the University of California, Davis announced a $120 million gift from Joan and Sanford I. "Sandy" Weill, made through the Weill Family Foundation. The university described it as the largest gift ever made to veterinary medicine anywhere in the world, and renamed its school the UC Davis Joan and Sanford I. Weill School of Veterinary Medicine.

About $80 million will help build a new small-animal teaching hospital, part of a $750 million expansion of the school's veterinary medical complex. The existing hospital already treats about 50,000 animal patients a year; the new building is expected to add capacity for around 20,000 more and to bring artificial intelligence and precision medicine into diagnosis and clinical trials. The remaining $40 million is for research into diseases that affect both animals and people, including cancer, neurological disorders and heart disease. The gift is also meant to help ease a national shortage of veterinarians.

The connection is personal. Joan Weill once hoped to become a veterinarian, and the couple's dog, Angel, was treated at UC Davis after being diagnosed with lymphoma in 2018. That experience led them to support the school's clinical trials before this much larger commitment. With this gift, the Weills' giving to the University of California system passes $500 million.

Sandy Weill was born in 1933 in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn to Polish Jewish immigrant parents; his father ran a dressmaking business. He went on to build one of the largest financial firms in the world and led Citigroup as chief executive until 2003. Since then he and Joan have become among the most significant philanthropists in American medicine and education, with their names on Weill Cornell Medicine in New York and on major neuroscience and cancer efforts at the University of California, San Francisco.

UC Davis's veterinary school is regularly ranked among the best in the world, and its hospital is one of the busiest academic animal hospitals in the United States.