Bill Ackman and Neri Oxman pledge $400 million to a new Manhattan brain institute

On 19 August 2026 the investor Bill Ackman, chief executive of Pershing Square, announced that he and his wife, the Israeli-American designer and former MIT professor Neri Oxman, were founding a nonprofit called the Ackman Oxman Institute (AOI) to study and treat brain injury and disease. A securities filing the same day showed Ackman giving the institute 10 million Pershing Square shares, worth roughly $400 million, as an outright gift. He said the couple would follow it with a second donation of similar or larger size in another form, partly to give new inventions time to become commercially viable.

The project grew out of a family crisis. Earlier in 2026 the couple's adult daughter suffered a severe brain haemorrhage, and Ackman wrote that months of treatment and rehabilitation had shown his family both how much the brain can recover and how limited current therapies are. He said he and Oxman had first considered a brain institute five years earlier, inspired in part by her mother's death from Alzheimer's disease, but had judged New York real estate too costly at the time.

In July the Pershing Square Foundation bought a largely empty biotech building at 125 West End Avenue on Manhattan's Upper West Side, and it is acquiring a neighbouring building and an empty lot. Ackman said the campus could eventually reach about 680,000 square feet, more laboratory space than Rockefeller University. Ackman said Mount Sinai would be an important partner but not the only one, and that he wants the institute to work across institutional boundaries.

Ackman described AOI as patient-centred, bringing neurosurgery, neuroscience, rehabilitation, nutrition, clinical trials and device development under one roof. Rather than measuring success in academic papers, it plans to run its own venture arm, seed companies around its discoveries and reinvest any returns. He chose to build it outside the university system, which he criticised publicly, and said he expected to name a chief executive by October.