Alfred E. Mann
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Alfred E. Mann (born 1925, Portland, OR), who also goes by Al Mann, is a billionaire American entrepreneur and philanthropist.
Born and raised in Portland, his dad was English and mother Polish. He moved to Los Angeles, California in 1946 and remained there ever since. He received his B.S. and M.S. in physics from the University of California, Los Angeles, doing graduate work in nuclear and mathematical physics.
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[edit] Business
In 1956, Mann founded Spectrolab, the first of two aerospace companies. While at Spectrolab he also founded Heliotek, a semiconductor company, and both became a major suppliers of solar cells for spacecraft. In 1960 he sold both companies to Textron (Spectrolab is now a subsidiary of Boeing Satellite Systems) and continued to manage them. He left his original companies in 1969 to found Pacesetter Systems, which focused on rechargeable artificial pacemakers. He sold the company in 1985, and it is now a part of St. Jude Medical. Mann then went on to establish MiniMed (insulin pumps, now owned by Medtronic) and Advanced Bionics (neuroprosthetics, now owned by Boston Scientific).
He is currently involved in several companies, including:
- Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board of MannKind Corporation, a biomedical company working on inhalable insulin for the treatment of diabetes;
- founder and CEO of Second Sight, LLC, a biomed company working on retinal prosthesis;
- founder and Chairman of the Board of Quallion, LLC, a company producing batteries for medical products and for the military and aerospace industries
- Mann also chairs the Southern California Biomedical Council (SCBC or SoCalBio), a trade association that represents and promotes the growth of the life-science community in the Greater Los Angeles region (see: http://www.socalbio.org).
[edit] Philanthropy
Alfred Mann has made major philanthropic contributions. His two most notable are below.
[edit] Alfred Mann Institute
The Alfred E. Mann Institute for Biomedical Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC), commonly known as the Alfred Mann Institute or AMI, is a business incubator for medical device development in preparation for commercialization. AMI was founded in 1998 when Alfred Mann made a $100 million gift to USC, a major private research university in Los Angeles. The total gifted endowment for AMI, after similar donations from MannKind and the Alfred Mann Foundation totaled $160 Million.
[edit] Alfred Mann Foundation
Founded in 1985, the Alfred Mann Foundation has several core aims. It aims to work with scientists and research organizations to find bionic solutions for people suffering from debilitating medical impairments
The Alfred Mann Foundation for Biomedical Engineering aims at establishing additional institutes, similar to AMI at USC, at other research universities.
In 2004 Mann pledged $100 million to establish a biomedical engineering institute at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology; it is named the Mann Institute [1].
[edit] Trivia
- Mann still works 90-hours a week on his start-up companies.
- According to Forbes magazine, his estimated net worth exceeds $2.2 billion, ranking him the 140th richest man in America.
- He is married to Claude Mann, a successful businesswoman, restaurateur and humanitarian. They met in 1977.
- He has seven children including socialite daughter and charity co-director Cassandra Mann.
- As a proud alumnus of UCLA, he tried to make a substantial monetary gift to his alma mater; however, he became frustrated over the bureaucratic delays involved in donating the noted public university and ended up, after lobbying by USC President Steven B. Sample, making a $100 million gift to the arch-rival private university. At the time of the USC gift in 1998, Mr. Mann announced plans to give a similar amount of money to UCLA, but despite years of discussions the parties could never come to terms.
- In 2004 he won the "Business Leader and Humanitarian of the Year Award" from the Jewish Vocational Service [2].
- On March 16, 2007 Purdue Univeristy recieved a $100 million endowment from the Mann Foundation for Biomedical Engineering. The endowment is the largest research gift ever at the university, and will create the Alfred Mann Institute at Purdue.
[edit] Quote
- "When my success exceeded my expectations, I began to think of a way to return to society what it has given to me."
