Peter O'Donnell

Peter J. O'Donnell Jr. (April 21, 1924 – October 10, 2021) was an American businessman, securities investor and philanthropist. From 1962 to 1969, he was the Texas Republican state chair. In 1963, he was also the national chair of the Draft Goldwater Committee. Background and personal life O'Donnell was reared in Highland Park, near Dallas. He received a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Sewanee: The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, and a Master of Business Administration from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. After college, he worked first in a small bank and then tried his hand at real estate. However, his financial success came in the securities industry. He died in Dallas, on October 10, 2021, at the age of 97. Philanthropist In 1957, O'Donnell and his wife, the former Edith Jones (1926–2020), a graduate in psychology from the University of Texas at Austin, founded the O'Donnell Foundation, with the principal goal of improving higher education in Texas. The two contributed tens of millions of dollars, much of it anonymously, toward various educational entities, both public and private. The O'Donnell Foundation is the fifth largest independent foundation in Dallas. In 1983, the UT regents established the Peter O'Donnell Jr., Centennial Chair in Computing Systems."No one in history has had a greater impact on science and engineering in Texas than Peter O'Donnell," said J. Tinsley Oden, the mathematician and engineering professor and director of the UT Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences. O'Donnell also worked to seek the expansion of the University of Texas at Dallas into a four-year institution and in obtaining the since defunct Superconducting Super Collider near Waxahachie in Ellis County south of Dallas. The trust is rooted in Mrs. O'Donnell's inheritance. In 2016, the couple resigned from leading the O'Donnell Foundation, according to their profile at the Texas State History Museum Foundation.