DePizzo's $1.625 million gift establishes faculty position in Gerontologyy
John “Jack” and Nuggie DePizzo, who owned and operated more than 30 senior care facilities across the region and who continue to develop and operate in Southwest Florida, have donated $1.625 million to Youngstown State University’s “We See Tomorrow” fund-raising campaign to establish an endowed faculty position in Gerontology and to enhance their existing scholarship in the Williamson College of Business Administration.
The Jack and Nuggie DePizzo Chair in Gerontology will be a full professor position in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Gerontology in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at YSU.
It is the university’s 11th endowed faculty chair or professorship.
“Our thanks to the DePizzos for this generous gift and for their continued, unwavering support of the YSU community,” YSU President Jim Tressel said. “Endowed faculty positions such as this allow the university to provide expert teaching and learning opportunities for our students and the community.”
The gift is part of the $100 million “We See Tomorrow” fundraising campaign, the largest in YSU history. The campaign is nearing the $90 million mark.
“I often say that when I needed a college education, YSU was there,” said DePizzo, founder and vice president of Jadco Enterprises Inc. “Now, I am here for YSU.”
DePizzo graduated from Ursuline High School in Youngstown before entering YSU, where he was a founding member of Sigma Pi social fraternity and a member of Alpha Tau Gamma honorary accounting fraternity. He graduated from YSU in 1971 with a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration.
His business career in the long-term care industry began when he was a student at YSU and worked as a full-time Medicare auditor at Blue Cross of Eastern Ohio in Youngstown, where he audited hospitals, nursing homes and home health agencies in eight Ohio counties. From there he took a position with a small chain of nursing homes, where he organized and ran its central office. In addition, he designed a comprehensive software system that automated all bookkeeping and accounting transactions for single or multi-nursing home groups.
“I truly believe that the education I received at YSU is second to none,” he said. “In fact, I credit YSU for the defining moment in my business career. With no available investment capital, during a time of high-interest rates and tight lending, I applied something that I learned in an Accounting class at YSU which ultimately resulted in my first acquisition of a senior care facility.”
The Jack and Nuggie DePizzo Chair in Gerontology will teach undergraduate and graduate classes at YSU, maintain an active agenda in research and scholarship, conduct occasional professional seminars, and maintain active involvement in the Gerontology profession at the national, regional and local levels.
Endowed chairs or professorships are faculty positions that combine a traditional faculty post with enhancements funded from the interest on the principal of the gift to the university. Increasing the number of endowed faculty positions is among the priorities in the “We See Tomorrow” campaign.
In addition to establishing the endowed chair, $125,000 of the gift will be used to enhance the JAD Scholarship in the Williamson College of Business Administration. DePizzo established the scholarship in the 1990s.