$210 million gift aimed at health

SEATTLE — The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is giving the University of Washington $210 million to help build a facility to advance efforts to improve the health and well-being of people worldwide, officials said Tuesday.

The donation from the largest private foundation in the world, just miles from the Seattle campus, is the biggest single gift in the university’s history.

The new building will serve as a research hub for faculty members and others working on an ambitious new population health initiative to address challenges such as poverty, health care access, equity and climate change. The total facility cost is $230 million.

“This is really much more than about a building,” University of Washington President Ana Mari Cauce said in an interview last week. “The building is really about catalyzing a vision — an initiative that we launched last spring to really be first in the world in terms of population health.”

The initiative pulls together research and resources from across campus and disciplines to help people live longer, healthier and more productive lives, the university said.

The efforts recognize that the health of a person or community is more than about the lack of disease; it encompasses everything from education, the environment, politics and quality of life, including performance arts, Cauce added.

The university has an opportunity as well as an obligation to find solutions to those pressing challenges, and a new building would allow researchers, students and other partners to come together to work on them, Cauce said.