Major Gift to Support Construction of Yale Environment School Home

A Yale alumnus has given $4 million toward the construction of a new home for the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies (F&ES) at Yale University.

The gift from Carl Knobloch, president and CEO of Atlanta–based West Hill Investors, a privately held equity firm, will create the Carl and Emily Knobloch Environment Center at Yale, which will be located in the new “green”building being planned for F&ES.

The Knobloch gift is part of the School’s capital campaign, which has raised $58.8 million in support of the building, student scholarship endowment and faculty endowment. Dean Gustave Speth said, “The center will be a critical feature of our new building. It will be the most public part of the facilityÑa gathering place not only for our students and faculty, but also for students and others from all parts of Yale. It also will be a major site for conferences, public lectures and receptions, and a destination for distinguished visitors from across the country and around the world.”

The new building, which will be named after another Yale alumnus, Richard Kroon, will be part of Science Hill, a 32–acre slice of the northern campus where Yale is redeveloping the physical and biological sciences.

Prior to founding West Hill Investors in 1998, Knobloch, Yale Class of 1951, was chair and CEO of Production Operators Corporation, which specializes in the handling of gases for maximizing the recovery of hydrocarbon resources. In 1998, Production Operators was acquired by Schlumberger Limited.

Knobloch is founder and chair of the West Hill Foundation for Nature, a nonprofit corporation he founded in 1999 that focuses its giving on land preservation efforts in the United States. He also is the recently retired chair of Automated Logic Corporation, a leading state–of–the–art building automation energy controls company that was acquired last May by the Carrier division of United Technologies in Farmington, Conn.