Silicon Valley e-business software giant Bill Coleman and his wife, Claudia, on Tuesday gave CU the largest donation ever made to an American public university. The $250 million endowment, to be paid over five years, will be used to establish the four-campus Coleman Institute for Cognitive Disabilities.

The endowment is expected to yield $8 million to $10 million a year in interest for the new center, which is in its early stages. The center will aim to better understand and possibly prevent cognitive disabilities, while developing new gadgets to help disabled people in their day-to-day lives.

"You have put the University of Colorado on the map," Bruce Benson, co-chair of the CU Comprehensive Fundraising Campaign, told the Colemans. He credited Elizabeth Hoffman, now in her fifth month as CU's president, with convincing the Colemans to create their center in Colorado.

Bill Coleman, 53, founded BEA Systems of San Jose, Calif., in January 1995 and will serve as a technical adviser on the New Economy for the George W. Bush administration.

"In 1993, we already had enough money to retire, and my decision was if I could build a company that could be very successful and built to last, then I would take the profits from that to create a foundation to give back," Coleman said.

Gov. Bill Owens said the gift put the Colemans in the company of such history-making philanthropists as Andrew Carnegie, the Rockefellers and Bill and Melinda Gates.

"This gift means the (research) landscape has now changed permanently -- forever," said Steven Eidelman, executive director of the Association of Retarded Citizens of the United States. "I don't think anyone here can imagine yet what kind of effect we can have through this center."

The main purpose of the gift is not to build facilities but to develop a new institute that crosses existing disciplines at CU such as genetics, cognitive science, psychiatry, computer science, mechanical engineering and special education. Up to 20 percent of the Colemans' donation, however, may be used for new buildings or expansions.

The Colemans' 23-year-old niece, Suzanne Turner, suffers cognitive disabilities from abnormalities of her 13th chromosome. About 20 million Americans have cognitive disabilities such as mental retardation, traumatic brain injuries, autism, Down syndrome, stroke injuries and Alzheimer's disease.

Assistive technology development for those suffering from cognitive disabilities is piecemeal and outdated, said Michael Lightner, associate dean for special projects at CU's College of Engineering and Applied Science. Some people who aren't able to speak because of their disabilities are using 20-year-old "Speak 'n Spell" technology to communicate.

Modern technology, for example, could further develop personal digital assistants into "mobile social assistants," with Global Positioning Satellite capabilities and cellular phone technology, Lightner said. A person with a cognitive disability may be waiting at a bus stop for an 8:30 a.m. bus to get to work, and if the GPS shows he is still at the bus stop at 8:35, the mobile assistant automatically would call the bus system's headquarters to track the bus, tell the person if the bus is running late and whether to wait longer for it, and then call the place of employment to report that the person will be late.

"The biomedical and technology fields are now mature enough, whereas even five years ago, they weren't," he said. "It's the right time." The endowment will be used to provide seed money for research projects in those fields.

The Colemans, though neither attended CU, had given about $2 million over the past year to CU for cognitive research. They met CU's Hoffman at an Aspen symposium last October and came away
impressed that the university could be a leader in cognitive research. They first got the idea of a new institute during a tour of CU's Center for LifeLong Learning and Design cognitive science building.

Hoffman said federal research grants eventually will double or triple the Colemans' donation.

CU is trying to recruit David Braddock, head of the University of Illinois at Chicago's Department of Disabilities and Human Development, to run the new institute.

An Air Force Academy alumnus with a graduate degree from Stanford University, Bill Coleman has worked in software for 30 years, including in management positions at Sun Microsystems, Dest Systems and VisiCorp.

The largest previous gift to a public university was an estimated $240 million bequest in stocks, land and assets from the estate of Larry Hillblom to the University of California at San Francisco, but the full amount has yet to be received. The next-largest gift to a public school was $125 million each to Louisiana State University and the Universities of Nebraska and Utah.