On Jun. 10, 2015, Southwestern Medical Center announced it has received a $25 million gift from Lyda Hill, funding the establishment of the Lyda Hill Department of Bioinformatics to bridge research and clinical care.

The new Department, recently approved by the UT System Board of Regents, is dedicated to developing UT Southwestern’s capability in bioinformatics, a discipline that provides tools for managing and analyzing the extremely large data sets that are increasingly key to addressing the most important scientific and medical challenges. Finding the patterns in these data sets has become an essential component of biomedical discovery and is crucial to developing new therapeutic strategies and to understanding the foundations of life and the defects that cause disease.

With this commitment, Miss Hill had contributed more than $37.5 million to UT Southwestern. Lyda Hill  is an American investor and philanthropist, a member of the Hunt family, and the only living single woman to make the Philanthropy list of most generous donors.