Alexander W. Dreyfoos, Jr.

Alexander W Dreyfoos, Jr. (born 1932) is an American entrepreneur and philanthropist living in West Palm Beach, Florida. After graduating from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1954 [ [http://web.mit.edu/corporation/members/Dreyfoos-A.html Members of the MIT Corporation - Alexander W. Dreyfoos, Jr ] ] (where he remains a lifetime corporation trustee) and Harvard Business School in 1958, he founded Photo Electronics Corporation, a company specializing in photography and video production photography, in 1963. Over the decades working with the company, Dreyfoos was granted 10 US patents. Some equipment developed by Photo Electronics Corporation can be seen on permanent display at the Smithsonian Institution.

The Dreyfoos tower of the Stata Center at MIT bears his name. [2] Dreyfoos' most noteworthy philanthropic achievements include founding of the Palm Beach County Cultural Council and the cultural centerpiece of Palm Beach County, the Raymond F. Kravis Center for the Performing Arts, which opened for business fully funded in 1992. Dreyfoos is also well known for making the largest donation in history to a Florida public school{fact}, a gift of $1,000,000 in 1997 to the Palm Beach School of the Arts, which was soon thereafter renamed the Dreyfoos School of the Arts. More recently, in 2004, Dreyfoos donated another $1,000,000 to the nascent Palm Beach County biomedical research campus of the California-based Scripps Research Institute. In February of the same year he was elected to the Board of Trustees of the institute.

ee also

* [http://www.soafi.org/index.php?cView=2 School of the Arts Foundation]
* [http://www.kravis.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=tribute.main Retirement from Kravis Center Chair tribute video]
* [http://www.scripps.edu/philanthropy/dreyfoos.html Scripps Philanthropy Factsheet]

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