The ExxonMobil Foundation has presented Cornell with $542,150 through the foundation's Educational Matching Gifts Program.

The gift was presented to President David Skorton by engineering alumna Sherri Stuewer '73, M.S. '75, during an informal ceremony at the Cornell Board of Trustees meeting in New York City April 7. Stuewer is ExxonMobil's vice president of environmental policy and planning.

Cornell has been a longtime beneficiary of the foundation's matching gifts program, which allows ExxonMobil employees, retirees, surviving spouses and directors to make contributions to higher education institutions of their choice. The foundation matches $3 to every $1 up to $7,500.

Cornell received the fifth-largest gift out of 924 institutions that received matching gifts through the program this year, totaling $38.7 million.

The foundation seeks to improve U.S. math and science education by supporting math and science programs to "respond to the nation's growing need to produce more engineers and scientists and to develop more highly qualified math and science teachers to train the nation's youth."