Biography|John Morgridge — The Orchard Street Institute That Opened on His Name

The Cisco years made the fortune.

This block of North Orchard Street is where the fortune came home as a building.

On 3 April 2006, the University of Wisconsin–Madison announced a 50 million dollar gift from alumni John and Tashia Morgridge toward twin research institutes on the 1300 block of University Avenue.

The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation and the State of Wisconsin each put up matching public money under the older BioStar plan.

The private half took the donors' name: the Morgridge Institute for Research.

The public half became the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery.

Both sit in the Discovery Building at 330 North Orchard Street.

The building opened on 2 December 2010.

WARF's own history page and contemporary campus coverage agree on that date.

A visitor can walk the Town Center on the ground floor without a lab badge.

That public first floor was part of the brief Tashia Morgridge, a former teacher, pushed from the start.

The institute remains a private biomedical lab affiliated with the university, not a department of it.

In 2025 WARF transferred its ownership share in the building back to the two institutes that occupy it.

Morgridge Hall, the computer and data-science building funded by a later gift, opened next door the same year.

The 2006 announcement called the 50 million dollars the largest individual gift then recorded for the Madison campus.

Later gifts to engineering and to computing have since passed that mark from the same household.

The pin is the 2010 opening, not the later hall.

Stand on Orchard Street and the glass is the thing the 2006 check paid for.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons, Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0