Ben E. May

At the age of fifteen, May worked in a sawmill, where he acquired the expertise with which he would eventually make his fortune.

After only a year of formal higher education at the Georgia Institute of Technology, May moved to Mobile, Alabama, where he quickly recognized the value of the region's timber holdings and began acquiring previously-harvested properties with the idea of reforesting them.

He supported the Weizmann Institute; funded the research of Sir Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin; aided the investigations of Paul Dudley White, renowned cardiologist affiliated with Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts; and helped found a cancer research institute led by Charles B. Huggins, director of oncology research at the University of Chicago.

[6] Due to the continuous support from the Trust, the Weizmann Institute established the Ben May Center for Chemical Theory and Computation in 2018 to bring scientists together to study the fundamental properties of materials and physical systems by using advanced theoretical and computational tools spanning a broad range of scales.

[8] The Trust continues to support a wide array of local, national, and international charitable causes through the issuance of funds pursuant to grant requests.