[2] Robert Belfer was born in Kraków, Poland in 1935 and graduated from Columbia College in 1955 and Harvard Law School in 1958.
[6][9][10] Belfer had diversified into New York City real estate and co-founded a second energy company, Belco Oil & Gas Corp., with his son in 1992.
[12] For decades, he has given to John F. Kennedy School of Government, which named Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs after him in 1997.
[20] He also was the founding donor for the Neurodegeneration Consortium, a multi-institutional collaboration to find treatments for Alzheimer's disease, which is based out of MD Anderson Cancer Center.
[21] Belfer has also supported the Aging Brain Initiative, an interdisciplinary research effort within the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT.