$12.5 million gift to university: immigrants Alex and Diana Tsigutkin back the next generation of engineers in a changing campus climate

Tech CEO and philanthropist Alex Tsigutkin didn’t set out to rewrite the future of Yeshiva University when he arrived in New York from Mariupol, Ukraine, in 1980.

He was a young immigrant then, chasing possibility more than legacy, and YU was the place that gave him both a sense of belonging and a path into the world he would eventually help shape.

Decades later, after more than thirty years on Wall Street and the founding of AxiomSL, a global regulatory technology platform, he and his wife, Diana, are sending a clear signal back to the campus that launched him: this is where the next generation of Jewish engineers and innovators should start their journey.

Their $12.5 million gift to establish a new electrical and computer engineering program at Yeshiva University reads, on paper, like a major STEM investment. In person, it feels more like a deeply personal letter to the students who will come after them.

The program, which will bear their name, is designed as a true pathway: undergraduates who major in mathematics or physics will be able to move through a sequence of demanding electives—engineering design, computing systems, electronics, signal processing, machine learning, and wireless communications—and, if they complete the track, step directly into YU’s graduate programs in computer science and engineering.

Built into that pipeline are $25,000 scholarships for at least 10 undergraduates each year, ensuring that promising students who might otherwise be priced out of an intensive STEM education have the chance to stay in the game.

For Alex, who spent three decades on Wall Street, the program reflects the demands of his own career: rigorous training, fluency with complex systems, and the ability to turn abstract theory into practical tools.

AxiomSL, the company he founded in 1991 and led until its 2021 merger with Calypso, became a quiet backbone for financial institutions managing regulatory data and risk.

In that world, clean code and sound engineering can be the difference between stability and crisis.

In making this gift, he is effectively telling YU students that the skills he used to build a global firm are now the skills he wants to help them acquire—only this time with more support, more access, and a clearer route from classroom to career.

Diana’s name on the program speaks to something beyond the technical.

The Tsigutkins are already known in Jewish communal circles as dedicated supporters of education, Jewish life, and social impact initiatives.

Friends and colleagues describe them not simply as donors but as people who show up: at dinners, at board meetings, at community events where the work is more about building relationships than cutting ribbons.

The decision to formalize this gift together underscores that their philanthropy is a shared project, grounded in a family conversation about the kind of future they want to help build for Jewish students drawn to STEM fields.

When Yeshiva University president Ari Berman talks about the Tsigutkins, he doesn’t linger on the size of the check.

He points instead to the arc of Alex’s story: an alum who not only achieved enormous success but chose to circle back and “pay it back by paying it forward.”

The language is simple, but the idea is powerful in a moment when many institutions are scrambling for footing.

Alumni gifts can easily become transactional names like buildings and fund chairs and move on.

Here, the gift is constructed as a living pipeline, a promise that there will always be room for gifted, committed students to grow from undergraduate curiosity into graduate-level expertise and, eventually, into leadership roles in industries that shape global innovation.

Yeshiva University has become both a refuge and a laboratory.

As donors and students reassess their options, faculty from other institutions have quietly begun to line up for positions at YU, drawn by the prospect of working at a university where their Jewish identity is not a liability but a core part of the mission.

Berman talks about having “a line of faculty who want to come to us,” and the Tsigutkin program is one reason he can say yes.

To make the pathway real, the university is building new classrooms and labs and bringing in seasoned leadership—among them Fred Fontaine, the former chair of Cooper Union’s electrical engineering department, who will direct the program and help design its curriculum.

The Tsigutkins’ gift falls amid a broader wave of support. In December 2025, YU completed its $613 million “RiseUp” campaign, hitting its goal two years early with the help of a final $5 million gift from longtime benefactor Robert Kraft.

The symbolic number—613, echoing the traditional count of Torah commandments—came to stand for a vision of an institution that is simultaneously steeped in Jewish learning and hungry for excellence in fields like science, technology, and innovation.

Within that landscape, a gift that creates an electrical and computer engineering pathway is more than a nod to the market; it is a bet that Jewish students should have access to the most demanding STEM training in an environment that honors their values.

That values piece is where the Tsigutkins themselves draw the line. In their statement, they talk about preparing students to enter fields “at the center of global innovation” while remaining deeply grounded in what makes Yeshiva University distinctive.

It’s not a marketing flourish. For them, the choice to attach their name to an engineering program at YU is a way of saying that Jewish identity, Torah learning, and a serious engagement with Israel’s future belong in the same conversation as data science, semiconductors, and machine learning.

It means students will be able to learn how chips are designed and networks are secured while sitting in classrooms that treat their connection to Israel, to Jewish history, and to one another as central, not incidental.

The program’s ties to Israel make that point even sharper. YU is working to align the pathway with similar initiatives at Israeli universities and to build in opportunities for students to study and intern there, in labs and companies at the heart of the country’s tech ecosystem.

Berman describes YU’s growth in engineering as a kind of backstop for Israel’s universities, a way of ensuring that there is always a partner institution abroad that understands the stakes and is willing to train people who can contribute to the country’s scientific and technological strength.

The Tsigutkins, whose philanthropic profile already includes support for Jewish and Israel-related causes, are effectively helping to codify that partnership at the curricular level.

Looked at from a distance, the $12.5 million check is impressive. Looked at closely, it is intimate. It is an alum revisiting the place that helped him navigate a new country.

It is a couple deciding that the right way to respond to a fractured campus climate is to build something sturdy and hopeful—a program that says to a shy first-year math major, to a physics student who has spent the past year arguing with classmates about Israel, and to a talented coder who wants to stay anchored in Jewish life while pursuing an engineering career: you belong here, and we’re willing to invest so that you can thrive here.

That, more than the headlines, is the story Alex and Diana Tsigutkin are writing with this gift.

Not just the story of an engineering pathway, but the story of a community deciding that the way to meet a difficult moment is to expand opportunity, deepen commitment, and insist that Jewish students deserve both cutting-edge training and a campus that recognizes who they are.