$10 million gift to university from Fred Burke brings an engineer’s education full circle
More than half a century after he walked out of Starkville with an industrial engineering degree, Fred P. Burke sat down at a table on the Mississippi State University campus, pen in hand, flanked by President Mark E. Keenum and Vice President for Development and Alumni John Rush, and signed the paperwork that will shape that same department for generations.
Fred and his wife, Sara Jean Burke of Atlanta, committed $10 million to the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering in the university’s Bagley College of Engineering.
It’s the largest gift the couple has given to the school, and it rests on an idea Fred has tested over a long career: engineers who also understand business can build things that last.
“Equipping engineering students with business education makes for a dynamite combination,” Burke said when the gift was announced this week. His own life is the evidence.
He graduated from Mississippi State’s industrial engineering program in 1971 and went straight to Purdue University, where he earned a master’s degree in industrial administration from the Krannert School in 1972.
He then served as a U.S. Air Force officer, leading a combat communications unit. He learned consumer marketing as a brand manager at Procter & Gamble and strategy as a consultant and engagement manager at McKinsey & Company, with assignments in Atlanta and Brussels.
In Brussels he led a pan-European strategic review, which he still remembers as a lesson in how people from different countries, each with their own approach, can reach the right answer together.
Then he started building companies.
In 1983 he co-founded Sales Technologies, an early pioneer in giving big field sales forces portable computers.
The firm grew to more than 600 employees serving Fortune 100 clients, landed at No. 30 on the 1988 Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing private companies, and was acquired by Dun & Bradstreet in 1989.
In 1992 he co-founded Central Pharmacy Services, a nuclear pharmacy company that grew to 45 business units, serving more than 1,000 hospitals and clinics in 22 states before Cardinal Health bought it in 2001. Three years later, with partners David Morris and Kendall Forbes, he launched Guardian Pharmacy Services from a single location.
Guardian provides medications and pharmacy care to assisted living communities, skilled nursing facilities, and organizations serving people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Its approach gives local pharmacy teams real ownership and authority, and it has grown to roughly 60 pharmacies across 38 states.
The company went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2024. Burke still runs it as president and CEO, and he describes his philosophy plainly: do the right thing, follow the Golden Rule, and the people around you will rise to their potential.
“My time at Mississippi State launched me on my path and had a profound impact on my life,” he said. The new gift is designed to carry that momentum forward. It’s divided into five endowments, each named for the Burkes.
The Burke Faculty Fellows Endowment will help the department recruit and keep nationally respected faculty and support their professional growth.
The Burke Endowed Scholarship will help undergraduates.
The Burke Graduate Fellows Endowment will support graduate students doing advanced research. The Burke Equipment and Facilities Endowment will cover the steady, unglamorous work of keeping labs and spaces in good condition.
The Burke Excellence Endowment will fund initiatives that raise the program’s national profile and educational reach.
Across all five, a theme runs close to the donor’s heart: encouraging students to study both engineering and business while they’re at Mississippi State.
Keenum called the commitment transformative.
“Mississippi State University is a national powerhouse and global leader in engineering education, research, and engagement, and the strong support of alumni and friends like Fred and Sara Jean helps make that possible,” he said, adding that the gift will “propel the Bagley College of Engineering and the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering to even greater heights.”
For the Burkes, the gift continues a legacy rather than starting a new one. Nearly three decades ago, when Bagley College was just starting to imagine sending engineering students overseas, the couple helped fund its first study abroad program.
“I was quite taken with this new opportunity, and that’s why we provided funding on the spot to get it started,” Fred recalled.
That early support became the Fred and Sara Jean Burke Endowed Study Abroad Program fund, which has now sent more than 70 Mississippi State students abroad.
The couple has spoken about how living overseas changed their own thinking, and Fred has argued that engineers, so often analytical and quantitative by temperament, gain something hard to teach in a classroom when they navigate daily life in another language, down to a trip to the grocery store.
Those people’s skills, he believes, pay off for anyone who will one day lead a team.
Sara Jean Burke brings her own long record of service to the partnership.
She has spent more than 20 years leading Atlanta charitable institutions. She twice served as president of the Atlanta chapter of ARCS Foundation, a national women’s volunteer organization that gives unrestricted awards to outstanding American students in science, engineering, and medical research, and she has served on the national ARCS board.
She chaired the Festival of Trees benefiting Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and later chaired the Southeastern Flower Show, delivering a record contribution to the Atlanta Botanical Garden.
She has also served on the boards of Teach For America and Catholic Charities.
Within ARCS, the Burkes are counted among the chapter’s most generous cumulative donors. Seen alongside her years of championing young scientists in Georgia, the Mississippi State gift looks less like one spouse’s alma mater gift and more like the shared conviction of a couple who have spent decades betting on gifted students in science and engineering.
In the end, the gift is simple to describe and slow to measure. A promising professor stays in Starkville.
A graduate student finishes the research that becomes her career. An undergraduate who might have chosen between an engineering degree and a business education takes both. A lab gets the upkeep it needs.
Fred Burke left Mississippi State in 1971 with a degree and an instinct for systems, and he went on to build three companies around making complicated things work better.
With Sara Jean beside him, he is now building something meant to outlast all of them, an endowment designed to keep turning out engineers who can lead.