$25 million gift from Pat and Jana Eilers unites athletics and academics in a new human performance institute at Catholic research university- raises their giving to school to more than $58 million
Pat Eilers knows what it costs to compete at the highest level, and he knows the part of the athlete the scoreboard never shows.
He started at safety for Notre Dame’s undefeated 1988 national championship team, lettered in baseball, earned degrees in biology and mechanical engineering, and then spent six seasons in the NFL.
Now he and his wife, Jana, are making sure the next generation of Fighting Irish athletes benefits from the kind of science he once studied in the classroom and lived out on the field.
The Winnetka, Illinois, couple has given an additional $25 million to the University of Notre Dame to create the Eilers Family Sports and Human Performance Institute.
The university calls it a first-of-its-kind partnership between Notre Dame Athletics and its academic units.
The gift brings the family’s investment in this area to $50 million.
Earlier this year, the Eilerses gave $25 million to endow the Eilers Family Sports Performance Center inside Jack and Kathy Shields Family Hall, the new operational home of Notre Dame football.
The new institute takes the next step.
Where the performance center gave athletes a place to train, recover, and heal, the institute gives the university a way to understand why the training works and how it can work better for athletes and for everyone else.
It will support research in physiology, neuroscience, data science, and athletic performance. It builds on collaborations already underway among Notre Dame Athletics, Notre Dame Research, and faculty in the Colleges of Engineering, Science, and Arts & Letters.
Current projects include a study on lowering reinjury risk for athletes returning from ACL tears and a psychology study on reducing jet lag for teams that cross several time zones to compete.
The research agenda is broad.
In neuroscience and mental health, researchers will study how the brain performs under stress, how teams build synchronization and trust, and the neurobiology of spiritual grounding, a question well suited to a Catholic research university.
In biomechanics, sensors and equipment will develop wearable, noninvasive technology that measures physical stress, impact, and the body’s automatic responses.
That work could guide adaptive prosthetics and better athletic equipment, and it could shed light on cognitive behavior.
In applied data science and artificial intelligence, they will build predictive health simulations and “digital twins” and explore metabolism and whole-body physiology.
The aims include game-day readiness, preventing nutritional deficiencies, reducing common injuries, and supporting long-term health well beyond the locker room.
Provost John McGreevy, the Charles and Jill Fischer Provost, called the partnership “an exciting illustration of what becomes possible when we think as an institution.”
He said it advances Notre Dame’s mission as a leading global Catholic research university. Pete Bevacqua, vice president, and James E. Rohr, director of athletics, described the gift as monumental.
He said it would unite experts in sports science with “world-class minds in our campus faculty, creating space for collaboration that will produce a positive impact beyond the field of play.”
For the Eilers family, the institute adds a new chapter to a long relationship.
Pat grew up in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and attended Saint Thomas Academy.
He spent his first college year at Yale, where he played football, before transferring to Notre Dame.
There, he became a two-year starter on one of the program’s most celebrated teams in history. After his NFL career with the Minnesota Vikings, Washington, and the Chicago Bears, he earned an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. He went on to a distinguished career in energy investing.
He spent more than 15 years at Madison. Dearborn Partners ‘ energy, power, and chemicals practice, then served as a managing director in BlackRock’s infrastructure group.
He later founded Transition Equity Partners, a Chicago private equity firm focused on the energy transition, where he is managing partner.
Over two decades, he has helped finance projects from wind farms in Hawaii to cleaner-burning natural gas plants serving New York City.
Jana Eilers shares those Minnesota roots.
She earned a marketing degree from the University of St. Thomas in 1989.
An avid photographer who loves to cook, she has devoted herself to her family and her community through volunteer work and philanthropy.
She also serves on Notre Dame’s Hesburgh Women of Impact Leadership Committee.
The couple’s four children all graduated from Notre Dame: Elizabeth, Katherine, Clare, and Patrick.
Katherine played women’s lacrosse, and Patrick played men’s lacrosse, so the family has experienced Notre Dame athletics as both alumni and parents.
The family’s loyalty goes beyond financial support.
In 2014, a graduate assistant on the defensive staff needed time away for a serious medical issue.
Pat took a sabbatical from private equity and spent the season as a volunteer defensive quality control assistant.
“I was the lowest man on the totem pole in the coaches’ room that season,” he later recalled, adding that Notre Dame “has such a positive impact on your life.”
The next year, he and Jana gave $3 million to endow the defensive backs coaching position, the university’s first endowed assistant coaching position.
Pat called it “an expression of our gratitude to those professors, coaches, and administrators who have dedicated their lives to Notre Dame’s unique mission.”
In 2022, they gave $5 million to endow the associate athletics director for sports performance position, now held by John Wagle, who is titled the Pat and Jana Eilers Sr. Associate Athletics Director for Sports Performance.
The family has also endowed the Joe Moore Offensive Line Coach position, helped build the Irish Athletics Center, and supported the Joyce Football Grant-in-Aid Program.
On the academic side, they established the Pat and Jana Eilers Family Endowed Engineering Fellowship in the Notre Dame Energy Center, a natural fit for an engineer who built a career in energy.
The pattern is clear.
The Eilerses have always invested in people and the systems that support them: the coaches who mentor athletes, the staff who keep them healthy, and the scholars who advance knowledge.
The new institute brings those threads together. It treats the student-athlete as a whole person, body, mind, and spirit, and it gives researchers across campus a living laboratory whose findings can reach far beyond South Bend.
“Notre Dame has shaped our family in countless ways, making this incremental gift especially meaningful to us,” Pat Eilers said.
“We are humbled to know the Eilers Family Sports and Human Performance Institute will help generations of student-athletes as well as the broader student body achieve their full physical, mental, and spiritual potential.”
He sees the institute as a way to advance the university’s strategic framework on health and well-being, including medical research, mental health, wellness, data, AI, and computing.
“We hope this collaboration across the university as a whole will generate many grants and amazing research that greatly benefit students, coaches, and teachers alike,” he said.