Jane Stanford

Co-founder of Stanford University

Jane Elizabeth Lathrop Stanford (August 25, 1828 – February 28, 1905) was an American philanthropist, co-founder of Stanford University in 1885 (opened 1891) along with her husband, Leland Stanford, as a memorial to their only child, Leland Stanford Jr., who died of typhoid fever in 1884 at the age of 15.

After her husband's death in 1893, she funded and operated the university almost single-handedly until her unsolved murder by strychnine poisoning in 1905.