McLean business leader’s foundation gives $20M to George Mason University

A Fairfax County business woman has made a $20 million donation to George Mason University, the university announced Friday.

The Kimmy Duong Foundation made the donation to support a department in the university’s College of Engineering and Computing; it will be renamed the Long Nguyen and Kimmy Duong School of Computing, according to the announcement.

Long Nguyen and Kimmy Duong, who both were born in Vietnam, are husband and wife and live in McLean. Nguyen founded Pragmatics, a Reston-based IT company, in 1985, and Duong joined the company in 1994. She worked as vice chair and CFO. In November 2024, Integral Federal in McLean acquired the company for an undisclosed amount, and the couple has now retired.

However, retirement hasn’t slowed Duong down.

In 2015, she established the Kimmy Duong Foundation, which supports health, education and welfare initiatives in the United States and Vietnam. It has given more than $4 million toward scholarship programs with endowments to universities in the Washington, D.C., area.

“I have a foundation, and my husband also has another foundation,” Duong said in an interview Friday. “So maintaining those foundations is a lot of work itself.”

In 2009, George Mason University’s College of Engineering and Computing named an engineering building in honor of Nguyen, who made a $5 million gift.

Duong had the jitters Friday morning about speaking later in the day during a formal announcement of the gift at George Mason’s Nguyen Engineering Building. “I’m not that good in public speaking,” she said.

That said, Duong has proven over the years that she can do hard things.

Coming from Vietnam

Born in Nha Trang, Vietnam, in 1945, Duong earned a degree in economics and law from the University of Saigon and went to work at IBM in 1968.

During the 1975 fall of Saigon, Duong fled the country. She arrived in the United States with $30 to her name and speaking little English. After moving to Bethesda, Maryland, Duong began working for IBM stateside. Later, she married Long Nguyen, also a native of Vietnam, and raised seven nephews and nieces.

Duong is drawn to give to universities, she said, because without an education it can be hard to get ahead.

“My main goal is to encourage the student to do well for themselves, helping their family, [and] then, after that, they have to think about others,” she said. “They need to know about others, and they need to support others, and that is my goal.”

Duong received the Mason Medal, George Mason’s highest honorary award, in 2023.

With the most recent gift, the university will establish three endowments: two within the College of Engineering and Computing to support scholarships and student success initiatives and one for University Life to provide scholarships through the Long Nguyen and Kimmy Duong Scholarship Endowment. Those scholarships have a preference for students majoring in nursing, education or journalism.

A portion of the gift is eligible for matching funds through the Tech Talent Investment Program, a Virginia effort to increase the number of graduates with computing degrees. George Mason expects the impact of Nguyen and Duong’s gift to be around $36 million.

In 2023, the university launched a $1 billion comprehensive fundraising campaign.

“Kimmy Duong and Long Nguyen have been good friends to George Mason, recognizing the opportunity our university provides for students to succeed,” George Mason President Gregory Washington said in a statement. “Kimmy came to this country with very little and climbed her way to success, not unlike how many of our students who — whether they are first generation or come from difficult socioeconomic circumstances — overcome their own challenges.”

Although the university’s board of visitors approved the school’s name change April 1, it will become official upon receiving approval from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV). That is expected to be granted over the summer, according to the university.