Phillip Terrence "Terry" Ragon is an American

entrepreneur Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value. With this definition, entrepreneurship is viewed as change, generally entailing risk beyond what is normally encountered in starting a business, which may include other values t ...

and philanthropist who founded

InterSystems InterSystems Corporation is a privately held vendor of software systems and technology for high-performance database management, rapid application development, integration, and healthcare information systems. The vendor's products includInter ...

and is the current CEO.

Early life and education

The son of a U.S. Air Force fighter pilot, Ragon was born in Arizona. He grew up in a variety of states and graduated from high school in Bogota, Colombia. He graduated from

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

in 1971 with a B.S. in physics.

Career

In 1978, Phillip Ragon founded InterSystems Corporation in

Cambridge, Massachusetts Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. As part of the Boston metropolitan area, the cities population of the 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the fourth most populous city in the state, behind Boston ...

, to develop and sell

database management In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases spa ...

and healthcare information systems. He is currently the CEO and owner. Ragon is a member of the

Harvard Medical School Harvard Medical School (HMS) is the graduate medical school of Harvard University and is located in the Longwood Medical Area of Boston, Massachusetts. Founded in 1782, HMS is one of the oldest medical schools in the United States and is consi ...

Board of Fellows, and a member of MIT Corporation (the governing body of

), and a member of the advisory board of the

MIT Jameel Clinic The MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health (commonly, MIT Jameel Clinic; previously, J-Clinic) is a research center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and health sc ...

. In 2020, with a net worth of $2.2 billion, Forbes ranked Ragon No. 378 on the Forbes 400 list of the richest people in America.

Philanthropy

In March 2017, Ragon, and wife Susan, signed

The Giving Pledge The Giving Pledge is a campaign to encourage extremely wealthy people to contribute a majority of their wealth to philanthropic causes. , the pledge has 236 signatories from 28 countries. Most of the signatories of the pledge are billionaires, a ...

, vowing to donate at least half of their money to philanthropic causes. In 2009, Ragon pledged to donate US $100 million over 10 years period for AIDS research through the

Phillip T. and Susan M. Ragon Institute Phillip T. and Susan M. Ragon Institute is a medical institute founded in 2009 at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) by the funding from founder and CEO of InterSystems Phillip Ragon and his wife Susan Ragon to find vaccines for diseases of ...

at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) after witnessing the plight of the disease in

South Africa South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the Southern Africa, southernmost country in Africa. It is bounded to the south by of coastline that stretch along the Atlantic Ocean, South Atlantic and Indian Oceans; to the ...

. The Ragons donated $200 million to MGH in 2019, the largest donation in the hospital's history. In April 2019, Ragon and his wife announced that they were donating a further $200 million to Massachusetts General Hospital for a vaccine-research center.

Awards and Honors

In 2022, Ragon received the Golden Plate Award of the

American Academy of Achievement The American Academy of Achievement, colloquially known as the Academy of Achievement, is a non-profit educational organization that recognizes some of the highest achieving individuals in diverse fields and gives them the opportunity to meet ...

References

Living people 21st-century philanthropists American technology chief executives Giving Pledgers Harvard Medical School people Massachusetts General Hospital benefactors MIT Department of Physics alumni {{US-CEO-stub Year of birth missing (living people)