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Penn State University has named Jon Wolf as its 2026 Philanthropist of the Year. The award, which recognizes individuals, couples, or families who have demonstrated exceptional generosity in the promotion and support of the University, celebrates Wolf’s landmark gift in 2025 to dramatically scale up the university’s resources for undergraduates studying to become addiction and recovery professionals or enter the field of mental health services.
“Mental health and substance use issues touch almost every family across the Commonwealth and the country broadly, but lingering stigma gets in the way of marshaling a response on scale with the challenge,” Wolf said. “My intention is to attract more of the best and brightest to the behavioral health counseling program at Penn State by offsetting the burden of tuition through financial support and facilitating upgrades to the teaching curriculum and faculty resources. I am enormously honored to be named Penn State’s Philanthropist of the Year, and my hope is that my story might spur others to think about how they, too, can provide gifts that enhance specific programs within the University that lift students to success and have an impact in the wider world.”
Wolf graduated from Penn State with a degree in health policy administration in 1981, followed by a master’s degree in hospital administration from George Washington University in 1983. He went on to specialize in launching and operating freestanding psychiatric and substance use treatment facilities in Georgia, Utah, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.
In 1999, he founded his own company, Pyramid Healthcare, and in his more than two decades as CEO, led its development into an integrated system of behavioral healthcare programs that employs a staff of 3,500 and operates more than 80 behavioral health treatment facilities and seven specialized schools across the eastern United States.
