By Anne Howard

Ann Lurie, president of Lurie Investments, in Chicago, and a former pediatric nurse, has pledged $100-million to Children’s Memorial Hospital. Her gift will help build a new facility in Chicago’s Streeterville neighborhood and will support pediatric-health research.

The new hospital, which will be named for Ms. Lurie and her late husband, Robert, will likely cost $850-million in all. Construction will begin in the spring, and the facility is scheduled to open in 2012.

“Medicine is evolving so rapidly. To capture some of the value of new innovations and technology, Children’s Memorial requires an updated clinical facility with space for upgraded equipment and services,” Ms. Lurie said in a statement released by the hospital. “It is my hope that this gift will help Children’s Memorial Hospital leverage its strengths and combine its expertise with its affiliated entities, including Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, to provide state-of-the-art care for infants and children in Chicago, the Midwest, and beyond for many years to come.”

Ms. Lurie, a mother of six, once worked as a critical-care nurse at Children’s Memorial Hospital. She is also president and treasurer of the Ann and Robert H. Lurie Foundation and president of Africa Infectious Disease Village Clinics, a nonprofit group she founded in 2002.

Her late husband, Robert, was a real-estate developer who died of colon cancer in 1990 at the age of 48.

At Children’s Memorial, Ms. Lurie previously endowed a professorship in cancer-cell biology and donated $1.3-million to support the Adolescent Medicine Trials Network, for HIV/AIDS research. She has donated large sums to Northwestern University, including $40-million to create a medical-research center and $10-million to endow the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center. In 2002 she pledged $25-million to the University of Michigan — her late husband’s alma mater — to create programs in biomedical engineering and integrated microsystems.

In 2003 Ms. Lurie told The Chronicle of Philanthropy that she wanted her philanthropy to battle cancer, hunger, and inadequate health care. “In general, I give to things that I stumble across that really appeal to me or that have I some personal interest in,” she told The Chronicle.