A $50 million gift from John Malone ’63 to the Yale School of Engineering and Applied Science will allow for an expansion of the University’s engineering faculty.

Announced this morning, the gift — the largest in the engineering school’s history — will support the hiring of new professors across the school’s core research departments and interdisciplinary research centers as well as two professors with joint appointments with the School of Management. The gifts support Yale’s engineering program at a time when the education of engineers is important to the nation’s future, University President Richard Levin said in a Thursday press release.

“This gift will enable an expansion of the engineering faculty and help us to attract exceptional new talent to the program,” Levin said in an interview Wednesday night. “We’re very grateful to Mr. Malone for his extraordinary generosity.”

Altogether, the gift will allow for the hiring of ten new professors. It requires approximately $5 million to endow a new professorship, Levin said.

A native of Milford, Conn., Malone attended Hopkins Grammar School in New Haven before graduating from Yale with a degree in electrical engineering, the press release said. After obtaining his Ph.D from Johns Hopkins University, he entered the telecommunications business and has continued to invest in media companies to the present.

Malone has previously supported Yale’s engineering programs and funded the construction of the Malone Engineering Center, which opened in 2005 and houses the department of biomedical engineering. At the time, that $24 million gift was the largest in the school’s history, Levin said.