Ex-NBTY CEO gives $10M to Washington U.

Scott Rudolph, the former chief executive of Ronkonkoma-based vitamin maker NBTY Inc., has donated $10 million to his son Michael Rudolph's college, Washington University in St. Louis.

In a ceremony earlier this month, the school named the building that houses the Department of Planetary Sciences Scott Rudolph Hall.

"My son was going to the institution, and I was very impressed with the way they do things," Rudolph said Thursday. Michael Rudolph is currently at the college's Olin Business School.

Rudolph, who last year left NBTY after it was sold to the Carlyle Group investment firm for $3.8 billion, started a new venture, Piping Rock Health Products Llc in Upper Brookville. It has a building in Islip and another in Babylon and will sell jams and jellies online when operations begin July 1. Rudolph's one-year noncompete agreement with NBTY ended Thursday.

He is now free to sell more products, he said. So far, Piping Rock has hired about 20 people. "Eventually we'll have a few hundred," he said.