UC Merced Magazine | Volume XIX, Issue VII

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“The Tony Coelho Endowed Chair has fundamentally shaped the center’s development and will continue to do so as it matures.” Chair endowment funding allows university leaders to direct support where it is most needed, including research and academic programming. Professor Sarah Kurtz, the inaugural recipient of the Reno Ferrero Family Chair in Electrical Engineering, said the support has been “tremendously helpful in creating and promoting the electrical engineering program” at UC Merced. The new major launched just as Kurtz was named to the chair. “As a relatively young university, UC Merced has very few resources of this type,” Kurtz said. “They are precious as we build a university that serves a unique population.” Other UC Merced chairholders have noted that the flexibility of their endowments enables them to explore and develop new knowledge by exchanging ideas with a community of peers. Ruiz Family Chair in Entrepreneurship Professor Christian Fons-Rosen has used some of his chair support to bring together doctoral students and faculty from UC Merced and UC Berkeley for the “Yosemite Retreat in Entrepreneurship and Innovation” for the past two years. The most recent gathering was extended to invite

researchers from UCLA and Stanford. “I strongly believe the Ruiz family and I have the shared goal of leveling the playing field and making UC Merced play a more central role in entrepreneurship,” Fons-Rosen said. “For this reason, I always make sure that both UC Merced faculty and Ph.D. students are present in this meeting and end up having quality time with top scholars in the field.” Vincent Hillyer Chair of Literature Professor Humberto Garcia — whose research focuses on 18th-century British literature and culture through the lens of race, empire, gender, South Asia and the occult — is able to share his work globally by traveling to international academic forums for presentations. More importantly, his resources enable him to bring the world to the UC Merced community by sponsoring visiting speakers to meet with faculty, graduate students and undergraduates. UC Merced supporters who establish endowed chairs are generally inspired by a personal affinity with the university or their desire to help increase the campus’s prominence. They also are often motivated to make a significant philanthropic contribution to spur advances in a particular area of study or find solutions for a specific issue or problem confronting society.

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