I am grateful for your belief in my potential.
-ESHANI, Graduate Student
The UW-Madison Department of Chemistry is known for its outstanding teaching, research, and outreach programs as well as its collegial and collaborative atmosphere. Here, you’ll find gritty, courageous leaders who are steering our program with curiosity, insight, and determination. This spirit will lead us into the future, but we can’t do it alone. Our continued success depends on the support of donors and benefactors who share our passion for discovery and offering the highest quality of education.
Priorities for the department include boosting lab start-up funding to attract faculty talent, increasing support for our graduate students, and ensuring top quality impactful research by maintaining cutting-edge shared instrumentation facilities. Your donation can support our growth and mission in a myriad of ways. We invite you to explore the ways making a gift can work best for you.
GOALS
- Attract and retain excellent faculty
by offering competitive start-up packages that fund lab startup costs, equipment purchases, and research. - Extend support for graduate students and postdocs
by providing funding beyond traditional limits to foster more time for research. - Ensure top quality impactful research
through state-of-the-art shared instrumentation. - Provide broader access to a chemistry Ph.D.
by supporting programs that attract and retain graduate students who represent varied backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences. - Expand and fortify our chemistry education outreach
program to advance the Wisconsin Idea.
Learn More
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Attract and retain excellent faculty
Faculty support is one of the top priorities for the department. For new faculty, this support helps them establish their labs, research, and grant funding. Market-driven costs now average $1.5 million per new faculty member. State-of-the-art equipment, supplies, and support are critical to recruiting and securing top talent, and having resources available for this purpose will keep us on top as research leaders. It allows us to attract top quality mid-career scholars to our department and for established faculty, this support raises faculty distinction among peers and helps us to keep our most successful faculty from being enticed away by other institutions.
$1M ENDOWED PROFESSORSHIP
$2M ENDOWED CHAIR
$3M ENDOWED DISTINGUISHED CHAIR
Support graduate students and postdocs
The lives of graduate students and postdocs can be enriching, exhilarating, and exhausting all at the same time. Balancing the demands of classes, research, and meeting a personal budget can sometimes be difficult. Time is a precious commodity and gifts to graduate student and postdoc support allow these individuals to focus on what’s important—doing the critical research that advances them toward their goals. Gifts to this initiative can support a postdoc or graduate student’s research for a summer, a semester, or an entire year. It can allow an individual to work with a top researcher at UW, or it can fund a postdoc or graduate student fellowship to allow these individuals to focus on developing potential discoveries.
$45,000 ANNUALLY PER STUDENT/POSTDOC
$10,000 PER SUMMER PER STUDENT/POSTDOC
Ensure top quality impactful research through state-of-the-art shared instrumentation
The Paul Bender Chemistry Instrument Center (PBCIC) serves the research needs of more than 60 research groups both on- and off-campus, as well as many private companies. Today, the PBCIC employs six award-winning Ph.D. scientists, and four teaching assistants offering guidance and instruction in magnetic resonance, electron paramagnetic resonance, mass spectrometry, and X-ray crystallography. The center serves more than 60 research groups both on- and off-campus, as well as many private companies. Staying on the cutting edge of instrumentation development and maintaining the center’s instruments valued at more than $11.3 million is no easy task. Upgrades to and acquisitions of equipment relies on funding from federal grants, the university’s Instructional Modernization grants, corporate sponsorships, bequests, and private donations.
$1.5-$2M ANNUALLY
Provide broader access to a chemistry Ph.D.
Opening our department to a wider variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences can result in more available talent, better problem-solving, and research environments that prepare our students for work life after graduation.
We have created a unique recruitment program that allows individuals to explore and experience our Ph.D. program at no expense. The program invites prospective students to the Department of Chemistry to meet one-on-one with faculty, learn about the program, tour instrumentation facilities, and network with graduate student hosts. This program also introduces many prospective students to the process of applying to a Ph.D. program.
Bridge is a post-baccalaureate program aimed at increasing the number of students from underrepresented populations who complete a Ph.D. degree in chemistry. As a direct result of Bridge, our department has more than doubled the participation of underrepresented students in our Ph.D. program.
$25,000 ANNUALLY FOR RECRUITMENT PROGRAM
$175,000 ANNUALLY TO SUPPORT 3-5 BRIDGE FELLOWS
Expand and fortify our chemistry education outreach
Outreach for the Department of Chemistry is focused on chemistry learning that illuminates daily life and embodies the Wisconsin Idea. The first of our initiatives is to build science teacher capacity through research-practice partnerships with high school and college teachers around the country. These efforts will support the creation of spaces for students to build, refine, and use chemistry ideas and models to make sense of complex phenomena and design solutions for important problems. The second initiative will directly engage learners to use chemistry knowledge productively. ChemCamps for middle school students, debates organized around contemporary issues that intersect with chemistry, the continuance of SCIENCounters—a national program that connects young learners with working scientists, and awards for communicating Ph.D. work to the public through thesis chapters written for a lay audience and disseminated online are some of the programs in this initiative. We are currently in the initial five-year growth phase of this outreach plan, which is supported by a variety of seed funding.
$200,000 ANNUALLY
“Your contributions truly have a profound impact on the department and make it one of the best places in the world to study chemistry.”
–SEAN, Graduate Student
Together, we can make an impact.
A $10,000 gift would support the summer research of a graduate student
A $25,000 gift would enable 25 prospective Ph.D students to visit the Department of Chemistry, meet our faculty, and learn more about our program.
A $45,000 gift would support a graduate student's research for an entire academic year.
A $175,000 gift would support 3-5 Bridge Fellows for a year.
A $200,000 gift would advance the Wisconsin Idea by providing chemistry learning opportunities to hundreds of middle school and high school students across the country.
A $300,000 to $1 million gift would support the startup costs of a new faculty member to the Department of Chemistry.
A $1-3 million endowed gift would provide a stable funding source for faculty members and open doors to additional areas of support, such as research assistantships, outside collaborations, and external grant funding.
Every gift to the Department of Chemistry helps, but giving at these levels can make a significant difference to students, faculty, and individuals beyond our classrooms and labs.
Connect with us
Kayla Reise
Position title: Director of Development, College of Letters & Science, Wisconsin Foundation and Alumni Association
Email:
kayla.riese
Phone: 608.732.1142