The Impact of Gifts

Few of us can resist a golden retriever. Big, lovable, friendly. After living with five goldens, John and Linda Nelson designated a planned gift for cancer research in the School of Veterinary Medicine.

After earning his master’s and doctoral degrees from the UW-Madison, retired biochemist James Chieh-Hsia Mao, who fled Chinese Communism, wants to help students and better the world.

What’s a department chair to do, when he’s given six new faculty lines but needs start-up packages to go with them. Donors step in.

Dr. Douglas McNeel and his team at the Wisconsin Institutes for Medical Research (WIMR) have been targeting ways the body might fight off prostate tumors.

Gifts to the L&S Annual Fund support ground-breaking research about how magnetic fields are generated. The Madison Plasma Dynamo Experiment is the first facility in the world to study the origin of the magnetic fields of planets, stars and galaxies. The origin of magnetic fields in universe is unknown, despite efforts by many scientists. The donations allowed for the creation of a new laboratory hosting an innovative sphere that is the focal point of the experiment.

Gifts to the L&S Annual fund benefit the L&S Freshman Scholar Award allow the College to provide assistance to 25 outstanding first-year students.

The Chazen Museum is a cornerstone of the visionary East Campus Gateway, which, when completed, will provide a swath of carefully planned development from Regent Street to Lake Mendota.

By several measures, students giving to support UW–Madison and their awareness of its importance leaped forward in 2011.