The Duke Endowment just provided a $50 million grant to the University to hire more researchers in engineering, mathematics, medicine, sciences and technology.
According to a Duke Today release Monday, the grant will fund the recruitment of “more than a dozen junior- to senior-level faculty.” These new additions to the Duke community will be critical parts of a collaboration among the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, Pratt School of Engineering and School of Medicine to advance the Duke's focus on interdisciplinary work.
“…[This] transformational grant will allow us to recruit the brightest and boldest thinkers and provide them with the infrastructure they need to solve the world’s most pressing challenges,” President Vincent Price said in the news release. “We are so very grateful to The Duke Endowment, and we look forward to all that we can accomplish together in the years ahead.”
The Duke Endowment is a private foundation established by James B. Duke in 1924, and aims to carry on the family's legacy through grant-making, publishing resources for service organizations and operating a fellowship program for emerging leaders in philanthropy. In addition to the more than $1.5 billion that it has donated to Duke University since its founding in 1924, The Endowment also supports programs and organizations of higher education, health care, children's welfare and spiritual life.
The news release explains that recruitment for the new faculty “is expected to be complete within three years,” and that the researchers will contribute to scholarship in fields like “climate change and epidemic disease.”
A. Eugene Washington, chancellor for health affairs and president and chief executive officer of the Duke University Health System, explained that the objective of the recruitment is to “improve the overall quality of the sciences across Duke.”
“Recruiting the best and most promising scientists will propel us to even higher levels of scientific discovery and education and will translate into improved health for communities in North Carolina and beyond,” Washington said in the release.
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Stefanie Pousoulides is The Chronicle's Investigations Editor. A senior from Akron, Ohio, Stefanie is double majoring in political science and international comparative studies and serves as a Senior Editor of The Muse Magazine, Duke's feminist magazine. She is also a former co-Editor-in-Chief of The Muse Magazine and a former reporting intern at PolitiFact in Washington, D.C.