[Ucrea] Join the UCREA in Supporting UCR Graduate Students during May Giving Month

[Cristina L Otegui]

[cid:image001.png at 01D858A4.1284BF00]

April 25, 2022
To:
UCR Emeriti

From:
UCR Emeriti Association Leadership Team

Re:
Join the UCREA in Supporting UCR Graduate Students during May Giving Month

Dear UCR Emeriti,

In the Spring Tower Talk newsletter, we announced that May Giving month would be dedicated to raising funds to support the UCREA Graduate Student Travel Award. Traveling to a national or international professional society conference, symposium or workshop to present and defend research is a critical part of graduate student education. Travel to access resources available at another institution, museum, private collection, or field site can be essential to the completion of a graduate student's research. Unfortunately, travel funds are frequently insufficient for graduate students to take advantage of these essential educational opportunities.

For this reason, the UCREA is committed to supporting graduate student travel. As emeriti of UCR, many of us have witnessed the role that travel played in the educational success of our own graduate students. The importance of travel and the funds to support it in contributing to student achievement is well-illustrated in the following story of a former UCR graduate student and her journey towards career success.

Dr. Samantha Lewis was conferred a Ph.D. degree (2013) from UCR's Genetics, Genomics, and Bioinformatics doctoral program under the tutelage of Professor Bradley Hyman. Dr. Lewis benefited greatly from UCR financial assistance to support travel. As but one example of Samantha's commitment to independent, multidisciplinary research, she completed an intensive, weeklong course in Computational and Comparative Genomics offered by the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories (2011); she was the only graduate student accepted out of 21 carefully chosen applicants from a worldwide pool. As if being the youngest participant was not enough of an honor, Samantha successfully competed on our campus for highly sought NSF Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) funds and Graduate Division travel awards to support her enrollment. Because of her attendance in this course, Samantha became a campus resource for bioinformatics at that time. She is currently a ladder rank Assistant Professor of Cell Biology, Development, and Physiology at UC-Berkeley.

As we approach May, we kindly ask you to consider joining us in supporting this worthy cause. Below we have outlined our goal and enticing challenges that have graciously been pledged by fellow UCR emeriti.

UCREA May Giving Month Goal
Establish an endowment that will provide permanent funding for the UCREA Graduate Student Travel Award. At UCR, $25,000 is required to establish an endowment. Coupled with the generous pledges from UCR emeriti, we now seek your financial support to help raise $12,500 during May Giving Month.

Matching Challenge

*        Anonymous donors have offered to match all gifts dollar for dollar up to $8,500. That means your gift of $100 can automatically be turned into $200. But wait, there's more!

*        Gifts of $100 or more will be matched by an extra 1 to 1 until $2,500 is exhausted.

The UCR emeriti community is strong! If we unite in this effort, we can provide a significant benefit to the success of UCR graduate students into the future. Please mark your calendars for May Giving Month and look out for a follow up communication which will include details of the UCR Emeriti Association May Giving Month webpage.

We thank you for your valued contributions to UCR!

Sincerely,

Darleen DeMason, Co-President
Raymond Russell, Co-President
retirees at ucr.edu<mailto:retirees at ucr.edu>
UCR Emeriti Association






-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ucr.edu/pipermail/ucrea/attachments/20220425/669ac051/attachment-0001.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image001.png
Type: image/png
Size: 11241 bytes
Desc: image001.png
URL: <https://lists.ucr.edu/pipermail/ucrea/attachments/20220425/669ac051/attachment-0001.png>