Opening Doors: Alum Gives ME First Endowed Chair; New Chair for Bioengineering
Tacoma CEO gives $2 million in name of former teacher and retired ME professor
- Henry Schatz, left, and Professor Emeritus Jim Morrison spend some time together at recent graduation ceremonies in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Schatz has given a $2 million gift to establish an endowed professorship and a scholarship fund named for his former teacher, who he says was the first instructor to truly inspire him as an engineer.
Watch a home video of the gift announcement during last month’s ME graduation.
Many successful people can point to one person often a teacher who made an impression so deep that it changed the way they approach life.
For Henry Schatz, CEO of General Plastics Manufacturing Co. in Tacoma, that person is Jim Morrison, a longtime professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Washington.
Morrison, he said, inspired him as a budding engineer in a way no one had before.
“He taught us to think analytically, logically, critically to look for the things that may not be apparent until thinking it through,” Schatz said. “This was a life lesson. It applied not just to engineering, but to other situations in life to raising your family, to growing a garden, to dealing with traffic and kids and with other people, in addition to the latest project you’re taking on at work.”
As a result, Schatz recently made a gift of $2 million to establish the first endowed chair in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and an undergraduate scholarship fund, both named for Morrison.
“I almost fell off my chair,” said Morrison, who is now retired. “I never tried to make a name for myself. I was just trying to be a good teacher.”
That, according to Schatz, is what made him so effective and was one of the factors involved in making the donation, which is intended to target teaching in conjunction with research. The other factor was the availability of supplemental funding through a matching funds program.
“If we were going to do it, I decided we should do it now to ensure the availability of the matching funds before they went to other donations,” he said.
The program, which combines money from a group of “Founding Donors” with university funds to create a matching pool, provides a 50-percent match for gifts given for endowments. With the match, the endowed chair and scholarship fund stand at $1.5 million each.
Schatz said he hopes the gift will help give today’s engineers the sort of inspirational foundation that Morrison imparted to him.
“That’s really the first step,” he said. “They need that if they are going to go on to make a significant contribution to the field and to society. I see it as an investment.”
Simpson Endowed Chair brings relationship full circle for Yongmin Kim
- Yongmin Kim, chair of the Department of Bioengineering, says he initially came to the UW because of a faculty development award sponsored by Hunter Simpson
For Yongmin Kim, news that he would be the first recipient of the new W. Hunter and Dorothy L. Simpson Endowed Chair in Bioengineering was particularly satisfying.
It wasn’t just the show of support from the Washington Research Foundation, which gave $500,000 in seed money to establish the chair -- money that the UW matched. And it wasn’t just the excitement of knowing that the chair would provide an additional tool to help keep top people in the UW’s Department of Bioengineering, already seen as a national leader in the field.
It was the name given to the new endowed chair.
“I have known Hunter Simpson since 1982,” said Kim, chair of the department. “I received one of the Physio-Control Corp. faculty development awards -- Hunter was president and CEO of the company -- and that was the reason I came to the UW.
“It was interesting that Hunter's gift in the 1980s made me come to the UW, and then, 22 years later, I hold the endowed chair named for Hunter and Dottie Simpson.”
At the UW, Kim has done groundbreaking research in magnetic resonance imaging and telemedicine. He has served as bioengineering chair since 1999.
The funding for the endowed chair was part of a $5 million commitment the foundation made to the UW under a matching program that seeks to raise $120 million in new endowments for chairs, professorships, fellowships and scholarships. Foundation President Ron Howell said that the organization established the Simpson Chair with the hope that others would also step forward and show their support.
“It is our hope that friends of Hunter and the university will join us in this matching effort by donating an additional $1 million to $1.5 million,” Howell said.
Hunter Simpson, a UW alumnus, served on the university’s board of regents from 1981 to 1992 and was named one of 100 UW Alumni of the Century in 1999. He has served on the board for KCTS Public Television and currently is on the Washington Research Foundation board.
At a recent dinner announcing the gift and the new endowed chair, Kim said that Hunter Simpson told him that he remembered the gift he made in the ’80s that brought a young electrical engineer from Wisconsin to the Pacific Northwest.
“He said it must be one of his best investments,” Kim said. “I'm just grateful to him and his wife, and to the WRF, for making this possible.”