UA Little Rock receives $6.75 million reward for Engineering College
The College of Arkansas at Little Rock has acquired a $6.75 million reward from the household of an engineering professor who was accountable for establishing a number of the college’s first engineering packages.
The Yupo and Susan Chan Charitable Belief made the reward to satisfy the expressed imaginative and prescient of Dr. Yupo Chan, the founding chair of UA Little Rock’s Division of Techniques Engineering, who handed away in 2020. The transformational reward will help UA Little Rock’s new College of Engineering and Engineering Expertise and supply scholarships for engineering college students for a few years to return.
This reward represents the fifth largest donation within the college’s historical past and kicks off UA Little Rock’s new capital marketing campaign. The reward was introduced Oct. 13 through the official launch celebration of the Centennial Marketing campaign, which commemorates the college’s upcoming centennial anniversary in 2027.
“Schooling was crucial to Yupo,” his spouse Susan Chan stated. “Yupo’s imaginative and prescient boiled all the way down to an curiosity in serving to make UA Little Rock an vital middle for engineering and operations analysis. The 2 issues he most loved about working at UA Little Rock have been mentoring particular person college students to make a distinction of their lives and doing engineering analysis. He needed to make a major distinction to UA Little Rock.”
The reward from the Yupo and Susan Chan Charitable Belief, for which Susan Chan and her niece Alexandra Johnson function trustees, contains:
· $1.5 million to determine the Yupo Chan Director of the College of Engineering Endowment
· $2 million to create the Chan Wui and Yunyin Endowed Undergraduate Scholarship
· $3.25 million to create the Chan Wui and Yunyin Endowed Graduate Scholarship
“Dr. Chan was a unprecedented chief and mentor,” stated Dr. Christina Drale, chancellor of UA Little Rock. “His accomplishments at this college touched many lives and helped elevate our engineering college to nationwide prominence. This reward will proceed the transformational impact on college students and packages that he was identified for and to which he devoted his profession.”
The Yupo Chan Director of the College of Engineering Endowment will present funds to learn the college’s College of Engineering and Engineering Expertise, which launched July 1 within the Donaghey Faculty of Science, Expertise, Engineering, and Arithmetic (STEM).
The endowment will assist appeal to and recruit extremely certified people to the place of the director of the College of Engineering, which shall be named for Dr. Chan, and supply the director with the sources to additional their contributions to instructing, analysis, and public service. The fund may also complement college help for excellent college within the college.
The scholarships will present help to full- and part-time undergraduate and graduate college students finding out engineering and engineering expertise at UA Little Rock for schooling associated bills, together with tuition, books, charges, and room and board. Scholarship recipients shall be chosen based mostly on monetary want and/or advantage.
The scholarships are named in reminiscence of Dr. Chan’s mother and father to honor their dedication to schooling. Through the Communist takeover of China, the nation seized the household’s property, and the Chan household fled to the British colony of Hong Kong within the Nineteen Fifties.
“Yupo’s mother and father believed strongly within the worth of schooling, that schooling was the trail towards success in life,” Susan Chan stated. “They despatched Yupo to an excellent Hong Kong Catholic Excessive College that ready him to be admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Expertise.”
Dr. Chan acquired a bachelor’s diploma in civil engineering, a grasp’s diploma in transportation programs, and a Ph.D. in operations analysis, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Expertise. His tutorial profession included positions on the State College of New York at Stoney Brook, Penn State, the College of Washington, and the Air Drive Institute of Expertise.
He joined UA Little Rock in 2000, the place he spent twenty years as a number one engineering educator and researcher. Dr. Chan based the Chan Wui and Yunyin Rising Star Workshop to contemplate the analytical relationship between mobility and communication and established a chapter of Tau Beta Pi, an honor society for engineering college students, at UA Little Rock.
