Endowed professors strengthen university

With an influx of new endowed professorships, RIT is retaining and attracting all-star faculty.

Today, there are 51 endowed professorships at RIT. Thirteen of those have been established since 2017. These named professorships help provide both the recognition and the resources that the highest caliber faculty and experts in their field deserve.

“Our talented faculty enrich our students,” said Prabu David, provost and senior vice president for Academic Affairs. “In addition to imparting their subject matter expertise, they have a profound impact as mentors. Our faculty foster critical thinking, effective communication and collaboration, and ethical decision making, and they address the student as a whole person.”

Internationally recognized faculty members are paramount to RIT’s success—especially as the university continues bringing in top-tier undergraduate students, expands the graduate program portfolio, and advances research plans.

While scholarships play a crucial role in helping students pursue their dreams, endowed professorships have a ripple effect that can impact thousands in the broader university and Rochester communities.

Endowments create a source of funding in perpetuity that helps support faculty salaries, research, and passions. Endowed professors with active research portfolios bring in top research students. They also tend to have existing collaborations with other top-100 universities.

“It’s a tool for retention, as well as recruitment,” said Phil Castleberry, vice president for University Advancement. “For junior faculty considering where to launch their careers, a university that offers a number of endowed professorships is very appealing.”

RIT’s endowed professorships are typically created with a gift of $1.5 million or more. In recent years, RIT’s Board of Trustees has matched $1 million gifts with an additional $2 million in order to create endowed professorships worth $3 million.

At each installation ceremony, RIT’s endowed professors are awarded a special medallion. Many honorees invite loved ones and recount the people and work that supported them along their professional journeys.

When Billy Brumley was named the inaugural Kevin O’Sullivan Endowed Professor in Cybersecurity, he invited and spoke about his mother, who inspired him to become a second- generation professor. That endowed professorship was made possible by a gift from alumnus Austin McChord ’09 and was named to honor a teacher who inspired McChord to achieve great things.

With the endowment, Brumley has been able to build and ramp up his platform security research laboratory on campus. He said the biggest influence is the ability to hire early career researchers.

“Staffing at this level is atypical for an academic startup package,” said Brumley. “This endowment is like a turbo button on a video game controller, except for research excellence.”

In the future, RIT plans to expand endowed professorships with cluster hires in specific areas, such as artificial intelligence and film and animation.

“I’d like for that to be our next chapter,” said Castleberry. “Identify experts in a particular discipline and provide them the opportunity to come build their world-class research together at RIT.”