Nurturing Faculty Excellence
Endowed chairs and professorships greatly enhance the prestige of academic institutions. They are powerful vehicles used to celebrate distinction and are given to scholars or teachers who are widely recognized as leaders in their field. These endowments help our university attract and retain the best faculty and students.
An endowed chair or professorship is more than an honorific for the academic chosen to hold it. It offers a private source of funding that enables the chair holder to take advantage of opportunities, finance important research, fund necessary instrumentation, attract post-doctoral fellows and graduate students, and support collaborations with other colleagues.
Creating endowed chairs and professorships is a priority at the University of Hawaiʻi Foundation because of the powerful and direct impact these academics have on our students, our faculty and our future.
Faculty awards recognize outstanding contributions in education and nurture faculty excellence. Awards are a meaningful way to thank and acknowledge the stellar work faculty do, in their important role as mentors to the next generation and forward-thinking researchers.
Distinguished lecture series enhance our campuses’ ability to stimulate intellectual vitality in our community. Through public lectures given by distinguished leaders and renowned scholars, our community is introduced to new ideas and engages in the exchange of knowledge.
In Associate Professor Jing Ai’s risk management class, students are taught to think of risks as a being closely linked to uncertainty. From market crashes to natural disasters, risk management or the process of identifying and assessing potential risks in order to minimize negative impact, plays a crucial role in a corporation’s decision making processes.
Fueled by his unrelenting commitment to the field, he established the Architecture Department within the College of Arts and Sciences, served as the department's first chair, and established both the four-year pre-architecture undergraduate degree program and the pre-professional programs in landscape architecture and interior design.
For two decades, the Japanese Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Hawai‘i has supported Hawai‘i Community College students, faculty and staff.
