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Pictured from left: Dave and Lindy Bess and Debra and Christopher Helm.

Pictured from left: Dave and Lindy Bess and Debra and Christopher Helm.

HONOLULU—Shidler College of Business alumnus Christopher Helm and wife Debra have established a $100,000 endowment through the Helm Family Trust to endow the David Bess Leadership Award. Each year, the award is presented to a promising student leader during the college’s Business Night event.

Since 1994, the couple has given more than $50,000 to fund the David Bess Leadership Award. With this new endowment, the college will now be able to fund this award in perpetuity.

For Helm, this gift is an enjoyable way of giving back to his alma mater. According to him, “in my second year at the Shidler College of Business, I was fortunate to be selected to represent the College on the Keio University MBA exchange program. I was only able to attend thanks to the generosity of the Lum Yip Kee Family who provided a scholarship to help cover the program and travel costs. So it is now my turn to give back.”

“Deb and I established the David Bess Leadership Award 24 years ago to honor my Dean, my mentor, and our friend, David Bess (former dean and professor at the Shidler College of Business),” says Helm. “We are extremely happy and excited to establish this endowment that will annually recognize future student leaders of the Shidler College of Business.”

Helm was born and raised in South Africa and later moved to England to finish high school. He graduated with honors from the University of Reading in Berkshire, England with a BSc in agricultural economics and ten years later received his MBA from Shidler in 1991.

Helm has lived and worked in seven states, as well as in China and Hong Kong. His love for Hawai‘i and the University of Hawai‘i brought him and Debra back to Honolulu in 2003 where he took on a position in the Office of the VP of Research for the UH System. He has also lectured in various Shidler College of Business Executive MBA classes before returning back to the business world as commercial director for a Hawai‘i- based biotechnology company. Helm is currently the executive vice president of Global Business Development for Longhorn Vaccines and Diagnostics LLC in Bethesda, Maryland, which just received FDA clearance for one of its technologies.

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The Shidler College of Business at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
Established in 1949 as the College of Business Administration, the college was named in 2006 after alumnus Jay H. Shidler, founder and managing partner of The Shidler Group. The Shidler College of Business is renowned for its expertise in international management education and is consistently ranked among the nation's top graduate schools for international business by U.S. News. Long recognized for its Asia Pacific focus, the college is a professional school offering a wide variety of degree, certificate and executive programs. The UH Shidler College of Business is the only graduate program in the state of Hawai‘i and Vietnam accredited by AACSB International. For more information, visit www.shidler.hawaii.edu.

The University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa serves approximately 20,000 students pursuing more than 225 different degrees. Coming from every Hawaiian island, every state in the nation, and more than 100 countries, UH Mānoa students thrive in an enriching environment for the global exchange of ideas. For more information, visit manoa.hawaii.edu and manoa.hawaii.edu/media/. Follow us on Facebook www.facebook.com/uhmanoa and Twitter www.twitter.com/UHManoaNews.

The University of Hawai‘i Foundation, a nonprofit organization, raises private funds to support the University of Hawai‘i System. The mission of the University of Hawai‘i Foundation is to unite donors’ passions with the University of Hawai‘i’s aspirations by raising philanthropic support and managing private investments to benefit UH, the people of Hawai‘i and our future generations. www.uhfoundation.org