Lab startups can be expensive, but in chemistry they are the single most valuable recruiting tool for attracting promising young faculty members who both love to teach and conduct research. You can help that new professor hit the ground running and ensure success.

Your gift can help the chemistry department hire several newly minted JMU chemistry graduates for that first summer after commencement to assist an incoming professor get the lab and research set up and to start obtaining critical preliminary data. Then, in the fall, undergraduates can continue that hands-on work in the lab, producing the data that is crucial in helping the professor obtain grants from funding agencies that require results to show feasibility. Chemistry students are the direct beneficiaries of those grants because they continue to work with their faculty mentors on original research.

By giving to the Department of Chemistry, you are giving students the most a Madison education has to offer. Your gift also helps send faculty members to research conferences along with their undergraduates, offer undergraduate research stipends for the summer, summer stipends for professors, emergency repairs for lab equipment, the purchase of lab chemicals and small specialty equipment for individual student research projects, bringing in alumni speakers, and building out curriculum and programs, like, most recently, the biophysical chemistry major.

Your gift to the department funds the most critical day-to-day academic needs that exist day to day. The department turns to these hardworking, go-to dollars for a wide range of purposes, each of which means students receive the one-on-one time with expert and engaged faculty members, hands-on research opportunities and access to sophisticated instrumentation that students at most universities don't get to use until graduate school.

Please give to the Department of Chemistry and give Madison students the early start that qualifies them ahead of the research curve to enter graduate school, research labs, the teaching profession, the workforce or anywhere else they seek to go to boost America's culture of innovation and discovery and solve the real-world problems that face society.