UC Davis Receives $2 Million to Support Entrepreneurship
By Jeff Almond on 2009-11-12 17:14:21
The UC Davis Graduate School of Management recently received an estate gift of $2 million following the death of Charles J. Soderquist, one of Sacremento's most prolific tech startup founders. Soderquist was an alumnus of the university, founded and led several high-tech startups in the greater Sacremento area, as well as a chairman of the UC Davis Foundation.
The $2 million gift will be split in half. The first half will fund an endowment to the UC Davis Graduate School of Management's Center for Entrepreneurship, while the other half will fund the creation of the Charles J. Soderquist Endowed Chair in Entrepreneurship. Since its inception, the entrepreneurship center in the School of Management has enrolled more than 300 national and internaitonal participants as well as 40 doctoral candidates.
The Entrepreneurship Center was created in 2004 after Soderquist, Graduate School of Management professor Andrew Hargadon, and venture capitalist Scott Lenet taught a course that combine students from the graduate life sciences and engineering program with students in the management school. The purpose for this combination of students was to show how business and science can work together. The professors believed that that future entrepreneurs could bring ideas out of the laboratory and into the broader world.
Even in the midst of a recession, charitable support to UC Davis (with the help of Soderquist's estate gift) surpassed the $100 million mark for the third consecutive year.
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