MSU alumnus and Chemistry Professor Emeritus Dr. Robert L. Graham has given $100,000 to MSU for a scholarship endowment and an unrestricted chemistry student development fund.
The Marie Payne Graham Chemistry Endowment will provide an annual $2,500 scholarship - tuition and fees - for MSU chemistry students. It also creates a unique development fund: money for student stipends, specialized student research equipment, or reimbursement of student travel costs and fees, so that promising MSU students may attend national science conferences and meetings.
The endowment is named after Dr. Graham's wife of 46 years, the former Marie Payne, who died on April 5, 2003, after a short battle with pancreatic cancer.
"We are grateful to Dr. Graham for his generous endowment," said MSU President Richard Davenport. "This is a very welcome gift. The Marie Payne Graham Endowment not only provides tuition assistance for top chemistry students; it encourages and supports the research interests of our best science students."
"For many years the Chemistry Department has wished for discretionary funds to advance the research interests of promising students," Dr. Graham said. "This endowment makes those funds available, and encourages the brightest students to study chemistry. It also allows me to give back to the university, for all that it provided to Marie and me."
In 1963 Dr. Graham began teaching in the Chemistry Department of then-Mankato State College. Twenty-six years later, in 1989, he retired, after serving as chair of the department for 13 years. Marie was employed as the church secretary at Grace Lutheran Church in Mankato from 1964 until 1989.
After graduating from high school, Dr. Graham worked at Hormel Co. in Austin, Minn., until he was drafted and selected the Navy. Following his service he returned to Hormel, and then enrolled at Austin Community College for one year. He then enrolled at MSU, majoring in chemistry. He graduated with special honors in 1952.
He attended graduate school at the University of Minnesota, earning an MS. He taught at Grandview College (Des Moines, Iowa) for one year before enrolling in the PhD. program at the University of Virginia. During his three-year tenure at U Va. he met Marie Belle Payne of Staunton, Va., and they married in 1957. He worked at DuPont in Virginia for a year and then at Virginia Tech for four years before joining the faculty at MSU.
Dr. Graham and Marie have one daughter, Leslie Graham-Childs, who graduated from MSU in 1995 with a degree in Social Work, and resides in Mankato with her husband Dennis.
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