The Power of Planned Giving
Leave a Lasting Impact
By utilizing a variety of gift planning options, you can leave a lasting impact on the Department of Physics and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. From an estate gift to a gift of real estate or a gift from an IRA, you can choose to establish your legacy at Wisconsin through your long-term financial plans and maximize benefits for yourself and the Department. To learn more about incorporating your future gift into your overall financial, tax, and estate plans, please contact: Mae Saul, Senior Development Director at (608) 216-6274 or mae.saul@supportuw.orgIf it weren’t for my experiences at UW, especially under the mentorship of Albert Erwin, I would not be who I am and where I am today. Those undergraduate and graduate years at UW were some of the best years of my life. Because of that, I want to give back for those who will be tomorrow’s trailblazers. The purpose of my planned gift is to fund in perpetuity the Erwin-Durandet Award Fund, a fund I established in memory of Albert Ewrin to support the department’s graduate students.
Casey Durandet ’89, MS’91, PhD’95
Planned Giving in Practice: The Ray MacDonald Fund for Excellence in Physics
This fund was established as a planned gift by Ray MacDonald MS’75 to promote excellence in all areas of the Department of Physics: research, teaching, and outreach. An annual competition is open only to departmental faculty and staff, making the award rate greater than almost any other funding opportunities. The MacDonald Fund is fully flexible and provides seed funding for research that goes on to secure larger extramural grants and for outreach and teaching activities that are otherwise competing for very limited funds in those areas. Examples include:
The IceCubeAR app shows visual representations of the patterns of a high-energy neutrino event at the Observatory.
Augmented Reality (AR) lets users immerse themselves into 4D space — perfect for visualizing a high energy neutrino event as if you were in the depths of the IceCube detector or for interacting with the quantum properties of an atom. Prof. Lu Lu has already developed IceCuBEAR, an AR phone app that also works with Microsoft HoloLens goggles. She is using her MacDonald grant to support the current outreach with HoloLens, while also developing it for the higher-capacity Apple Vision Pro platform.
A magnetic reconnection layer implosion on BRB captured by the ultrafast camera. Brighter areas correspond to emission from the plasma
Plasmas travel fast — up to 100 km/hr — requiring very fast diagnostics to investigate the underlying physics. Prof. Jan Egedal’s MacDonald grant provided the balance of funds needed to purchase an ultrafast camera to help diagnose the plasma systems in the lab. The Phantom T3610 allows the plasma physics team to capture movies of visible light emission from the plasma at rates down to nearly 1µs per frame and can visualize much of the large-scale structure better than probes alone.
Hasan (left) and Levchenko at the annual department awards banquet
Exploring the theory behind the properties of new superconducting devices such as Josephson diodes, interferometers, and anomalous junctions might only require a computer, pencil, and paper, but the research still requires excellent students. Prof. Alex Levchenko’s MacDonald grant supported grad student Jaglul Hasan on an RA appointment as he finished his thesis. With the added flexibility, Hasan was able to explore ideas that weren’t initially part of the project, leading to fruitful results that were included in Levchenko’s successful NSF grant renewal.