Gifts across UW’s College of Engineering from David Emmes will support graduate students, ensuring that “we continue to make progress and they get the opportunity to thrive.”

David Emmes believes that many issues faced by society can be addressed through technology – and that a broad, interdisciplinary cohort of young researchers is needed to build those technologies.

“Many of the most important advances in recent decades came from synergies across the sciences,” according to Emmes. “I grew up in the era of Sputnik and space exploration and believe in the positive impact of science and technology on society, national security, and the economy.”

“Science is a source of hope.”

Emmes recently made gifts to the Bioengineering Graduate Student Support Fund, with similar funding to the Departments of Chemical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Materials Science & Engineering, and the Institute for Protein Design. He is interested in multiomics and its applications to cognitive science and treatments for dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Multiomics is a multifaceted approach to study biological systems that integrates insights from fields such as genomics, epigenomics, proteomics, and metabolomics.

That interest makes the deep connections among UW’s School of Medicine, College of Engineering, and research institutes particularly compelling.

Emmes moved to Washington state about 17 years ago, after a three-decade career working on IBM’s most widely used commercial operating system. He earned his undergraduate degree from Washington University in St. Louis and master’s degrees from MIT and Syracuse. Emmes recognizes the value of supporting the impact of the university, its people, and its graduates. Generosity is more than a matter of loyalty.

“It isn’t just your alma mater that has a monopoly on worthwhile [work and research.] So I wanted to broaden my horizons,” he said. “We need to invest in future leaders to ensure we continue to make progress and they get the opportunity to thrive…The enterprises and economic impact those people create will accrue to all of society and improve our quality of life.”