Philip H. Knight endowed chairs and professorships were established at the University of Oregon in 1996, when Penny and Phil Knight donated US$15 million for 27 endowed chairs and professorships, "to provide academic areas with a source of funds for recruiting and retaining faculty of superior academic quality". [1] [2] [3] Chairs and professorships must be awarded on merit only, not longevity. [3] Collectively, the Knight endowed chairs and professorships receive over US$325,000 in bonuses per year. [4] The award for a Knight Chair is US$50,000, and US$25,000 for a Knight Professorship. [5]
Phil and Penny Knight donated an endowment fund of US$5 million to the Stanford University Graduate School of Business in 2006. [6]
In 2009, the Knights donated US$5 million to Willamette University for a School of Law endowed chair named for Alex L. Parks, Penny Knight's father, who served on the faculty of the School of Law. [7]
Symeon C. Symeonides, Alex L. Parks Distinguished Chair and Dean Emeritus of the College of Law [36] [37]
The University of Oregon is a public research university in Eugene, Oregon. Founded in 1876, the university also has two Portland locations, and manages a marine station, called the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology, in Charleston; and an observatory, called Pine Mountain Observatory, in Central Oregon.
Philip Hampson Knight is an American billionaire business magnate who is the co-founder and chairman emeritus of Nike, Inc., a global sports equipment and apparel company. He was previously its chairman and CEO. As of December 2023, Forbes estimated his net worth at $45.0 billion. He is also the owner of the stop motion film production company Laika. Knight is a graduate of the University of Oregon and the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He was part of the track and field club under coach Bill Bowerman at the University of Oregon with whom he would later co-found Nike.
The UC Berkeley College of Chemistry is one of the fifteen schools and colleges at the University of California, Berkeley. It houses the department of chemistry and the department of chemical and biomolecular engineering, both of which are ranked among the best in the world. Its faculty and alumni have won 18 Nobel Prizes, 9 Wolf Prizes, and 11 National Medals of Science.
Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) is a public research university focusing primarily on health sciences with a main campus, including two hospitals, in Portland, Oregon. The institution was founded in 1887 as the University of Oregon Medical Department and later became the University of Oregon Medical School. In 1974, the campus became an independent, self-governed institution called the University of Oregon Health Sciences Center, combining state dentistry, medicine, nursing, and public health programs into a single center. It was renamed Oregon Health Sciences University in 1981 and took its current name in 2001, as part of a merger with the Oregon Graduate Institute (OGI), in Hillsboro. The university has several partnership programs including a joint PharmD Pharmacy program with Oregon State University in Corvallis.
Claremont School of Theology (CST) is a private graduate school focused on religion and theology and located in Claremont, California. It is an official theological school of the United Methodist Church. Although it is accredited by the WASC Senior College and University Commission, it is accredited with a "notice of concern"; it is also accredited by the Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada (ATS).
The Frederick S. Pardee RAND Graduate School is a private graduate school associated with the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California. The school offers doctoral studies in policy analysis and practical experience working on RAND research projects to solve current public policy problems. Its campus is co-located with the RAND Corporation and most of the faculty is drawn from the 950 researchers at RAND.
The President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) is a council, chartered in each administration with a broad mandate to advise the president of the United States on science and technology. The current PCAST was established by Executive Order 13226 on September 30, 2001, by George W. Bush, was re-chartered by Barack Obama's April 21, 2010, Executive Order 13539, by Donald Trump's October 22, 2019, Executive Order 13895, and by Joe Biden's February 1, 2021, Executive Order 14007.
Symeon C. Symeonides, Alex L. Parks Distinguished Professor of Law, Dean Emeritus, is an international law scholar and professor at the Willamette University College of Law in Salem, Oregon, United States. The Cyprus-born legal scholar is also President of the American Society of Comparative Law and former dean at Willamette. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he previously taught at Louisiana State University's Paul M. Hebert Law Center.
Isaac Homer Van Winkle was an American attorney in the state of Oregon. A former dean of Willamette University's law school, he served as the 6th Attorney General of Oregon for 23 years.
The Robert W. Woodruff Professorships are endowed professorships at Emory University, named for philanthropist Robert W. Woodruff. The chairs are Emory University's "most distinguished academic appointments [...] reserved for world-class scholars who are not only proven leaders of their own fields of specialty but also ambitious bridge-builders across specialty disciplines." There have been 24 Woodruff Professors appointed since the 1982.
Michael Harry Schill is an American legal scholar and academic administrator. He has been serving as the 17th and current president of Northwestern University since September 2022. Schill previously served as the 18th president of the University of Oregon from 2015 to 2022, dean of the University of Chicago Law School from 2009 to 2015, and dean of the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law from 2004 to 2009.
Deborah A. Carver is a retired Philip H. Knight Dean of Libraries at the University of Oregon (UO) in the United States.
James E. Brau is an American physicist at the University of Oregon (UO) who conducts research on elementary particles and fields. He founded the Oregon experimental high energy physics group in 1988 and served as director of the UO Center for High Energy Physics from 1997 to 2016. Prior to joining the Oregon faculty, he served in the Air Force and held positions at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and the University of Tennessee. He is a fellow of both the American Physical Society and also the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2006 he was appointed the Philip H. Knight Professor of Natural Science, an endowed professorship.
Warren Binford is an American attorney, professor, writer, and international children’s rights scholar. She is a Professor and the inaugural W.H. Lea Endowed Chair for Justice in Pediatric Law, Policy & Ethics at the University of Colorado where she holds a tenured appointment as Professor of Pediatrics at the School of Medicine and a courtesy appointment as Professor of Law at the Law School. She is the Director of Law, Policy and Ethics at CU's Kempe Center for the Prevention and Treatment of Child Abuse and Neglect. From 2005 to 2021, she was a Professor of Law and Director of the Clinical Law Program at Willamette University where she founded Willamette’s Child and Family Advocacy Clinic to provide pro bono legal support for children and families.
Ellen Peters is an American academic and the Philip H. Knight Chair, Director of the Center for Science Communication Research, and Professor both in the School of Journalism and Communication and in Psychology at the University of Oregon. She is also an associate in the Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact. Prior to moving to the University of Oregon in 2019, she spent nine years in the psychology department at The Ohio State University where she was a Distinguished Professor. She also directed the Decision Sciences Collaborative in the College of Arts and Science and was a full member of the Cancer Control Center in Ohio State's Medical Center.