The Carolina Fund gives us the ability to use your gift to make the biggest impact possible and weather the ebb and flow of state funding, tuition income and federal grants. Gifts to the Carolina Fund can be put to use right away and provide unrestricted dollars to give us maximum flexibility to make strategic decisions.

This flexibility is particularly vital when meeting unforeseen challenges such as the repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic on our campus and around the world.

In 2021-22, The Carolina Fund provided funding to many areas across campus, including:

• Alumni Distinguished Professorships;
• Carolina Fund Scholarships;
• Be A Maker Makerspaces, to deploy a new Coworks application and pilot a new system with researchers and other special populations on campus;
• Student Affairs, to hire additional therapists to provide emergency services and counseling to the increased number of students at Counseling and Psychological Services; and
• Student Government, to support the pilot year of the Ronald Epps Emerging Leaders (REEL) Program. Named after the first African American student to serve as Carolina’s student body president, REEL is an emerging leader, cohort-style program that provides incoming first-year and transfer students with opportunities to develop key leadership skills that will serve them on UNC’s campus, throughout North Carolina and nationally.

In 2021-22, gifts to The Carolina Fund supported the current cohort of five Alumni Distinguished Professors. Established in 1961, these are the oldest professorships at Carolina, funded entirely by private donations from alumni.

The professorships supplement the salaries of professors whose outstanding teaching and research activities boost the stature of UNC-Chapel Hill.

• 
  Robert Babcock, Classics

  Since he was appointed Professor of Classics at UNC-Chapel Hill in 2008, Babcock constantly seeks ways to improve his courses, despite his consistent positive feedback from students. Babcock specializes in Medieval Latin, Latin paleography and the reception of Latin authors. His primary research focuses on Latin manuscripts and Medieval Latin literature.

• 
  Joseph G. Ibrahim, Biostatistics

  Appointed Professor in the Department of Biostatistics in 2002, Ibrahim’s areas of research include Bayesian inference, missing data problems, medical imaging analysis and genomics. He is principal investigator of two National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants for developing statistical methodology related to cancer and genomics research. Dr. Ibrahim is also the director of the Biostatistics Core at UNC’s Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center.

• 
  Richard A. Luettich, Coastal Resilience

  Joining marine sciences at Carolina in 1987, Luettich is a coastal physical oceanographer whose research deals with modeling and measurement of circulation and transport in coastal waters. He is a co-developer of the ADCIRC coastal circulation and storm surge model — widely used for coastal flooding studies by academia, the private sector and multiple federal agencies. Dr. Luettich is the principal investigator of the Department of Homeland Security’s Coastal Resilience Center of Excellence.

• 
  Barbara K. Rimer, Global Public Health

  The former dean of the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health is also the author of more than 270 peer-reviewed articles. Rimer is the first woman and behavioral scientist to chair the National Cancer Institute’s National Cancer Advisory Board. She was elected to the Institute of Medicine in 2008 and was appointed by President Obama to serve on the President’s Cancer Panel, which she chaired from 2011 to 2019. In 2013, she was awarded the American Cancer Society’s Medal of Honor for her cancer control research.

• 
  Helen Tibbo, Information and Library Sciences

  Tibbo teaches in the areas of archives and records management; digital preservation and access, appraisal, trustworthy repositories, and data curation. She is director of the Professional Science Master’s Degree in Digital Curation at the UNC School of Information and Library Sciences (SILS), where she developed the archives and records management concentration. She was principal investigator on several projects that have helped define digital curation best practices.

Since the 1980s, The Carolina Fund has provided support to the Office of Scholarships and Student Aid through The Carolina Fund Scholarships, ensuring that qualified students have the opportunity to study at Carolina regardless of their ability to pay. This year, private gifts from alumni to The Carolina Fund supported 23 scholarship students, and in the past five years, over 63 students have received The Carolina Fund Scholarships.

More than $79 million in scholarships and grants was awarded to more than 10,000 students with financial aid at UNC-Chapel Hill in 2020-21.*

*Audited 2021-22 numbers are not yet available

A gift of $10,000 to The Carolina Fund qualifies you for membership in The Carolina Fund Society. In addition to knowing you are making a strategic investment in Carolina that will address the University’s priorities, members of the society receive:

• Updates and progress on the Campaign for Carolina, the University’s $4.25 billion comprehensive campaign
• Special invitations to campus and regional events
• Access to a University liaison to answer your questions about Carolina
• Invitations to Carolina Fund events