Project Type: Course Credit (unpaid)
Open to: all students

Project Description:
A colleague and I are looking at university donations by people that lead to named chairs. It is inspired by all the concern about the Sackler family’s donations to universities and the problems that can cause when we learned more about opioid abuse. But of course it can apply to all kinds of problems that can arise when we look a bit more closely at how the money was made, or who the person was doing the giving. We are developing a database of named chairs: who gave the money, when, who the chair in is honor of, any stipulations on what it is for.  We have done one for UIUC and constructed some simple visualizations.  We’d like to do this for other major universities in Illinois.

The work involves looking up information about these chairs, press announcements etc. The information may require ingenuity to find. Further work involves data cleaning and then towards the end some basic data visualization.

Contact: Prof. Mike Twidale <twidale@illinois.edu>