Windy Ridge Foundation Gift to UW Supports Astro Camp and Professorship in Astronomy

The imaginations of tomorrow’s leaders and problem solvers will be supported with a $500,000 gift from the Windy Ridge Foundation to support the Windy Ridge Foundation Astro Camp and the Professor Harry C. Vaughan Professorship in Astronomy at the University of Wyoming.

“We are so fortunate here at UW to have partnered with the Windy Ridge Foundation,” says College of Arts and Sciences Associate Dean Daniel Dale. “We are excited by the possibilities for the Windy Ridge Astro Camp.”

The Windy Ridge Foundation Astro Camp is a free, weeklong, on-campus program for middle school students. The program provides unique learning opportunities in engineering and science, with a particular focus on astronomy. Activities include spaceship designs, alien landscape hikes, rocketry, cosmic timelines, telescope observations, Mars Rover-like remote sensing, underwater pseudo spacewalks, stargazing and planetarium shows. The Windy Ridge Foundation Astro Camp aims to educate the next generation of scientists and engineers while introducing the K-12 community to science programs offered through UW.

Additionally, the Professor Harry C. Vaughan Professorship in Astronomy has been created in an effort to recruit and retain top faculty in astronomy at UW. The professorship further leveraged UW institutional matching funds, which encourage donors to make gifts to create endowed faculty positions.

“The establishment of the Harry C. Vaughan Professorship provides faculty and students with unique opportunities to support their research,” Dale says. “The flexibility of the funding helps minimize time spent applying for grants and maximizes time exploring the cosmos.”

This latest gift commitment builds upon additional major gifts recently made by the Windy Ridge Foundation that support the renovation and enhancement of the Harry C. Vaughan UW Planetarium and were matched, in part, by the state of Wyoming.

These gifts from the Windy Ridge Foundation will expand UW’s outreach efforts across the state in both STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education and astronomy.

Harry C. Vaughan was the founder of the Windy Ridge Foundation and a professor of meteorology in the Iowa State University Department of Geological and Atmospheric Sciences. Vaughan taught courses in meteorology, earth sciences and agronomy.

Upon retirement, Vaughan relocated to Laramie and befriended faculty in the Department of Atmospheric Science at UW. Vaughan mentored many UW students during his time in Laramie.