special report going global d - ed lazowskalazowska.cs.washington.edu/oren.waceo.pdf ·...

By John Draper

30 WASHINGTONCEO • AUGUST 2006 www.washingtonceo.com

DGoing Global

In health, fundraising and technology, the University of Washington knows no limit

oceanography department is embarkingon a multimillion-dollar underwater proj-ect, headed by professor John Delaney, thatwill allow scientists to monitor seismic andvolcanic activity on the floor of the PacificOcean. And the university happens to beone of the most successful among publicand private institutions at fundraisingand endowment procurement. If it wasresources Enquobahrie wanted, the uni-versity had plenty.

Enquobahrie graduated with a master’sdegree in public health this year and iscurrently pursuing his doctorate in epi-demiology. His timing was ideal, as theuniversity last year announced it was cre-ating a Department of Global Health, ajoint venture of the university’s schools

of medicine and public healthand community medicine. Thedepartment will be the first in thenation. It will concentrate onbuilding interprofessional edu-cational programs, collaborativeresearch, professional service inpublic health policy and practice,and medical care to establishsustainable improvements inglobal health.

The department will furtheridentify and evaluate healthproblems and health inequitiesin underserved populations andwill develop and implementinnovative interventions thatmay reduce the proliferation ofdisease. There will be a researcharm of the department that will

girlfriend (and now wife) hadn’t movedacross the world to Seattle, where his life,too, would take a fortuitous turn at theUniversity of Washington (UW).

The university since the mid-1960s hasbeen a powerhouse in medical research, anucleus for satellite research organiza-tions and spin-off companies. It hasdeveloped into a major technology hub,where, in its Turing Center, engineeringprofessor Oren Etzioni is trying to teachmachines to translate languages. Its

DANIEL Enquobahrie wanted to make a difference. Yet, having grown

up in Ethiopia, where he later attended medical school in his country’s

capital, Addis Ababa, he knew that combating even common infectious

diseases such as tuberculosis and malaria was problematic.

“There was a lack of medications,”Enquobahrie says. “There were diseasesrelated to the unavailability of cleanwater. Diseases related to malnutrition,inappropriate pregnancy care. All of thesewere compounded by the fact thatresources were inadequate, as Ethiopiawas a developing country.”

Despite the less-than-ideal conditionsfor a health professional, Enquobahriewas happy with his rural practice. In fact,he’d probably still be there today if his

Red Square, framed byGerberding Hall (left), KaneHall (center) and SuzzalloLibrary (right), is the psychological core of theUniversity of Washington.

SPECIAL REPORT

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This article originally appeared in Washington CEO magazine, August 2006,Volume 17, Number 8, pages 30-40. Copyright © 2006 by Washington CEO Inc.All Rights Reserved. This article may not be reproduced by any means without prior permission of the publisher.

www.washingtonceo.com WASHINGTONCEO • AUGUST 2006 31

work on infectious diseases, injury con-trol, nutrition, the delivery of health caresystems, and reproductive, maternal andchild health. It will also build on existingresearch programs such as the origin andprevention of malaria, tuberculosis andhepatitis C.

ORGANIC GROWTHThe department was seeded by a $30 milliongrant from the Bill and Melinda GatesFoundation. UW officials estimate that thedepartment could attract as much as $100million in grants and contracts once it isfully operational.

The new department represents a con-solidation of numerous, organically devel-oped global health initiatives that havesprung up in and around the university.Many of them will likely operate under theglobal health department, which, whilegetting approval from the school’s board ofregents, is still under construction and islooking for a chairman.

“Seattle has become a worldwide centerof global health somewhat quietly,” saysUW Medical School Dean Paul G. Ramsey.“Many of our faculty and students haveresearch teaching and service-health-related programs in Africa, SouthAmerica, Asia and other areas aroundthe world. Fogarty International AIDSResearch and Training program has beenoperating here since the early ’80s.”

One of the pre-existing programs slat-ed to be brought into the new departmentis the Multidisciplinary InternationalResearch Training [MIRT] program,which Enquobahrie took part in. MIRTsends students around the world to per-form health-related, population-basedresearch and training in developingcountries. Last year, Enquobahrie spent amonth in Tbilisi in the Republic ofGeorgia, where he conducted research onemergency cardiology patients to evalu-ate factors associated with risk andseverity of coronary heart disease.

For years, UW has brought studentssuch as Enquobahrie to the forefront ofglobal health through international part-nerships. But the creation of the depart-ment has helped integrate efforts “in a

truly interdisciplinary fashion,” saysDaren Wade, who operates the GlobalHealth Resource Center, one of the pre-existing programs that fall under the newdepartment.

ENCOURAGING INVOLVEMENTThe new department may also encouragestudent involvement. Take, for example,UW student Molly Robertson, who is pur-suing a master’s degree in public health.Although she is only one class away fromgraduating, she is putting her educationon hold and heading to Mozambique fortwo years to work with Health AllianceInternational (HAI) and its effort tothwart HIV/AIDS.

“AIDS is a big problem in Mozambique.As much as 12 percent of the population isinfected. In some urban areas, it’s up to 40percent,” she says. “I will be doing com-munity outreach, telling communitymembers about the HAI’s clinical servicesand giving them support to take theirmedication.”

The department may also be a catalyst tospur businesses into preventive action.Anne Marie Kimball, UW professor of epi-demiology, says that SARS, HIV/AIDS andthe avian flu have alerted companies tohealth considerations when doing busi-ness overseas. “Some of us are intensivelyinterested in public/private partnershipsas a means of assuring health care deliv-ery, so companies with particular businessinterests may want to partner on humani-tarian concerns in their countries ofinterest,” adds Kimball, who is also theauthor of Risky Trade: Infectious Diseases in

an Era of Global Trade.Wade adds, “There is potential not only

to spark new ideas, collaborations, proj-ects and international relationships, butalso to attract new people and organiza-tions to the UW, the Seattle area andWashington state to work with us.”

For his part, Enquobahrie said the newdepartment will help him pursue his aca-demic career in research and teaching.Perhaps someday he may even go back toEthiopia to work on public health issues.

“Growing up in a developing country,the magnitude of health issues wasbrought to my attention at an early age.After seeing problems associated withpoor health care and the human sufferingcaused by disease, the vision of making adifference motivated me to study medi-cine,” he says.

“From trying to understand the determi-nants and outcomes of at-home labor anddelivery in rural Ethiopia to identifyinggenetic factors in cardiovascular diseases,I have come to appreciate the complexity ofglobal health problems and the challengeof studying them. The way public health ingeneral and epidemiology in particular[have] evolved to confront this challenge istruly remarkable.”

John Draper is a Puyallup-based freelancewriter.

Sarah Gimbel-Sherr (center) and otherUniversity of Washington students travel to countries like Mozambique to participate in the school’s HealthAlliance International program

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S P E C I A L R E P O R TS P E C I A L R E P O R T

WWordplay

University of Washington professor embarks on daunting language translation challenge

stimulation of research and teaching,”he says.

His research is just part of the univer-sity’s computer science and engineeringdepartment, an institution ranked amongthe top 10 in the country and on the cut-ting edge of many disciplines. There arethose working on micro- and nano-scale electronic devices that will providea variety of services to builders of thenext generation of electronic devices.Others are designing computer chipsbased on light waves (photonics), ratherthan silicon and wires, that will greatlyimprove the speed of computing andcommunications devices.

ENTER THE TURING CENTEREtzioni’s current research project isunder the auspices of the Turing Center, a

computer,” he says.But he makes a point of making sure his

duties with these startups only take amodicum of his time. For most of hisworkday, he’s dutifully working to makethe UW even more well known as aninternational leader in computer science.

“If my goal was to maximize compen-sation, I would definitely be in the pri-vate sector. But having spent a year asthe CTO of a public company and havingworked with startups, I know that, whileit’s exciting and dynamic, there’s nosubstitute for me for the intellectual

WHY Oren Etzioni is a professor at the University of Washington (UW)

is not the biting question. Most universities would be proud to have him

on their roster, seeing as he is continually pushing the boundaries of

computer science.

The real question is, why is he not outbecoming the next Bill Gates?

Even while remaining a college profes-sor, he’s amassed a pretty impressiveentrepreneur’s résumé. He is the founderof three companies he created while aprofessor at the UW’s Department ofComputer Science and Engineering,including Farecast Inc. – a company thatutilizes data-mining techniques to pre-dict prices in the travel industry.Etzioni is also a venture partner for theMadrona Venture Group. His otherstartups are Netbot Inc., which wasacquired by Excite Inc. in 1997, andClearForest Corp. At Netbot, Etzionihelped conceive and designthe Internet’s first majorc o m p a r i s o n - s h o p p i n gagent. ClearForest is aninternational leader in textmining. Years ago, he leftthe university briefly tobecome the chief technologyofficer for Go2Net Inc.

Not bad for a guy who didn’ttouch his first computer, aRadio Shack TRS 80, until age14 – and then only out of boredom. “I hadjust moved from Israel to New York withmy dad. I was in culture shock. For a math-ematically inclined nerd such as myself, itwas the perfect diversion to play with the

The Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science

and Engineering holds theoffices of professors

like Oren Etzioni (inset),who want the world’s

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The University of Washington is demonstrating that new ideas have a

big impact on the state’s bottom line.

Delivering a top-notch education is only one role the University of Washington plays in the

state’s economic outlook. Innovative research has kick-started a host of business ventures in

medicine, biotechnology, environmental sciences and software development. These

UW-spawned enterprises — almost 200 in the last 30 years — are creating new jobs, building

economic diversity, and generating important revenue for local communities. Some real-world

benefits that began with a few world-class ideas.

www.uwfoundat ion.orgTogether, we’re creating better futures. Join us.

C A M P A I G N U W

C R E AT I N G F U T U R E S

What if...innovative research sustained economic growth?


multidisciplinary research facility at theUW that investigates problems surround-ing natural language processing, machinelearning, Internet search and the“semantic web,” which scientists say is aneffort to make the meaning of content onthe Internet readable by computers.

The center was established in 2005 witha multimillion-dollar gift from Seattleentrepreneur Jonathan Pool.

Says Pool of the creation of the TuringCenter, “Ever since the third grade I’vebeen puzzled by the way people deal withthe Tower-of-Babel problem: the fact thatthe world is awash in diverse languages,and yet it’s becoming a global communitywhere most people want to communicateand collaborate. So, do we just choose aworld language – an existing one or aninvented one – and let the others die out?Try to make most people bilingual?”

To tackle this problem, Etzioni isworking on software that will take anywritten electronic language and auto-matically translate it into any other lan-guage. He calls the project “panlingualtranslation,” the complexity of which isdaunting. Linguists tell us there are


“There’s the famousstory of the government

spending a lot of money for an effort to

automatically translateEnglish into Russian and back. They sent

the message ‘This spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.’ It

came back, ‘The vodka’s good but the

meat’s rotten.’” – Oren Etzioni

The University of Washington is a world leader in biotech

research. And the work we do places us squarely in the

center of a growing and global industry.

It’s one reason major life-science companies select Seattle for their

operations. Here they find the scientific talent they need to turn ideas

into products that revolutionize health care. Consistently ranked

among the top five federally funded research institutions, the UW

is the kind of university with whom businesses want to partner. The

result: a powerful economic engine that is creating jobs, building

demand for goods and services, and spurring new construction — all

while improving health and saving lives.

www.uwfoundat ion.orgTogether, we’re creating better futures. Join us.

C A M P A I G N U W

C R E AT I N G F U T U R E S

What if...good science made good business sense?


6,000 languages spoken around theglobe; that makes for 36 million separatelanguage-translation pairs (e.g., Englishto Japanese, Russian to MandarinChinese, Swahili to Spanish, etc.). “Wewant to enable anyone in the world toelectronically communicate with anyoneelse in the world,” Etzioni says.

MACHINE READING“There’s a long history of ‘automatictranslation’ or ‘machine translation,’ dat-ing back to the Cold War effort in the ’50s.There’s the famous story of the govern-ment spending a lot of money for an effortto automatically translate English intoRussian and back. They sent the message‘This spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.’It came back, ‘The vodka’s good but themeat’s rotten,’” he says.

Etzioni explains that these days the U.S.government is concentrating on the one-dimensional task of Chinese and Arabictranslations. For Etzioni, translating alllanguages means having to make the soft-ware easier to use. To facilitate that, heand his peers have come up with the con-cept of controlled languages. In thismethod, one inputs a set of assumptionsabout syntax and semantics into the soft-ware before the translation starts.

“There’s a lot of ambiguity in language.We don’t hear the ambiguity because ourminds are so facile and [are] automatical-ly interpreting what is said based on wordchoice, tone, context, nonverbals, ourhistory with the speaker, etc. The classicalexample is ‘Time flies like an arrow.’There are many, many interpretations acomputer can find for that sentence. But ifyou can go in beforehand and tell the sys-tem, ‘This word has this meaning,’ thenyour translation problem becomes moremanageable.” This controlled language iswhat The Boeing Co. uses in its technicalmanuals, Etzioni says.

The project has just started. There’s stillmuch to do. But one doesn’t need to beEtzioni to see the enormous businessapplications of panlingual translation.Commerce is about communicationbetween seller and buyer, for instance.And commerce today is global.

Etzioni comments, “Let’s put itthis way – we have the largest imag-inable market for this technology:everybody in the world. If we cansucceed in even a modest way, thepotential for commercializationand value creation is enormous.”

– John Draper

The University ofWashington’s Computer

Science and EngineeringDepartment is among the top in the country.

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JUnder Achiever

Professor dedicates life to below-the-sea research

tionize the way scientists monitor theocean, the seafloor and even the sub-seafloor.

A DRAMATIC UNDERTAKINGNEPTUNE, led by the UW, will competefor $150 million to build the infrastruc-ture. This funding is part of the NationalScience Foundation’s Ocean ObservatoriesInitiative.

Although Delaney is not a stranger toHerculean projects (he once led an expedi-

tion to haul massive “blacksmoker” chimneys off theseafloor), this is of another mag-nitude altogether. Some featuresof the project include:

• 1,600 miles of cable• takes place 3,000 meters

undersea• equipment laid in place by

ships on the surface and robotsunder the waves

There will be tens of thou-sands of sensors, instrumentsand robots working on NEP-TUNE. Seismometers will meas-ure seafloor seismic activity;cameras will capture images oferupting underwater volcanoes;moorings loaded with sensorswill describe the characteristicsof ocean currents; flow meterswill observe the superheated flu-ids coming out of a hydrothermalvent; and sensors will measurethe pressure of fluids circulatingthrough the rocks beneath theseafloor.

NEPTUNE is the largestoceanographic project the UWhas ever been associated with, oneworth the effort, Delaney says.

The network, he says, could beused to study the ocean’s abilityto absorb greenhouse gases and

The project, dubbed NEPTUNE – forNortheast Pacific Time-Series UnderseaNetworked Experiments – would revolu-

JOHN Delaney can’t get much lower in his career. When he started,

at the University of Virginia, he taught geology and consulted with min-

ing companies, working with geology on land. Then he got to the

University of Arizona to start his Ph.D. program in economic geology.

That led him to a camping trip inside some volcanoes during a six-month

expedition to the Galápagos Islands.

He was hooked. Delaney wrote a thesisthat examined how the volatile gases insea-floor basalt – a volcanic rock – behavewhen bottled up by the sea’scrushing pressure. Not long afterjoining the faculty at theUniversity of Washington (UW),he went down in ALVIN, thedeep submergence vehicle, andsaw submarine volcanoes for thefirst time. He found beer-bot-tle-brown glass that had beenformed from undersea erup-tions. He saw fantastic animalsliving near the scorching heat ofundersea hot springs.

“I knew I wanted to devote mylife to studying underwater volca-noes,” says Delaney, now a profes-sor of oceanography at the UW.

His work began revolving moreand more around the Juan de Fucaplate, a relatively small and acces-sible chunk of the planet’s crustrife with regular temblors, activevolcanoes and thriving communi-ties of tube worms and microbes.

Now Delaney is backing anambitious plan to place a cable onthe Juan de Fuca plate off thecoast of Washington, Oregon andBritish Columbia. The cable willcarry power and data to and frominstruments connected to it.Scientists on shore will use thecable and the Internet to directinstruments and robots remotely.


UW Professor John Delaney plans to lay a $150-million network of sensors and robots on the ocean floor to capturedetails of underwater geology and oceanography.


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seafloor stresses that lead to earthquakesand tsunamis. It would be possible tomonitor U.S. and Canadian fish stocks, aswell as ocean conditions, which mayimprove weather forecasting. Volcano-loving microorganisms living at theseafloor under intense temperature andpressure could be the source of new med-icines and help us learn about life on thisplanet and elsewhere.

THE SKY’S THE LIMITAs important as the oceans are, the toolsscientists have at hand for understand-

ing them are inadequate to the task.Ships, for example, can only be in oneplace at one time, satellites can’t detectthings deep in the ocean and instru-ments operating remotely on mooringsare useful only as long as their batterieskeep working.

President Bush has included $150million for a regional observatory likeNEPTUNE in his proposed budget, whichnow must be approved by Congress. The$150 million would be spread over sixyears, starting in 2007. The money is partof the proposed funding of $310 million

for the National Science Foundation’sOcean Observatories Initiative and comesfrom funds specifically designated for thecreation of powerful new research toolsand infrastructure.

The UW will compete to become the “implementing organization” forNEPTUNE.

“The University of Washington’s leader-ship role in NEPTUNE and the observato-ry’s proximity to the Puget Sound regionsignal an opportunity for Seattle to emergein the coming decade as a global hub forreal-time earth and ocean science,” saysDelaney.

Scientists in Canada have alreadyreceived funding for their portion of thecable. “They go into the water late nextyear,” he says.

TECHNOLOGY AVAILABLEThe cable site is close to the two nations thatare the primary investors in NEPTUNE. TheUnited States and Canada each possess thetechnological infrastructures and portfacilities required to build, operate andmaintain an ocean observatory of this size.

One thing that makes NEPTUNE standout from current methods of studying theocean is that it will supply information 24hours a day, 365 days a year.

“There are many episodic events –eruptions of underwater volcanoes,earthquakes, massive storms, tsunamis– that cause major changes in the oceanand seafloor environments. We cannotpredict when these events will occur,and we do not now have the capability ofcapturing data related to these events,”Delaney says.

Robotic underwater vehicles pluggedinto NEPTUNE will be programmed toeither respond automatically to investigateepisodic events or will be commandedfrom shore to do so. Data will be trans-mitted in real-time or near real-time toscientists and laboratories on land foranalysis.

Delaney says, “NEPTUNE is at the fore-front of a transformation in the sciencesthat is opening a new era of discovery.Extensive and intelligent networks ofsensors established within remote andhostile environments, whether a subma-rine geological fault system on Earth or arobotic colony on Mars, are enablingentirely new approaches to scientificexploration and discovery.”

– John Draper

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IIntricate Wealth

The University’s multifaceted endowment is its sparkling jewel

leaders/alumni who sit on the Board ofRegents. The actual buying and sellingof securities is done by outside managers.

Despite their ivory tower image, thehalf-dozen-plus endowment folks at theUW are not at all unique in the bigger pic-ture. A comparison to other major publicand private universities shows that UW, infact, lacked the increase in market valueof endowment assets achieved by a num-ber of other U.S. schools.

Based on a slightly different fiscal year(ending June 30), monster endowmentsat private Ivy League Schools such asHarvard, Yale and Stanford, which havebeen in place for many more years thanthe UW’s fund, are as much as 17 timeslarger than the CEF and achieved returnsof 15 percent to 23 percent, with Stanfordtaking top honors, according to an annualstudy by the National Association ofCollege and University Business Officers(NACUBO).

But the UW’s 13.2 percent gain (basedon a fiscal year ending June 30) is nopaltry performance compared to thenational college and university averageone-year return rate of 9.3 percent, fig-ured for all 746 U.S. and Canadianschools that participated. And, amongthe top schools in the Pacific Northwest,“U Dub” was topped only by SeattlePacific University, at 28.4 percent, andCentralia College, with 16.8 percent.SPU’s enormous growth during that year“was the result of both strong invest-ment returns and endowment fund-raising success,” explains GordonNygard, vice president and treasurer ofthe SPU Foundation.

Among public universities across thecountry, the UW’s endowment assetsstood 10th at the end of 2004, a separateNACUBO study shows.

“We have taken cash, realized and unre-alized gains and losses. That number is the

to a mutual fund. The UW’s ConsolidatedEndowment Fund (CEF), which holds thebulk of the school’s endowment funds, is acommingled fund of individual endow-ments, generally arriving at the UW as giftsfrom individuals, foundations or corpora-tions. Each individual endowment main-tains its own identity and owns units inthe fund. Although the CEF is still manytimes smaller than many mutual funds,$1.7 billion is still $1.7 billion.

It is managed by about seven people, ledby chief investment officer KeithFerguson, who joined the group inJanuary 2005. Those officers are largelyinvolved in strategy development, portfo-lio research and analysis, supported by aback-room staff and Ph.D.s in statistics,as well as by general advice from industry

ISN’T a 20 percent return on investment something that happened back

in the dot-com days, never to be seen or heard from again? Who in the

world wouldn’t, say, eat a handful of earthworms for that?

Of course, it might help the little wig-glers go down if you are managing $1.7 bil-lion in endowment funds. And it helps,too, if you are the University of Washington(UW), with steady sources of income andprofessional fund managers who knowtheir way around a spreadsheet.

The managers are, after all, just doingtheir job. Which is to make the UW’sendowment make money. But they arealso doing a heck of a job at it. A 20 per-cent return (which is, technically, theendowment’s increase in market valueplus dividends less manager fees) woulddelight most average Joe and Janeinvestors. The entire Dow JonesIndustrial Average during the past year,ending March 31, saw only a 6.8 percentincrease in value (and that was before itshemorrhaging in the spring of ’06). TheNASDAQ Composite Index gained 17.8percent; the Standard & Poors 500 earned10.4 percent.

An “endowment” is defined simply as a“gift of money or property to a specifiedinstitution for a specified purpose.” Therub is in the details. Endowments are director indirect, large or small, immediate orpledged. Put thousands of them togetherover time, and the job of keeping track oftheir growth (or decline) gets huge.

The UW’s endowment funds are useduniversity-wide. In fiscal 2005, forinstance, endowment distributions were asfollows: faculty support, 48 percent; stu-dent support, 31 percent; program support,13 percent; and unrestricted, 8 percent.

THE PERPETUAL FUNDKnown in financial circles as a “perpetualfund,” an endowment can be compared

By Scott Williams



Treasurer V‘ella Warren helps manage the University of Washington’s billion-dollar-plus endowment, which producesone of the best financial returns amongU.S. public schools.

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total return,” explains UW Treasurer V’ellaWarren. “That is how we value invest-ments. That is the NACUBO number.”

FOR THE LONG TERMSo what’s the secret? Do the funds man-agers at the UW have some insider trackthat most of the rest of the investing worldlacks? According to Warren, the answer isin the nature of the investment. Theendowment funds are invested for a longterm, which can generally draw a higherreturn than short-term investments.

What’s more, Greg Sheridan, the UW’sassociate vice president for constituencyprograms (fund-raising), warns that the20 percent return for the year endingMarch 31 can be misleading. “You have tobe careful of what you can do with year-to-year comparisons. Like businesses doingquarterly profit reports, that [return forthe March 31 year] is not a sustainablebusiness plan,” he says.

Warren, too, likes the longer-termapproach. “Over a 10-year period [also]ending March 31, the return was 11.6 per-cent. Our expected return on an endow-ment is 10 to 12 percent over the long term.”

The decline this past spring in the mar-

kets should bring an end to the CEF’simpressive results for last year. “We don’tget 20 percent every year. … The marketwill be declining in May. At the end of theyear, we don’t expect to get 20 percent,”predicts Warren.

Is the endowment a key source ofincome for the UW? Yes and no. “It isimportant to us because it provides us amargin of excellence, allows us to dothings we couldn’t do otherwise,” says theUW treasurer. But on the flip side,endowments at Ivy League colleges (andat oil-income-supported Texas schoolsand the University of Michigan) can pro-vide from 20 percent to 40 percent ofrevenues. “Those endowments are veryindicative of how they support them-selves,” she says.

That higher rate of return, however,points to the difference between theendowment’s 20 percent return and the7.9 percent return on a second group ofUW investments, identified as “other”investments, including nonendowed gifts,reserve balances and cash. Warren notesthat these investments are largely inbonds (66 percent) and cash.

That group amounts to about $1 billion,

bringing total investments managementby the university to $2.7 billion. The sec-ond group essentially amounts to operat-ing money, money that Warren identifiesas “opportunity money.”

It is used for more immediate needsthan the endowment. “Some of the moneyis very short term,” she explains. “Forexample … when students pay tuition,that will be invested for a very short timebefore it is used to pay out expenses relat-ed to the education of that student.

“It will be invested maybe a month,maybe two months, maybe a few weeks.You clearly cannot put it into equity[stocks] and still be comfortable you canpay the salary of the faculty. That’s ‘oppor-tunity money’ – money paid to us for aparticular purpose.”

LOCAL AND NATIONAL FUNDINGAs a state university, the UW also getspart of its total $3 billion in revenuesfrom the state, which generally con-tributes 10 to 11 percent of revenues. For2005, that total stood at $323.4 million.State money cannot be invested, by law,and is held by the government until theschool needs it.

Federal funding comes mostly in theform of research grants, with the UW nearthe top among public universities. Muchof that funding goes to health and life sci-ences, including biotech.

The school is currently raising moneythrough its second major fund-raisingcampaign, led by William Gates Sr., whois a UW Regent, 1950 graduate of the UWlaw school and father of Microsoft chair-man and former chief software architectBill Gates. The campaign’s goal: raise $2billion over eight years, which startedJuly 1, 2000. Already, it has raised $1.7billion, or 85.3 percent of that goal.Corporations contributed the largestchunk: $372.5 million.

In the long run, though, it is the endow-ment that should always be there, the uni-versity’s secure backbone. Much of whatthe UW accomplishes depends on thegood will and preferences of its donors.“You are looking at a huge universityhere. You have to make sure it [theendowment] goes to what the donorswant,” says Warren.

Scott Williams is senior editor of WashingtonCEO magazine. He can be reached [email protected].

special report going global d - ed lazowskalazowska.cs.washington.edu/oren.waceo.pdf ·...

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