Gifts from more than two dozen UC Davis faculty, staff and retirees — together with an estate gift from a late alumnus — have created nearly $1.2 million in new endowments that will help UC Davis graduate and professional school students with their educations for generations to come.

Announced in January 2010, the effort — known as the Soderquist Matching Fund Initiative for Graduate Student Support — garnered $696,000 in gifts from more than two dozen current and retired faculty and staff. The gifts were matched — dollar for dollar and up to a maximum of $25,000 — with funds from a $500,000 gift from the estate of Charlie Soderquist, an entrepreneur and alumnus.

“For members of the campus community to give during such an economically difficult year was truly inspiring,” said Jeffery Gibeling, dean of graduate studies.

But Gibeling wasn’t surprised. He noted that many faculty and staff work closely with graduate students, understand the importance of their work, and appreciate the challenges they face in affording their educations.

Fees for all University of California students jumped for the 2011-2012 academic year to help close a systemwide $1 billion budget shortfall. Graduate school tuition and fees at UC Davis total $15,271 a year for residents and $30,373 for nonresidents. Professional school tuition and fees range between $19,273 and $54,622, depending on the program and whether students are residents or nonresidents of California.

Donors to the matching fund initiative made minimum contributions of $12,500. Those gifts, together with their matching funds, created 27 new endowments.

Those endowments will be permanently maintained and invested, with investment income going to deserving graduate students in the form of fellowships or awards. Each endowment will support one or more students each year, depending on the donors’ wishes. The total funds committed for the new endowments so far reaches nearly $1.2 million. The effort was UC Davis’ first matching fund initiative for graduate student support.

The first awards from the Soderquist initiative will be made this fall, with award amounts varying according to endowment size. For the first year, most awards will be about $1,000, but the size will increase over time as the endowments grow.

Graduate student fellowships and awards help UC Davis attract the top students in a competitive environment, Gibeling said, and allow those students to focus on their research so that they can generate the new knowledge and innovations needed to address society’s most pressing issues.

“Financial support gives graduate students the freedom to come up with new ideas,” Gibeling said. “And even modest awards can make a huge difference in helping UC Davis recruit the most promising students and enabling those students to dedicate themselves to their research.”

Graduate students rely on a variety of sources to finance their educations. Some work as teaching assistants or research assistants; others receive financial aid in the form or grants or loans; and some receive fellowships or awards supported by donors or other sources.

Support for students is one of the priorities of The Campaign for UC Davis, the ongoing universitywide fundraising effort that seeks to inspire 100,000 donors to contribute $1 billion in philanthropic support by the end of 2014.

UC Davis seeks to raise $120 million in scholarships and fellowships for students as part of The Campaign for UC Davis and through Project You Can, a UC-wide initiative to raise $1 billion for student financial support across the 10 campuses.

Retired staff members Silvia and Ted Hillyer gave $12,500 under the Soderquist Matching Fund Initiative. Their gift, combined with matching funds, yielded a $25,000 endowment that will generate an award for one graduate student each year, alternating between students in ecology and engineering, the Hillyers’ main areas of interest.

Before her retirement in March, Silvia Hillyer worked for 21 years as a student affairs officer in the UC Davis Graduate Group in Ecology, managing admissions and budget, processing students’ applications for fellowships and helping to track fellowship funding. The experience made her all too familiar with the difficulties that graduate students face in paying for their educations.

“Financing a graduate student education can be a real challenge,” she said.

Gibeling and his wife also contributed to the effort, creating the Jeffery and Marsha Gibeling Graduate Student Support Fund to enable graduate programs to offer recruitment incentives to top applicants.

Endowments were established in all four of UC Davis’ colleges — Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, Biological Sciences, Engineering, and Letters and Science — as well as in the Office of Graduate Studies, University Outreach and International Programs, School of Education, School of Medicine, School of Veterinary Medicine, and Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing.

The matching fund initiative was so successful that UC Davis is looking for other friends of the university who may be interested in supporting another matching fund effort, according to Paul Prokop, interim associate vice chancellor for university development.

Soderquist earned his master’s in 1973 and doctorate in 1978 from UC Davis, both in agricultural and environmental chemistry. He went on to found and lead several high-tech companies in the greater Sacramento area, and also served as chair of the UC Davis Foundation Board, president of the Cal Aggie Alumni Association and alumni representative to the UC Board of Regents. He died in 2004. The $500,000 in matching funds for graduate support was just a portion of the $5.5 million bequest Soderquist made to UC Davis.

Katie Kolesar, a Ph.D. candidate in Civil and Environmental Engineering and chair of the UC Davis Graduate Student Association, has benefited from fellowship support. She says that graduate students are grateful for the generosity that faculty and staff have shown through the Soderquist initiative.

“Faculty and staff help to shape the university in so many ways, and this is just another way they are helping,” Kolesar said.

UC Davis offers 90 graduate programs, many of them highly interdisciplinary, and has more than 8,000 graduate and professional school students.