UMRA’s Professional Development Grants for Retirees (PDGR) program provides funding forUniversity retirees to continue their scholarship or pursue new projects. PDGR awards are available to all retirees from the five campuses of the University of Minnesota who are eligible for retirement benefits and who will be fully retired at the time of their award. For 2024, the PDGR Committee reviewed 10 competitive applications, recommending that 8 be funded with awards ranging from $1,600 to $5,000. Award recipients represented the Morris and Twin Cities campuses, and four of the eight were first-time applicants. Once again, the awards covered a diverse set of topics, reflecting the breadth of studies undertaken by University retirees. 

UMRA member Ferolyn Angell, retired University of Minnesota Morris lecturer in dance and past recipient of several PDGR awards, has produced a film to facilitate discussions of current issues surrounding the topics of immigration and refugees. Her award will be used to sponsor screenings in Germany and Minnesota.

UMRA member Dale A. Blyth, professor emeritus and former Howland Endowed Chair for Youth Development Leadership in the School of Social Work, will use his award 1) to launch The Global Extended Learning and Youth Development Association, and 2) to advise on a youth engagement effort—Grow Our Food, Grow Our Future—emerging in the Somaliland region of Ethiopia. Award funds will help support travel to Ethiopia and participation in these programs.

Mark Bohnhorst, a member of UMRA who retired from the Office of the General Counsel as senior associate general counsel, maintains an ongoing program of research and publication concerning election systems and their history, focused for the past several years on the history of the Electoral College and its flaws. PDGR funding will help support a research assistant and full access to newspaper archives.

Katherine Fennelly, emeritus professor of public policy in the Humphrey School of Public Affairs and a previous PDGR awardee, will delve into the Foreign Language Information Service archives held by the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota to better understand how her grandfather, a Jewish Hungarian immigrant, rose to become the head of a prestigious espionage unit in the Office of Strategic Services (precursor of the CIA) during World War II. Grant funds will support archival research that will build upon Fennelly’s recent biography of her grandfather, Family Declassified: Uncovering My Grandfather's Journey.

Andrea Gilats, retired from the College of Continuing and Professional Studies, will use her award to learn how Native American bead art has evolved over the past 30 years, discover how Indian reservations have evolved in regard to tourism, and revisit historical sites to improve her writing about them. In addition, she will visit the Heritage Center on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota to explore whether it might make an appropriate home for her beadwork collection.

UMRA member and previous PDGR award recipient Michael Potegal, associate professor ad honorem of occupational therapy, will use his award to support statistical consultation with the University of Minnesota’s Biostatistical Design and Analysis Center and to complete analysis of electroencephalograms (EEGs) recorded from tantrum-prone 3-year-olds. He hopes to identify EEG-tantrum correlations with an analysis that will provide insights into pathological variations from the normal population. 

UMRA member Kathryn J. Sedo, clinical professor of law emerita, will use her award for professional development through legal education. She is an authority on cooperative law and volunteers at the Cancer Legal Care Center providing advice to cancer patients with tax problems. This is her fourth PDGR award.

Thomas Skovholt, professor emeritus of the Department of Educational Psychology and an UMRA member, has been invited to present his research—on resilience and burnout prevention for health and helping practitioners—at Stavanger University Hospital in Norway, and conduct a “helping the helpers” workshop there. His award will be used to support his travel expenses.

More detailed information on these awards can be found on the 2024 PDGR Abstracts Page on the UMRA website.

Established in 2009, the PDGR program is administered by the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost and today is funded primarily by donations from UMRA members. If you wish to make a tax-deductible gift to support the program, you can contribute by credit card online or by mailing a check to the University of Minnesota Foundation (please note “For UMRA fund 4867” on your check), P.O. Box 860266, Minneapolis MN 55486-0266. All contributions made during 2024 will be doubled thanks to a challenge grant. 

Another option: Those who are 70½ or older can make a qualified charitable distribution to the PDGR program directly from an IRA and avoid paying federal income tax (up to $100,000 per year). 

—John Bantle, MD, PDGR Committee chair