WPI Journal - The Magazine for WPI Alumni

WIN 2013

The Alumni Magazine for Worcester Polytechnic Institute. (WPI)

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Advancing WPI Setting the Tone An endowment inspires both student and patron IRVING SKEIST '35 was a brilliant chemist and a pioneering businessman to whom hundreds of chemical companies looked for ground-breaking research. He was also a talented classical musician who played in string quartets around the world. Although these two pursuits might seem very different, Skeist's musical and scientiƂc sides were in fact complementary, says his daughter, who recently decided to honor her father by setting up an endowment at WPI to help current and future students experience the music that he loved. "Being a musician helps bring out a certain amount of passion and creativity," explains Helen Skeist, an amateur violist who was inspired to take up the instrument by her father's example. "And my dad was very much an innovator in his Ƃeld. I think that being a musician, probably at some sort of subtle level, helped him. " The Irving, Class of 1935, Dorothy, and Helen Skeist Endowed Fund will enhance musical opportunities and provide scholarships for WPI juniors and seniors who play violin or viola. To qualify for Ƃnancial aid, a student need not have great talent, but enthusiasm, a commitment to practicing, and a love for the music that was a great passion of Irving Skeist's life. The fund will also honor Helen's late mother, Dorothy, who did not play music herself but, Helen says, was "a great listener." Professor Douglas Weeks, who coordinates WPI's large and diverse music program, says he is grateful for the gift, and notes that the Skeists have been good friends to WPI over the years. After Irving died in 1998, Dorothy and her children set up an endowed scholarship in his honor, for WPI students studying chemistry. Dorothy also donated Irving's valuable, handmade violin to WPI so that students might play it. 66 Winter 2013 "You think about a student coming to a school like WPI and receiving a scholarship for music—to have them recognized for an interest and skill that goes beyond their traditional major is unique," Weeks says. Irving Skeist was born in Worcester in 1915, and he Ƃrst picked up the violin as a child. When he attended WPI in the 1930s, the university did not have an orchestra, but Skeist played in the Worcester Symphony. He earned a PhD in polymer chemistry from the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and developed the Skeist Copolymerization Equation, which has been used in many Ƃelds of chemistry, especially adhesives. In 1955 he founded Skeist Laboratories, which became a successful chemical consulting Ƃrm in an era when consulting was a very new profession. But despite this busy career, Skeist always found time to play his violin or viola. Whenever he traveled for business or for scientiƂc conferences, his daughter recalls, Skeist would seek out other musicians, playing violin or viola in string quartets across the United States and as far away as Europe and Japan. He was often invited to speak at scientiƂc conferences, where he would play music with other chemists in the evenings. "And these were conferences about adhesives and polymers!" Helen Skeist says with a laugh. "He got to meet people all over the world, in a very different context from staying in a hotel and seeing someone in a business meeting. That might have also made him a better chemist, in a sense of having a worldwide perspective." Helen, a physical therapist who lives in New Hampshire, shares her father's love of music, and as a student at Brandeis University she played viola in the orchestra and in chamber music groups. When Irving Skeist died, he left his daughter his own viola. Over the years, the instrument, made by 20thcentury Italian luthier Ansaldo Poggi, appreciated in value, and Helen realized that selling it could earn enough money to set up this endowment and help WPI students well into the future.

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