The Clark School of Engineering has established the Hong Ji Distinguished Fellowship in Bioengineering with a $600,000 pledge from an anonymous donor. The gift, named for a Taiwanese cement company, will award a one-year, $25,000 fellowship to an academically talented international graduate student annually.

The generosity of E. Landon Walston ’60 will result in an endowed scholarship program for graduate students in the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences. An Eastern Shore native who worked for the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene for many years, Walston will establish the scholarship program through a bequest in his will.

The President’s Enhancement Fund received a $100,000 bequest of unrestricted support from L. Edward Blumenauer, a longtime supporter of Maryland Athletics. Through his bequest, Blumenauer will support the areas of greatest need at the president’s discretion.

Once again, the university has received outstanding support from The Ford Foundation, this time in the form of a $100,000 grant to the School of Public Policy’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE). Founded in 2001, CIRCLE’s mission is “to promote research on the civic and political engagement of Americans between the ages of 15 and 25.” The Ford grant will support the “Narrowing of the K-12 Curriculum Project” that aims to determine the extent to which the standards-and-accountability movement begun in the 1980s is affecting—negatively as well as positively—various groups of young people.