Endowments for Faculty Excellence
Help the Allen School recruit and retain the finest faculty members!
Our greatest current priority is the creation of additional Endowed Professorships to aid in the recruitment and retention of extraordinary faculty. Professorships provide recognition and support to the very strongest faculty members, and they are critical to the recruitment and retention of these true leaders, for two reasons:
- Prestige and national visibility: An endowed position carries recognition among colleagues within academia and industry and beyond. This type of recognition is an important retention tool for exemplary faculty, encouraging them to continue their important work at UW.
- Opportunity for unfettered creativity: An endowed position provides discretionary funds that may be used for any scholarly purpose. This flexibility is invaluable because most government grants provide restricted funds for a specific activity. While funds from grants for established research directions are critical, discretionary funds support creativity and entrepreneurial ideas — akin to “venture funding” for talented faculty to experiment and go in different, sometimes unexpected and serendipitous, directions.
Endowed Professorships and Endowed Chairs are funded at a level of $1 million and $3 million, respectively. In both cases, the principal is invested in UW’s Consolidated Endowment Fund, which has consistently performed in the top quartile of endowments nationally. Roughly 4% is available for expenditure every year; additional gains are reinvested to keep pace with inflation.
Profile: Armon Dadgar & Joshua Kalla Endowed Professorship in Computer Science & Engineering
Allen School alum Armon Dadgar (B.S., ‘11) is co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of HashiCorp, a leading provider of software for companies and organizations seeking to automate their infrastructure and security management in multi-cloud and hybrid environments. Armon and his friend and classmate Mitchell Hashimoto (B.S., ‘11) were inspired to start HashiCorp by their experience as undergraduate researchers in the Allen School’s systems research group, where they gained their first hands-on exposure to cloud computing and the challenges it posed for practitioners.
Armon subsequently helped grow HashiCorp to over 2,500 employees and took the company public in 2021 before its acquisition by IBM for $6.4 billion in 2025. That same year, Armon and his partner, Joshua Kalla, a faculty member at Yale University, committed $1 million to establish the Armon Dadgar & Joshua Kalla Endowed Professorship in Computer Science & Engineering to help propel Seattle and the University of Washington from the epicenter of cloud computing to the leading edge of systems and artificial intelligence. The professorship is part of a larger $3 million commitment from the couple that includes support for the Allen School Student Success Fund.
In Armon’s own words: “By supporting systems research, I hope for the Allen School to continue to be at the forefront of innovation in AI and beyond to inspire the next generation of students, researchers and entrepreneurs.”
Interested in learning more?
Contact Marzette Mondin, Senior Director of Advancement in the Paul G. Allen School, marz (at) uw.edu
Named funds are available for gifts of $100,000 and above. Appropriate recognition, designed in consultation with each donor, is part of each gift that creates a named fund. Additionally, lifetime endowment gifts of $25,000 and above are permanently recognized on the Endowment Wall in the Allen Center atrium.