Support Graduate Students on Give Day
Thanks to your generosity, last year’s Give Day was a huge success for the Kitto Grad Hub! You helped us take a major step forward in supporting grad students, who are the heart of innovation, research, and academic leadership at Western.
Graduate students teach undergraduates, advance critical research, and shape the future across disciplines. That’s why the Kitto Grad Hub is so important. It’s a vibrant, inclusive space on campus dedicated to grad students. It’s more than just a physical space — the Kitto Grad Hub is a home for collaboration, community, and professional development, and even modest gifts can have an outsized impact.
The first $1,000 in donations to the Kitto Grad Hub for Give Day will be generously matched by Dean of the Graduate School David Patrick and his wife Bahareh.
Will you give today to support Western graduate students?
Meet Recent Graduate Students Who Benefit from Your Generosity on Give Day
Jessi Gauvin is a graduate of WWU's experimental psychology program who studied Alzheimer’s disease. Gauvin said she’s drawn to this kind of research because of the complexity of neurodegenerative diseases and the need to develop more effective treatment.
Gauvin’s research advisor was WWU Professor of Psychology Jacqueline Rose, who runs the Rose lab and specializes in neuroplasticity and behavior. Research in the Rose lab, which is attached to the Behavioral Neuroscience Program within the Psychology Department, uses a type of microscopic worm, C. elegans, as a model organism for studying behavior and learning. The C. elegans model system allows researchers in the lab to investigate how neurons react and modify themselves depending on stimuli changes.
Jack McBride is a graduate of WWU's MA in anthropology program and a current PhD student at Yale. During his time at Western, he focused on litter size in primates under advisor Tesla Monson. Specifically, McBride investigated the evolution of primate reproduction by focusing on twinning in American monkeys.
McBride was awarded Western's Graduate Research and Creative Opportunities Grant for his work on litter size in primates, which funded his coursework specializing in R, a program he can use to process large amounts of data into a digestible format.
Miguel Gonzalez Ramirez, a graduate of WWU’s Master’s in Teaching program is learning that the biggest successes as a teacher don't always happen at the classroom level but often at the individual level. “[Teaching] is the care and nurturing of each student,” Gonzalez Ramirez, who plans to teach history, said. “It’s cool to reach the whole class—but it’s an individualized process.”
When you support the Kitto Grad Hub, your gift to graduate students matters now and continues to give for generations to come.
