Family-friends fellowship

Robert L. Richards Jr., EG '50, had a long and successful career with DuPont before retiring in 1987 as a vice president, but he never forgot what it was like to be a struggling graduate student with a family to support.

After earning his bachelor's degree at UD in chemical engineering, he enrolled in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to earn a doctorate in that field and married Joyce Hilty Richards, CHEP '51, after she graduated from UD. Joyce Richards worked as a librarian at MIT until the first of their two children, Alice, was born in 1952.

Bob Richards got a job as a part-time research assistant, and the couple qualified for married-student housing on campus, but money was tight. On Sundays, Joyce Richards recalls, four or five families in the housing complex would chip in to buy a copy of The New York Times, trading sections of the paper among households for the rest of the day.

Although their experience at MIT included a close-knit group of friends--"We were all in the same boat, with young kids and no money," Bob Richards recalls--they decided they wanted to make things a bit easier for others in similar circumstances.

The result is the Joyce Hilty and Robert L. Richards Jr. Fellowship at UD, which has an unusual component, Deirdre Smith, director of development for the College of Engineering, says. "It's set up specifically to provide living expenses for an engineering graduate student who is married, because the Richardses wanted to assist a student who has a family," Smith says. "That makes it different from other fellowships."

"The University of Delaware was always high on our list for charitable donations, because we were blessed with good educations," Bob Richards says. "We recognized that there were a lot of scholarships out there, but the one we had in mind was a little more personal and distinctive."

The first beneficiary of the couple's generosity was Pete Tessier, who held the Richards Fellowship for the past five years and completed his doctoral work this spring. He says the support he received from the fellowship was instrumental in allowing him and his wife, Maria, to start a family while he was still a graduate student. Their daughter, Sarah, was born in 2002.

After earning his bachelor's degree at the University of Maine, Tessier says he was considering both UD and Princeton University for graduate school. He was already leaning toward Delaware, he says, when he was offered the Richards Fellowship.

"That really was confirmation to me that UD was the right place," he says. "It wasn't only the money but the thought behind it. I knew I wanted to have a family, and the idea that there was a fellowship that would help me do that just seemed wonderful."

If their fellowship not only assists a young family with living expenses but also helps the University's chemical engineering program attract top graduate students like Tessier, that's icing on the cake, Bob and Joyce Richards say.

The Tessiers and the Richardses have met and corresponded occasionally, and Pete Tessier says Bob Richards always has been interested in his work. Joyce Richards says she and her husband were especially pleased when they received the announcement of Sarah's birth, with a note thanking them for helping to make it possible.

Pete Tessier defended his doctoral dissertation, "Fundamentals and Applications of Nanoparticle Interactions and Self-Assembly" in May and now is conducting postdoctoral research at the Whitehead Institute, a biomedical research facility affiliated with MIT. While at UD, he got some classroom experience as a teaching fellow and says he would like an eventual career as a college professor.

His doctoral research involved nanoparticles, specifically proteins, and how they assemble themselves into crystalline structures. Proteins are large and complex, Tessier says, and getting them to crystallize in a predictable way is difficult, since a large number of variables affect that assembly process.

"Understanding how proteins are formed is very important in biology, with applications to such areas as drug development," he says. "More broadly, biologists want to understand how proteins function in general, and the way to start understanding that is to understand their structure."

At the Whitehead Institute, Tessier is studying prions, a type of protein that has been implicated in mad cow disease and other neurodegenerative disorders in which brain cells die. It appears that one protein is involved in many different prion disorders, he says, raising the question of how a single protein molecule can give rise to such a variety of illnesses.

"The hypothesis I'm investigating is that the protein aggregates into different forms, called prion strains, and because the structures are different, they cause different disorders," Tessier says. The research, he says, has implications beyond the rare neurodegenerative diseases involved and could help answer the question of how a protein molecule can assemble itself into different structures.

Tessier's advisers in his graduate work at the University included Abraham Lenhoff, Gore Professor of Chemical Engineering; Stanley Sandler, Henry Belin du Pont Chair of Chemical Engineering; and Eric Kaler, Elizabeth Inez Kelley Professor of Chemical Engineering and dean of the College.

--Ann Manser, AS '73, CHEP '73