The Department is delighted to announce the creation of the Thomas M. Uhlman Graduate Fund in Political Science.
One of the Department' s exceptionally successful graduate students, Tom Uhlman, earned his doctorate in Political Science at UNC, focusing on judicial behavior and writing a massive dissertation, Black Judges and Defendants in the Metro City Criminal Court 1968-1974, under the direction of Professor Dick Richardson. In 1976 this study received the American Political Science Association' s award for the best doctoral dissertation in the field of public law.
After that Uhlman was off to be an Assistant and then an Associate Professor at the University of Missouri- St. Louis, where he published a dozen articles on judicial behavior and a well-received book, Racial Justice.
But it was soon clear that his interests were changing, and we were not surprised when Uhlman decided to switch careers and enrolled in Stanford University’s School of Business.
After receiving a Master’s degree, Uhlman worked for a decade as Director of Corporate Development at Hewlett-Packard, leading the firm's worldwide equity investment, strategic alliance, and strategic planning efforts. Then he moved to senior executive positions at Lucent Technologies and AT&T as Vice President of Corporate Development in charge of merger, acquisition and divestiture activity, and at Lucent as Senior Vice President for Corporate Strategy, Business Development and Public Affairs responsible for strategy, mergers and acquisitions, planning and government affairs activities.
The turn of the century saw Uhlman serving as President of Lucent's New Ventures Group, and then, in 2001 he became a founder and Managing Partner of New Venture Partners, the venture capital firm formed as a result of the spinout of his business at Lucent.
Throughout these career moves, Tom Uhlman has never lost his affection for Chapel Hill. His previous gifts to the College of Arts and Sciences have included a major contribution to the Richard J. Richardson Professorship in Political Science and the creation of the Uhlman Family Seminar in UNC's Curriculum in Jewish Studies.
The Department was delighted to receive the latest and most ambitious of Uhlman's gifts to the College of Arts and Sciences. The centerpiece of this $1 million gift, which comes in the form of a permanent endowment, will create a select group of Thomas Uhlman Fellows in Political Science, boosting significantly the value of stipends offered to incoming graduate students by UNC's Graduate School. The goal of these handsomely funded fellowships is to attract and support the very best students to Chapel Hill' s graduate program. Uhlman Fellowships are designed to be competitive with those offered by any of the nation's leading universities.
Two additional facets of the Uhlman Endowment will provide Political Science graduate students with summer research stipends and with travel support to present their research findings at professional conferences. This summer research and travel support will be available to all of the Department's graduate students on a competitive basis.
Although a regular visitor to Chapel Hill, where he is a member of the Board of Directors of UNC’s Arts and Sciences Foundation and chairs its Committee on Finance and Audit, Dr. Uhlman lives in Madison, New Jersey, with his wife, Betsy, and their three daughters, Carly, Rachel and Katherine.
