An alumnus with a passion for the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Department supports faculty excellence, with a ripple effect that uplifts future UMass engineers and scientists.

Gary Lapidus ’84 is committed to supporting the UMass Amherst Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (CBE) Department, its faculty, and students. Though he ultimately didn’t practice chemical engineering professionally, Lapidus says that the skills he obtained at UMass influenced his career.

“I have always felt like my chemical engineering education at UMass made me who I am. All these skills that I leveraged professionally—analytics, mathematics, problem solving—go back to the Chemical Engineering Department at UMass.”

Gary Lapidus ’84

Lapidus says this is the reason he is so passionate about giving back to the university.

“It is the foundation of everything my life has become.”

Lapidus, who grew up in Newton, Mass., initially wasn’t sure what he wanted to study at UMass. A chemistry class, where he was one of the top-scoring students, piqued his interest in chemistry, and chemical engineering had a reputation for being the most difficult major you could take. Lapidus, up for a challenge, decided this was the major for him.

“I studied at the Newman Center and would see a group of guys with chemical engineering textbooks. I remember looking at their book and thinking, ‘I’ve got to do this,’” he says. “So that’s what I did. And I loved it.”

After graduating with a Bachelor’s in Chemical Engineering from UMass, Lapidus earned a Master of Science in Chemical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology before pursuing an MBA from Harvard Business School, where he met his wife, Clare.

Lapidus spent 20 years working in New York, ending up on Wall Street, where he was an equity research analyst covering the automobile industry. In 2011, he moved to London, maintaining his connection to UMass from afar.

An investment in the future

Lapidus is a longtime donor to the university, providing significant support to the Daniel J. Riccio Jr. College of Engineering and the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Department in particular.

In 2021, Lapidus established the Gary R. Lapidus Faculty Fellowship in Chemical Engineering, which supports faculty excellence in the CBE department. The fund provides resources for summer stipends, research and teaching expenses, and professional travel, and supports the purchase of important materials and supplies that are critical for research.

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There have been two Lapidus Fellows to date. The inaugural fellow, Professor Jessica Schiffman, PhD, was appointed in 2022, and Professor Sarah Perry, PhD, is the newly appointed fellow as of January 2026. Both express gratitude for the fund, noting the tremendous impact it has had on their work and their students.

Schiffman, who was recently named the Armstrong/Siadat Endowed Professor in Materials Science and Engineering, heads a hands-on interdisciplinary research group in the CBE department that uses green chemistry to develop new materials that address grand challenges in health care and environmental remediation.

According to Schiffman, the Lapidus fund helps create opportunities for student researchers to share their results with other researchers in the community. This is an important—but costly—part of their education.

“It’s essential that we have supplemental funds like this to help send our students to these conferences so they can share their findings with the research community,” she says.

Perry’s work is in the polymer space, with half of her research group working on microscale devices and the other half on self-assembling polymers. She appreciates the flexibility provided by the Lapidus fund.

“You have to fund science—fund students, fund researchers, pay for materials. It is challenging to do new things [without funding],” she explains. “Having this fellowship means I have the flexibility to pursue new ideas, maybe something that’s really a departure from what we’re doing.”

Perry and Schiffman say that the impact of faculty support like the Lapidus fund is far reaching, extending beyond their labs and even beyond UMass.

“It’s like the butterfly effect. This grant helps to support research in my lab that could potentially create a whole new field of research, and it will create new generations of researchers who go on to have their own impact. It’s an exponential explosion that will have many downstream consequences.”

Professor Sarah Perry, PhD

“It’s important to make an investment in basic science and engineering and the future of our students. Supporting professors at UMass in turn supports the research that their groups do, which gets translated into new medicines, new membranes, and new technologies that we rely on in our everyday lives,” Schiffman says, adding that the need for this type of support is greater than ever. “The cost of everything is rising. We are really grateful that there are donors willing and able to help the next generation of scientists and engineers.”

The fund is making exactly the impact Lapidus was hoping for.

“I value what UMass did for me, and I’m happy to help them continue to do that for other people,” he says. “I want to support the department because it teaches students how to think and develops their skill sets, and I specifically want to aid students through research. My ambition [with the fund] is to increase the number of students who can benefit.”

Interested in supporting current and future generations of engineers? Make a gift to the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering today.