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The Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) has donated $1 million to the University of California, Davis to create an endowment that will fund ongoing graduate-level coffee research.
The Specialty Coffee Association Endowed Fellowship in Coffee Science will be based at the UC Davis Coffee Center, the latest in a series of collaborations between the two organizations. Under the agreement, UC Davis will invest the donation as an endowment, with approximately 4%—currently about $40,000—to be distributed annually to support an SCA Fellow’s graduate research. Remaining earnings from the fund will be reinvested.
“One of the longstanding missions of the UC Davis Coffee Center has been to establish and nurture a strong academic talent pipeline in support of the coffee industry,” William Ristenpart, founding director of the UC Davis Coffee Center, said in a press release. “This new endowed fellowship dramatically advances that mission by directly supporting graduate students and bringing perspectives and experience from around the world into coffee research at UC Davis.”
According to the SCA and UC Davis, the donation reflects a long-term investment in coffee research and in training the next generation of researchers in the field. The UC Davis Coffee Center was founded in 2014 and has worked with the SCA on a number of projects, including the center’s first major project in 2017 which explored the fundamentals of coffee brewing. More recently, scientists from the Coffee Center spent several years working to update the classic Coffee Brewing Control Chart, with financial support from the SCA.
“Through our longstanding partnership with UC Davis, we’ve seen what’s possible when education, research, and industry come together,” said SCA CEO Yannis Apostolopoulos. “This fellowship will support the next generation of coffee scientists, and we hope it will open doors especially for talented students from coffee-producing regions, whose perspectives and leadership are essential to our sector’s sustainability and resilience.”
Read the full story on the coffee research investment here.
Photo provided by Gregory Urquiaga / UC Davis.
