Hearts at the University: Donors Honored for Generosity, Vision

The S.J. & Jessie E. Quinney College of Agriculture & Natural Resources recently celebrated its many donors and student scholars and gave special recognition to two couples for their support to programs that now comprise the college. Bruce Bugbee and Diana West received the college’s Distinguished Service Award, and Janis Boettinger and Eugene “Geno” Schupp were honored with the Friends of the College Award. All four are longtime supporters of Utah State in addition to giving to other educational institutions and community organizations.

“There are not sufficient ways to measure the positive impacts of our donors’ generosity and vision,” said Derek McLean, Janet Quinney Lawson Endowed Dean of the Quinney College. “All of us in the college are profoundly grateful for our donors and that we get to witness the great things their investments make possible in the lives of students and the world.”

Bruce Bugbee and Diana West

Bugbee is a professor of crop physiology in the Department of Plants, Soils, & Climate, and is widely recognized for his work with plants in controlled environments, including greenhouses and growth chambers in laboratories and aboard spacecraft. He has been honored as USU’s Researcher of the Year and is the founder of Apogee Instruments, a Logan-based manufacturer of scientific and environmental sensors that are used worldwide.

West is also an educator and among the founding members of the Walden School, a grades K-12 charter school in Provo, where she has held senior leadership roles since the school opened in 2003. She has also been a teacher, and taught education courses at Utah State University where she earned her doctoral degree.

Together they have supported community nonprofits as well as the college, but Bugbee and West described their experiences seeing the critical difference scholarships make for students who otherwise would have been unable to attend college.

Bugbee said building a career as a scientist had long put his focus on the “resume virtues” of doing research and getting it published, but in hindsight, those are not his greatest accomplishments.

“The students we have taught and graduated, that’s what you’ll be remembered for,” Bugbee said. “My heart is at the university because we grow students.”

West said that during her teaching career she has loved working with high school students as they prepare to go to college and has seen many of them exceed her own accomplishments.

“I look at what some of them have accomplished and it makes you really happy for them and you hope you’ve been able to play some small part in that,” West said.

Learn more about Bugbee and West in the video linked here.

Janis Boettinger and Geno Schupp

USU Professor and Associate Provost Janis Boettinger has generously supported scholarships in the Department of Plants, Soils, and Climate and other student-focused activities at USU. Her late partner, Professor Geno Schupp, who died earlier this year due to cancer, had likewise supported a scholarship in the Department of Wildland Resources. As a pair, investing in students, the arts, and nonprofits in the community are important values that they have embodied.

“We were both grateful that Utah State University hired us and invested in us, and we wanted to give back,” Boettinger said.

The two of them were a natural combination, with Boettinger’s professional focus on soil science and Schupp’s on plant ecology, skills that sometimes came together in their research and always in creating and tending their abundant garden. Schupp became ill just months after retiring from the Department of Wildland Resources last year — where part of his legacy is the Conservation and Restoration Ecology degree program — Boettinger felt strongly that supporting his legacy was important.

Boettinger said Schupp had felt that the faculty position he had for 33 years been created just for him and he considered it “the best job in the world.” When he died in June, she determined that endowing a professorship in plant ecology in Schupp’s name was a way to honor his work and continue to strengthen the research and teaching he loved.

Learn more about their commitments to supporting people and organizations they care for in the video linked here.