History of Woodruff Scholars, Fellows, and Professors
Since 1980, the Woodruff Scholarships and Fellowships have been awarded to Emory University’s top students in every field. Woodruff qualities are shared across the schools and carry on Robert W. Woodruff’s legacy of passionate intellectual curiosity, creative leadership, and a strong motivation to use one’s talents and skills for the benefit of others rather than individual glory.
The Scholars and Fellows are questioners and innovators, debaters and disrupters. Their curiosity and leadership inspire all of us to strive for our greatest potential. In Emory’s bold mission to create, preserve, teach and apply knowledge in the service of humanity, the Woodruff Scholars and Fellows stimulate our most rigorous thinking, our most elegant problem solving and our deepest compassion.
The Woodruff Foundation’s generosity also provides specialized resources, student and alumni programming, and other opportunities for Scholars and Fellows. Woodruff Scholarships and Fellowships help Emory attract the world’s next cohort of leaders, game changers, professionals and humanitarians.
The Gift
In November 1979, Emory received an unprecedented opportunity—a $105 million philanthropic gift from the Emily and Ernest Woodruff Fund that gave Emory leadership the chance to make a transformative investment in the university’s most important resources—its students and faculty.
President Jim Laney and other university leaders envisioned this gift as a way to attract the nation’s most esteemed faculty and recruit the brightest students, regardless of financial background, to build an intellectual community capable of making an impact on the Atlanta community, the nation, and the world.