The University serves Virginia, the nation, and the world by preparing responsible citizen-leaders; advancing, preserving, and disseminating knowledge; and providing world-class patient care.
All gifts of any kind help secure the University’s place as a premier institution of learning and make it possible for our students, faculty, and researchers to shape a brighter future.
You can give to all 12 schools across Grounds. The possibilities are endless for supporting our students, faculty, and programs. Together, we will find the way forward.
You can join the growing number of alumni and friends who invest now in the University’s future by including UVA as a beneficiary of their wills, charitable trusts, and retirement plans. Gifts like these can offer you and your family significant tax benefits as well as greater financial flexibility in meeting your personal and philanthropic goals.
The Honor the Future campaign, the largest in University history, concluded in 2025, thanks to thousands of loyal supporters. Its impact on students, faculty, facilities, and research reaches across Charlottesville, Wise County, and Northern Virginia as it continues to advance the school in its third century of service to the commonwealth, nation, and world.
For John Wesley Wingfield (Engr ’61), attending UVA provided an opportunity to avoid another dangerous job and pursue a career that he considered a high calling.
The youngest of five brothers, Wingfield was a Marine Corps sergeant in World War II, serving in the Pacific Theater and later in the Korean War. After returning home, Wingfield took a job with the Appalachian Power Company, but the working conditions he witnessed gave him pause. At that time, linemen had little protection beyond rubber gloves and boots, and Wingfield described one foreman who lost an arm and another who lost both his hands.
“I was thinking I could be the next one to go,” he said. “So I went to UVA instead.”
The decision was in part practical, but Wingfield’s niece, Carolyn Jacques, said it also was heartfelt.
“Wesley valued education so deeply,” Jacques said of her uncle, who died in 2023.
Carolyn’s husband, Richard “Doc” Jacques, who has taught in UVA’s School of Engineering since 1998, nodded in agreement. “Every time we met with him after we were married, he would talk about UVA,” he said. “He loved the University of Virginia.”
Richard Jacques believes that in the back of Wingfield’s mind was also the idea that as an engineer he could help create safer environments for those power company workers.
After earning his degree in electrical engineering, Wingfield worked on pioneering projects for Babcock and Wilcox in North Carolina, including the reactor for the first nuclear-powered U.S. merchant ship, the NS Savannah. For the U.S. military, he invented a filter to keep radiation from causing missile misfires, and his engineering expertise also took him abroad, where he taught at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, a public university in Wuhan, China.
“He loved his students there,” said the couple.
Teaching has also been part of Richard Jacques’s career, which included being an officer in the U.S. Navy and working for 27 years with the federal government in a variety of capacities. Before his retirement from UVA this spring, he taught engineering ethics using books and case studies to prompt discussions about ethical decisions and behavior. “The basis of engineering ethics is no different than business ethics or any other,” Jacques said. “It’s simply a quality of relationships.”
In honor of the dedicated engineer and uncle who mentored and supported Carolyn from the time she was a child, the Jacques endowed the John Wesley Wingfield Award for Excellence in Engineering Ethics, awarded for the first time this spring to students from the University’s Engineering Ethics course. The 25 students, along with mentors and guests, gathered at an evening ceremony at the Rotunda and were presented with an engraved Jefferson cup symbolizing their commitment to character and integrity in engineering.
Assistant professor Bryn Seabrook, who regularly teaches the Engineering Ethics course, explained that the award committee wanted to de-emphasize standard measures of success like grade point average or high test scores and instead prioritize individual growth and the articulation of personal ethics that comes with deep self-reflection.
Award recipient Jacob Pudwill (Engr ’28) was one of the students Seabrook nominated. She was impressed by Pudwill’s thoughtful personal ethics project and presentation, a video he shot and edited that brought viewers along with him on a solo backpacking trip. His narration emphasized the importance he places on hard work and perseverance: “Backpacking has hardened my mental toughness and taught me how to handle hard situations one step at a time. Each difficult trip I’ve been on has built up my confidence, giving me living proof that I can get through the hardest climbs I’ll face.”
Seabrook said, “The video was a really powerful way of showing the character strength he was relying on to be alone in the woods and how he was thinking about the ways those skills align with his professional identity as well. I was amazed by the capability that he had demonstrated that otherwise easily could have gone unnoticed in the class because he was a little bit on the quieter side.”
The award was unexpected for Pudwill but being recognized for some of the work he’d done outside of class was positive. “Receiving the award has definitely given me a lot more confidence in my ability to deal with different ethical situations,” he said. “I feel like I understand things about myself and how I can think about navigating difficult scenarios in the future.”
“I personally did not know John Wesley Wingfield,” said Seabrook, “but he sounds exactly like the kind of person we want our students to be.”
