NC State University Insect Museum

We've reached a new, exciting(!) milestone here at the Insect Museum - we established an endowment and are putting the final touches on a Friends of the NCSU Insect Museum program. Admittedly, it's a difficult year to start a large fund raising effort, but the impacts on our program, especially for the students, are well worth the effort.

Our operating funds are currently derived solely from the Department of Entomology, and our allotment generally covers critical materials and supplies - e.g., alcohol to preserve soft-bodied arthropods, pins to mount insects, paper to label our specimens - and important permits and professional memberships that keep us legal and current on methods. We aspire to reach higher, though, and a recent brainstorming session generated multitudinous ways in which we could serve researchers, students, and the public better. Imagine...

• Insect Museum Research and Travel Grants for Students - A highly motivated graduate student needs $1,100 to visit the Natural History Museum in London in order to work with a certain taxonomic expert and to observe holotype specimens directly. Another student needs $1878 to sequence a critical exemplar and to add another gene fragment to her dataset. We'd love to enable these kinds of efforts. These two students gain invaluable proposal writing experience and benefit from funding lines that are theirs to manage and maximize AND which enabled them to extend their research into areas their advisers simply cannot not support financially.
• The Insect Museum Student Fellowship - A graduate student yearns to secure a research position in a natural history museum after graduation. We grant that student a one-year fellowship in the Museum to gain career-building experience by learning the intricacies of museum science.
• The Visiting Curator Fellowship - Insects are extraordinarily diverse, and a properly curated collection enables efficient discovery of biodiversity, identification of potential pests, and the understanding of diversity changes over time. Each year a taxonomic expert is selected for the Visiting Curator Fellowship. He or she is flown in to bring levels of expertise not currently available at NCSU. His or her curation efforts would be followed by seminars that enlighten faculty, staff, and the public.
• The Outreach and Citizen Science Fund - A fund aiding the development of insect exhibits that educate, inspire, and allow us to connect non-experts to the natural world and to reach future generations of entomologists.

And those are just a few of the dozen or so ideas we came up with in an afternoon.

Help support the Insect Museum

Become a friend of the NCSU Insect Museum

Donate to the NCSU Insect Museum Endowment

The creation of an endowment and a Friends of the Insect Museum program warrants at least another post or two, especially after we settle on the program details. Both accounts are ready now to accept donations, though, should you feel inclined; simply follow the links in the table above. We'd love to hear your feedback and creative fund raising ideas if you're willing to share your tricks! In the meantime watch for updates about this exhilarant new adventure, and please feel free to contact me with any questions.