Two dozen faculty and staff of UW-Milwaukee were honored for their distinguished service to the university at the 2024 Employee Excellence Awards ceremony. Chancellor Mark Mone and other speakers praised the winners during a ceremony Wednesday in the ballroom of the UWM Student Union.
Doug Stafford was awarded the Ernest Spaights Plaza Award for his accomplishments and contributions.
Douglas Stafford joined UWM in 2011 and served as founding director of the Milwaukee Institute for Drug Discovery (MIDD) until his retirement in 2021. Over this decade he worked tirelessly to advance MIDD into the enduring centerpiece of interdisciplinary research, education and scientific excellence that it is today. He quickly saw that MIDD needed essential research instrumentation and organized a unique public-private partnership that secured over $4 million to establish a world-class analytical chemistry facility, now named the State-of-the-Art Analytical Instrumentation Laboratory and Research Core (SAILARC) within the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, where he served as its executive director.
SAILARC quickly became a cornerstone of MIDD research, and the expert staff Stafford recruited provide unparalleled opportunities for UWM faculty and students across campus to learn, conduct high-level mass spectrometry studies and form collaborations with academic institutions and private industry. Since its formation, over 500 students have been trained using SAILARC instruments, with research included in over 100 PhD and master’s theses. Industry collaborations provided operations support for the core and opened doors for many student internships and future employment.
Stafford also worked to secure several million dollars in grants from the National Institutes of Health and private sources for MIDD researchers, including a Translational Grant program that funded 11 projects where UWM faculty worked collaboratively with local industry partners. His vision for drug discovery infrastructure at UWM included conceiving and advocating for the Kilo Laboratory, a teaching and research facility unique to the region and housed in the new Chemistry Building that will enable new research and collaborations for decades to come based on chemical synthesis using process-scale equipment.
Reaching beyond UWM, Stafford co-founded Bridge-to-Cures Inc., a nonprofit organization that offers financial support, business mentoring and advocacy for new entrepreneurial health care ventures in Wisconsin, notably those arising from academic research.