Sparking discoveries for a changing world

The Charles E. Scheidt Family Foundation has given Binghamton University’s unique and groundbreaking Institute for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention (I-GMAP) a generous gift to grow the institute and its impact on undergraduate and graduate education.

This gift provides for significant investments in faculty, post-doctoral fellows, research, programming and more, bringing national and global attention to our campus as a leading actor in the international community of atrocity prevention scholars and practitioners.

It will also support the new Nadia Rubaii Prize and Lecture, as well as memorial fellowships, in her honor.

Rubaii was co-director of I-GMAP and a professor before she died in March 2022.

The inaugural recipient of the Nadia Rubaii Prize is Maria Ressa, a journalist who won the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for her reporting on an authoritarian regime in the Philippines. In April, Ressa was keynote speaker at I-GMAP’s 2023 Frontiers of Prevention meeting, an international gathering at Binghamton of atrocity prevention scholars, practitioners and policymakers.

“The Scheidt Family Foundation’s first gift established I-GMAP. Its second, larger gift allowed us to grow during some very difficult times, including the COVID pandemic and the death of our co-founder,” said Max Pensky, philosophy professor and I-GMAP co-director. “This newest and largest gift from the Foundation is transformational. With this generous support, we will dramatically scale up our existing programs and launch a range of new initiatives. Thanks to this gift, the next few years at I-GMAP will be a very exciting time.”