Kulcinski values opportunities campus has given

Chris DuPré
Photo by Jeff Miller

Higher education has the power to change lives. For some, the changes just keep coming.

Take Professor Gerald Kulcinski, associate dean for research in the College of Engineering. He counts five times that UW–Madison has transformed him, and those events compel him to contribute to coming generations.

The first transformation came in 1957, when a self-described “skinny kid from La Crosse” came to campus to study engineering. Having just enough money for part of his freshman year, he hoped to play football and get an athletics scholarship.

First a quarterback, Kulcinski dislocated a shoulder and broke his nose before taking coach Milt Bruhn’s advice to beef up and move to the line. He made the varsity as a walk-on guard and linebacker.

“The athletic scholarship from the university allowed me to complete a chemical engineering degree in four years,” he says.

Kulcinski’s second transformation came during his senior year in 1961, when the university introduced a graduate program in nuclear engineering. Seeing an opportunity “too good to pass up,” he had his doctoral degree in nuclear engineering four years later. In 1965, he moved with his wife and two children to Washington state.

But UW–Madison wasn’t yet done with Kulcinski. Seven years later, the College of Engineering was starting a program in thermonuclear fusion, and university officials called to ask if he would return as an associate professor. “It took about a millisecond to say “yes,'” he says.

A fourth change arose in 1983 when Kulcinski was offered the chair of nuclear engineering established by alumnus David Grainger. “This chair allowed me to open up a whole new direction of research into finding new ways to produce nuclear power without generating nuclear waste,” Kulcinski says. “Today, my students routinely produce small amounts of fusion power in the lab that someday may be the safe, clean and economical nuclear energy source we have been looking for.”

Two years ago, Kulcinski became associate dean, his fifth life-changing experience at UW–Madison. “As the associate dean for research in the College of Engineering, it has been my privilege to help young faculty and students develop their dreams and aspirations as we move into the 21st century,” he says.

For Kulcinski, giving back to an institution that has provided him so much is easy. “I couldn’t have attended the university without the support I received,” he says. “My family had limited means, and I was the first to go beyond high school.”

His gifts to the UW Foundation “are a little bit of a return on the investment the university made in me,” he says.