Hildebrandt Estate Establishes Library Endowment

January 20, 2003
University Park, Pa. -- An $800,000 gift to Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences from the estate of alumnus Albert C. Hildebrandt will help to improve the Department of Plant Pathology's library, located in Buckout Laboratory.

A professor of plant pathology at the University of Wisconsin for twenty-nine years, Albert Hildebrandt was an internationally recognized authority on plant tissue culture and one of the earliest advocates of cell fusion as a means of incorporating new traits into a cell line, leading to the development of advanced research techniques that are widely used today.

The Department of Plant Pathology will use income from the Hildebrandt Endowment to make improvements to the current library, a discipline-specific body of knowledge available to all faculty, students and staff in the department. According to Professor of Plant Pathology and Department Head Leonard J. Francl, improvements include organizing the present collection, binding scientific journals, and purchasing key reference books. Income may also soon provide computer services such as journal subscriptions and information retrieval. "A gift such as this one holds great potential not only for the faculty and students in plant pathology but also for other related disciplines at Penn State," Francl said. "This endowment will enable the department to become an international leader in library holdings and access to digital research, which will create new opportunities for graduate education, research support, and outreach."

A State College native, Hildebrandt graduated from Penn State with a bachelor's degree in botany in 1939, and a master's degree in plant pathology and botany in 1941. He received his Ph.D. in plant pathology from the University of Wisconsin in 1945, and joined the faculty four years later. He retired in 1978 and died in 2001.

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