Lawrence Jepson was born in Denmark and immigrated to Iowa with his parents in the early 1900's. Early in life he served as a blacksmith's apprentice. Ultimately, he was a student at ISTC and, while an undergraduate, was instrumental in the creation of the Cedar Falls Chamber of Commerce. Leaving Cedar Falls, he became a Wall Street business man who was keenly interested in how Iowa and the United States would fit into the emerging global economic framework.

In the development of the Keystone Mutual Fund which he founded and ran until the late 1970's, he learned that the U.S. was not an island in the world economy. He used to say that if a Zurich banker sneezed, someone in the United States caught a cold. The truly impressive aspect of this is that he was aware of the importance of global interrelationships well before it was fashionable to be so. If you can remember the 1970's, other than oil, we in the U.S. felt little need for the rest of the world. Lawrence Jepson knew otherwise.

When he died in 1982, Mr. Jepson bequeathed to the UNI Foundation funds to establish the Lawrence M. Jepson endowment to establish a professorship and support activities in the area of international economics. Over the years, thousands of students, faculty, business leaders and community representatives have benefitted from his generosity. The endowment has been used to finance symposiums, speakers, faculty development, and student scholarships.

One of the activities of the Jepson Professorship is a bilateral student seminar on international business, an exchange program with the Plekhanov Russian Academy of Economics (PRAE) in Moscow. Each spring, teams of five students and at least one faculty advisor from each university present papers to their respective Russian or American peers for critique and discussion during two separate seminars - the first at UNI and the second at PRAE. Experiences such as these broaden our students' outlook and strengthen UNI's global connections.