Sama Fund

Dominick Sama Creates Chemical Engineering Fund

Ask retired Chemical Engineering Prof. Dominick Sama why he created a scholarship fund for chemical engineering students, and he’ll bring you back nearly 50 years, to 1960, when he was first hired to start the Chemical Engineering Department at Lowell Technological Institute.

He also became head of the Paper Engineering Department, whose faculty formed the core of the new chemical engineering department. But there was only one student signed up as a new Paper Engineering major.  Prof. Sama approached the department’s very active advisory board and suggested they establish a scholarship program to improve the number and quality of students in the department. 

They followed his suggestion and started awarding several scholarships a year to students with strong academic records.  Three years later, the paper program had 33 majors, and it remains alive and thriving today as part of the Chemical Engineering Department.  

“I feel strongly that we should encourage scholarship. We need to encourage good students to become better, regardless of their financial need,” says Sama, who knows the benefit of scholarship support first hand.  As a student at MIT, he received academic scholarships at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

The Professor Dominick A. Sama Endowed Scholarship Fund provides scholarship support to sophomore, junior and senior chemical engineering students who have achieved the highest semester grade-point average in each class level. His goal is for the fund to award three $2,000 scholarships each year, but the fund must receive an additional $100,000 in donations to achieve this goal. Contributions made to the fund before June 30, 2008, qualify for a 50 percent match from the state.

In addition to his chemical engineering students, he is hoping to appeal to the many former civil and electrical engineering students who struggled through his course in thermodynamics and heat transfer. “For many of them, it wasn’t easy. They didn’t see the connection between thermodynamics and civil or electrical engineering, but it has everything to do with life. If any of those students got anything worthwhile from my course, I would invite them to contribute to this scholarship fund,” says Sama.

Retired since 1999, Sama keeps connected to the University through his friendship with Chemical Engineering Chair Alfred Donatelli. Sama’s daughter, Susan Sama, is also a research professor in the Department of Work Environment.

Although retired, Sama remains very active in scholarship and other creative endeavors. He regularly reviews articles, participates in conferences on thermodynamics, and will give the keynote speech at the ECOS thermodynamic conference in Poland next June. He enjoys winters in the Florida sun, but works in his backyard-vineyard in Groton, when he transfers his home base up north for the summer.

He is the Class Vintner for MIT’s class of 1954, producing the “Chateau La Teque ’54” wine that has been served at their class reunions since 1979.  According to the label, the wine is “naturally produced from pure water and carbon dioxide,” which, Sama suggests, is a marvelous way to sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Sama’s interest in wine comes from his Italian parents, who brought their wine-making skills from the old country. When he had trouble finding grapes to buy for his own wine making, he planted grapes on his Groton hillside, using hardy hybrids of French/American vines introduced into this country by the agricultural experiment station of Cornell University.

He now spends his summers tending to his vineyard, harvesting his grapes in early October. Sama is hoping to interest one of his 10 grandchildren in taking over the labor-intensive hobby, but for now he will continue to tend to his crop as a labor of love.

For more information about how to donate to the Professor Dominick A. Sama Endowed Scholarship Fund, contact Caitlin O’Brien, major gifts officer in the Office of University Advancement, 978-934-4805.  Click here for other eNews.