Alumni · May 21, 2026
Alumni Couple’s $2.5 Million Gift Creates an Endowed Professorship in Manufacturing Systems
Ruth and Gary Lindqvist, who built a Porter County machining company, fund the university’s ninth endowed professorship; Dr. Imani Castellanos is the first holder.
Ruth Lindqvist (’79, industrial technology) and Gary Lindqvist (’78, manufacturing engineering) have given $2.5 million to establish the Lindqvist Family Professorship in Manufacturing Systems, the ninth endowed professorship at UW–Porter Falls and the first in the College of Engineering & Technology since 2014.
The Lindqvists founded a precision machining shop in a rented pole barn outside Porter Falls in 1983. It now employs about 140 people making hydraulic and agricultural components, and has hired more than 60 Porter graduates over four decades, including the company’s current president. The couple stepped back from day-to-day management in 2022.
The endowment is expected to pay out about $112,000 a year. Under the gift agreement, roughly half supports the professor’s salary and the rest funds paid undergraduate research assistants, equipment and an annual summer workshop for engineers from small regional manufacturers.
The first Lindqvist Professor
Dr. Imani Castellanos, professor in the Department of Manufacturing & Industrial Engineering, will hold the professorship for an initial five-year term beginning July 1. Castellanos joined Porter in 2013 after nine years as a plant engineer and has led the department’s work on low-cost automation for shops with fewer than 50 employees — the kind of company, she notes, that cannot hire a robotics integrator but can hire a Porter intern.
“We were the kind of shop she studies. In 1985 we could not afford anybody who knew more than we did. Somebody from Porter answered the phone anyway. This is us answering it for the next one.”
— Gary Lindqvist, class of 1978
“An endowed professorship is the most durable thing a university can be given. It outlasts buildings and budgets. This one will be paying for students in a lab long after all of us are gone.”
— Dr. Bjorn Halvorsen, provost
Information about endowed positions and other naming opportunities is available from University Advancement; current fundraising needs are listed on the giving priorities page.
Contact: Office of University Communications, news@uwporterfalls.edu
Fictional information
UW–Porter Falls is a work of parody. The Lindqvists, their company, the gift and the professorship are invented, and Dr. Castellanos is not a real person.