The fund supports up to 20 projects in any given academic year with each grant award ranging up to $1,750.

Creative projects may be carried out on- or off-campus. Previously funded projects may provide some guidance into the range of possible topics, but the purpose of this fund is to encourage students to be creative and to think outside of the box.

Grants are awarded by a six-member committee composed of four students, a faculty advisor, and an administrative advisor. Student committee members are selected from among those students previously awarded a King Creativity Fund grant.

Committee members base awards on creative merit, the soundness of the proposal, feasibility, potential for educational enhancement, qualifications of the student project directors, and budget projections.

"I saw this as a pilot project in creativity," King explains. "If the students would be self-motivated enough to apply for the grant, it shows they can be self-motivated to teach themselves. This program allows them to have the financial means to select the subject in which they are interested and learn by doing. I call it the 'Gospel of Creativity.'"

King says returning to campus to see the initial results was the best part. "They were so varied. Did I think someone would make a life-sized mold of my hand? No. Did I imagine the fund would help establish an independant film making organization? No. I didn't see any projects that I would have done-and that's exactly the point!"

For more information on grant recipients, please choose options below. For more on Joey King, please visit Southwestern's News & Events feature.

W. Joseph King is president of QOOP International. QOOP turns digital content into print products. The company's on-demand product platform allows the rapid delivery of customized, print products worldwide. Prior to joining QOOP, Dr. King was executive director of Connexions at Rice University. Connexions is a unique, web-based teaching and learning platform that disintermediates academic publishing.

As a managing director of Trinity River Capital Ventures, Dr. King financed and advised new technology companies. He was a founder and president of Zama Networks. Together with its investors, Mitsui & Co. and NTT DoCoMo, Zama developed next generation, high quality-of-service communication systems and networks. Dr. King also served as chief scientist of F5 Networks (Nasdaq: FFIV), from its founding through to its initial public offering.

He is entrepreneur-in-residence at TechFortWorth, a municipally sponsored technology incubator. Dr. King served as an adjunct professor at the TCU Neeley School of Business and the University of Washington. Formerly, Dr. King was a research scientist at the Human Interface Technology Laboratory at the University of Washington. He is a fellow at the Advanced Telecommunication Research Institute in Kyoto, Japan, where he served as a visiting scientist in 1994. He has also conducted research at Hughes Research Laboratories and GTE Telecommunications Research. Dr. King has served as a consultant and advisor to Siemens, Rapport, Hanson Robotics, Hughes Electronics, Microsoft, Interval Research, Walt Disney Imagineering, and Atari Games.

Dr. King is chairman of the board of Rice University Press, the first fully digital academic press. He is vice chairman of the board of Fossil Rim Wildlife Center, a non-profit endangered wildlife conservation and education facility. He is a member of the board of trustees of Southwestern University, founded as Texas' first university in 1840. Dr. King also serves on the board of Connexions. Formerly, he served on the board of the Benaroya Research Institute and of the Pacific Northwest Ballet.

Dr. King holds a Ph.D. in human-computer interaction from the University of Washington (Seattle, Washington). He holds a B.A. with honors in computer science and in experimental psychology from Southwestern University (Georgetown, Texas).