Robert Davies Scholarship

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All admitted students are considered for the Davies Scholarship during the named scholarship selection process. Students who are named Davies Scholars receive this merit-based scholarship award. In most years, 1-2 first-year students will be awarded the Davies Scholarship.

The Robert N. Davies Scholarship was established in 2007 by Robert Davies '61, to provide financial assistance to students with demonstrated financial need who have achieved a high level of academic success.

Mr. Davies and his wife, Gail, have continued to donate generously to the scholarship endowment over the years, making substantial gifts, and taking full advantage of special "challenge" opportunities that generated additional contributions to the scholarship. In 2020, the Robert N. Davies Scholarship endowment grew to become one of the largest scholarship endowments at Duke Law School.

Grateful for the scholarship assistance he received as a student, Mr. Davies also funds a scholarship for art students at DePauw University in his home state of Indiana, where his late first wife also had studied. An observation from his DePauw fraternity brother, 1998 Nobel laureate Ferid Murad, inspired Davies to focus his support on scholarships.

"Ferdid said that if he needed to borrow money to go to college he could never have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine because he could never have worked in a setting where he was doing research for low pay," Mr. Davies said. "His scholarships gave him freedom to excel. That really hit home for me."