Dr. and Mrs. William Mendenhall III created this fund in 2005 to support a professorship in the Radiation Oncology Department. William Mendenhall was the founding chairman of the statistics department at the University of Florida and served the department from 1963 until 1977. Mendenhall received his Ph.D. in statistics from North Carolina State University and was a professor of mathematics at Bucknell University before coming to UF. He retired as professor emeritus in 1978. Best known as a prolific textbook author in statistics, his text “Introduction to Probability and Statistics,” has been used throughout the United States and the rest of the world as a canonical introduction to the subject.

William Mendenhall and his wife, Joan, are parents of two UF alumni, Dr. William M. Mendenhall, a noted radiation oncologist at the UF Medical Center, and Dr. Charles M. Mendenhall, head of the Department of Radiation Oncology at the Phoebe Putney Hospital in Albany, GA.