Bob Barni (’77, ’80) remembers walking through a family garden with his grandfather, picking a tomato, and eating it like an apple on the front porch. It’s a formative memory for Barni that inspired a lifetime devoted to helping others create such opportunities for connection and realization through education and environmental biology.
“When people interact with children, they may not know just how big of an impact their support can have. Those memories could last a lifetime,” says Barni.
Many such memories for Barni took place against the backdrop of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He graduated with a degree in biology from UT Martin in 1977 and with a master’s in botany from UT Knoxville in 1980.
While in Knoxville, he remembers watching UT football games from Hesler’s rooftop greenhouses. As a graduate student, he recalls the opportunity to teach first-year biology classes, which made him fall even more in love with education. And above all, he is grateful and appreciative for the connections he made with professors and fellow graduate students who inspired him to pursue his dreams of showing others just how magical plants and nature are.
Now, Barni is giving back to the university that gave him such formative experiences in hopes of similarly impacting current and future Vols.
Barni established an estate gift to UT with the Barni Family Endowment in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in 2024, which will support graduate students studying in these respective fields. He is also funding the scholarship immediately by giving from his IRA through a qualified charitable distribution.
Through the combination of an estate gift and support from his IRA, Barni ensures that graduate students in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology have consistent opportunities for education—and with immediate impact he gets to witness in his lifetime.
“If you can eliminate the financial roadblock, that’s great because the student doesn’t have to think, ‘I’m interested in this, but I don’t have the money,’” says Barni.
One of the reasons Barni was financially able to attain his master’s degree was because he got paid to do “grunt work” in one of his professor’s labs when he was a student.
“That allowed me to keep going,” says Barni. “Without it, I don’t know if I could have continued.”
The Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology produces graduates who become educators, health care workers, conservationists, state and federal agency employees, leaders in nonprofit and service work, and professionals in every sector in between.
“Support like Barni’s can help students achieve their career goals,” says Jen Schweitzer, professor and head of the department. “It provides opportunities for graduate students who frequently forgo work opportunities to pursue education.
“An endowed scholarship from someone with Barni’s professional background and connection to the university also says to students and the department that he believes in our mission of education, research, and outreach and service,” says Schweitzer.
Education has been important to Barni in his professional life, as well. He directed Alaska’s Denali Institute, led environmental education efforts for children in Memphis, and created an environmental education tour company that took trips to the Everglades, the Grand Canyon, the Pacific Northwest, and countless places in between.
Most recently, Barni taught biology at Normandale Community College in Minneapolis. His life has largely been dedicated to educating others and creating those small moments with people that could change the course of their lives—like when he ate a tomato with his grandfather.
His gifts to the Barni Family Endowment provide yet another avenue through which he can continue that legacy.
Learn more about giving by IRA QCD.
