Purdue University Northwest will name its new bioscience building after a late professor who devoted his professional life to the campus and left it $8 million upon his death.

By the time it opens in fall 2020, it will be called the Nils K. Nelson Bioscience Innovation Building, a campus spokesman said.

Nelson was an organic chemistry professor at Purdue University’s Hammond campus for nearly three decades. He was hired in 1962 and retired in 1991. He died at 90 in July 2017.

He never married and “lived frugally,” keeping a studio apartment about a block off campus well into retirement, a relative told the university.

“The work and his students were most important to him,” Mary Keith Agnew, a second cousin, said. He had a great sense of humor and enjoyed working in his lab, she said.

After retirement, Nelson came back for retired professor luncheons. He was a regular fixture blocks away at Woodmar Deli on 169th Street. As his health declined, Nelson enjoyed watching campus life from his apartment window, Agnew said.

Most of Nelson’s $8 million gift will go toward scholarships, Purdue University Northwest Chancellor Thomas Keon said. The bulk will be devoted toward a scholarship in his name.

Another part will establish professorships named for him at the College of Engineering and Science, Keon said. The rest went to the building, he said.

The 68,000-square-foot bioscience building will house the College of Nursing and Department of Biological Sciences. It will also have research and testing labs. It is the Hammond campus’ newest building in nearly 20 years.

“We are humbled by Dr. Nelson’s posthumous generosity,” Keon said in a statement. “Dr. Nelson impacted the lives of students who went on to be chemists, biologists and doctors. Today, we celebrate the continuation of his legacy.”

Agnew recalled Nelson as a man who was unassuming, vivacious and loved to travel.

Her father once went on a cross-country trip with Nelson after they graduated high school, she said. Later in life, on campus breaks, Nelson traveled in the U.S., Europe via rail and Mexico by bus.

Prior to his time at Purdue, Nelson taught at the University of Maine and University of Illinois. Before that, he was a research chemist for 11 years at Shell Oil Co.

A Missouri native, he got his undergraduate degree in chemical engineering from the University of Missouri-Rolla and masters and doctorate in organic chemistry at the University of Illinois. In 1970, Nelson took a year off from Purdue to study modern advances in organic chemistry at England’s Cambridge University. He was named a visiting scholar there by Sir Alexander Todd, a Nobel prize-winning chemist.

The Purdue University Board of Trustees approved the name change for Nelson on April 12, a campus spokesman said in a release.

mcolias@post-trib.com

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