Published on July 6, 2023 by Morgan Black
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Katherine and Logan Deen
In May 2022, the Risk Management and Insurance (RMI) Advisory Board in Samford University Brock School of Business established the Risk Management and Insurance Advisory Board Endowed Scholarship. After losing one of the board’s founding members, Logan Deen ’12, to cancer in November 2022, a unanimous vote in May 2023 approved changing the name of the fund in his memory.
Deen, who was the owner of Logan Deen State Farm in Birmingham, Alabama, was a dedicated member of the Birmingham business community and was passionate about giving back to Samford students.
He and his wife, Katherine Moore Deen ’12, met while they were students at Samford. She said, “Logan was not just a businessperson that wanted to be successful for himself. He wanted to mentor the next generation and loved being involved with Samford’s business school.”
Deen regularly hosted Samford interns in his office and made it a point to teach them that there was more to a sales career than just medical sales, driving more interest in the insurance industry.
Katherine said, “He got them interested in insurance when, at first, they didn’t think it was very ‘flashy’, and taught them how the industry was about ‘helping people manage the risks of everyday life’.”
The Logan Deen RMI Advisory Board Endowed Scholarship is awarded Samford business majors who are pursuing the Risk Management and Insurance concentration or a career in the industry.
Rusty Yerkes, the Thomas J. Adams Sr./AutoTec endowed professor in risk management and insurance, regularly interacted with Deen through his involvement in the business school and its risk management and insurance program.
Yerkes said, “Logan was always a consummate professional. He was a faithful and dedicated Christian, husband and father, and he loved Samford and the Brock School of Business and went out of his way to pay it forward for our students.”
Katherine added, “The renaming of this scholarship just goes to show you how much of an impact Logan had on people once he met them. I’m excited that his son, Josiah Logan, will get to see that there’s a scholarship at Samford named after him—it plays an important role in furthering Logan’s legacy.”
Samford is a leading Christian university offering undergraduate programs grounded in the liberal arts with an array of nationally recognized graduate and professional schools. Founded in 1841, Samford is the 87th-oldest institution of higher learning in the United States. Samford enrolls 6,101 students from 45 states, Puerto Rico and 16 countries in its 10 academic schools: arts, arts and sciences, business, divinity, education, health professions, law, nursing, pharmacy and public health. Samford fields 17 athletic teams that compete in the tradition-rich Southern Conference and ranks 6th nationally for its Graduation Success Rate among all NCAA Division I schools.
