Dear Fred and June,

I read this letter today as part of a tradition we began five years ago, at the very first Kummer Day. Every year, as we celebrate the anniversary of your gift, I present a report to our campus community on the impact of your gift on our university.

You’ll be pleased that your university is on the rise and that the Kummer Institute continues to be in good hands under the direction of a dedicated board of directors — the Kummer Missouri S&T Foundation Board.

Dr. Richard Brow, a longtime researcher, faculty member and leader at S&T, serves as the executive director of operations of the Kummer Institute. I am grateful to Dr. Brow for his steadfast and diligent support of the Institute.

 

 

Fred and June, we continue to make great progress on your threefold mandate to us: elevate S&T, provide broad STEM outreach and ensure economic impact.

First, we continue to elevate S&T through academic and research excellence.

Dr. James Sterling, the dean of the Kummer College, is leading the charge in academics for the Kummer College of Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Economic Development.

You may recall that Dr. Rachel Kohman was named assistant dean of entrepreneurship education in the Kummer college around this time last year. Dr. Shou Wong has joined the college’s leadership team and has launched Team Innovation Projects, a new initiative that connects S&T students and faculty directly with industry partners.

 

 

To meet national workforce needs, we are expanding our academic programs throughout the university. Our MBA program has achieved STEM accreditation, and we’ve added a master’s degree in economics and innovation.

Additional new programs include bachelor's degrees in biomedical engineering and semiconductor engineering, Ph.D. programs in biological sciences and bioengineering, and a master’s degree in applied artificial intelligence. Additional new programs in Artificial Intelligence related fields are highlighted as “AI + X” as they are structured to offer a combination of AI plus elective courses related to applied AI in the STEM disciplines of one’s choice.

 

 

Fred and June, your gift is also transforming research at S&T. Under the leadership of Dr. Kamal Khayat, we have achieved our North Star goal of Carnegie Research 1 or R1 University. S&T now is classified as a “very high research activity university.” We set this goal for 2030 but, thanks in no small measure to the collective effort of our faculty and research staff, we accomplished this national level recognition five years early. Missouri S&T is now a top-tier research university with R1 classification.

In the past five years, the Kummer Institute has invested a total of $2 million in seed funding for 65 S&T faculty-led projects through the Ignition Grant Initiative to fuel early-stage research and innovation. You will be happy to know that this investment of $2 million led to external awards totaling over $11 million.

Under Dr. Khayat’s leadership, research expenditures have nearly doubled, from $29 million in 2020 to $56 million in 2025. Total awards increased from $32 million in 2020 to a high of $74 million in 2024.     

Large grants include two that are led by Kummer Institute research center directors:

  • Shelley Minteer, director of the Kummer Institute Center for Resource Sustainability, is leading a $19.8 million National Science Foundation Center for Synthetic Organic Electrochemistry. The five-year award started last month and where the researchers will work to improve the safety and reduce the cost of manufacturing chemicals while at the same time decrease chemical waste.
  • Richard Billo, director of the Kummer Institute Center for Advanced Manufacturing and director of the Missouri Protoplex, is leading a $9.1 million Mo Excels grant sponsored by the Missouri Department of Higher Education and Workforce Development. This work will help drive awareness of career opportunities within manufacturing for rural and underrepresented individuals. In addition, Dr. Billo has worked collaboratively with many national manufacturing companies such as Boeing, Caterpillar and Lockheed Martin, to just name a few. These companies are now integral parts and partners of S&T’s Protoplex.

 

 

Fred and June, thanks to your generosity, our mission to elevate S&T is also benefiting greatly from Kummer scholarship and fellowship programs, which are now in their fifth year.

Kummer Student Programs provides students with scholarships and opportunities to enhance their experience beyond the classroom. This fall, 250 undergraduate students are new Kummer Vanguard Scholars, which brings the total number of students in that program to 1,120. As you recall, the scholars program attracts and supports the best and brightest first-year students in STEM degree programs and is renewable for four years.

In addition, 11 Ph.D. students are new Kummer Innovation and Entrepreneurship – or I&E –Doctoral Fellows, bringing the total number of I&E fellows to 50. We are half-way through to achieve our goal of 100 I&E fellows. 

In December, we honored the first person to complete the Kummer I&E Fellowship program, who earned a Ph.D. in computer science. His research focused on a method for using social media posts to support the national emergency communication and network connections.

In addition to these scholars and fellows, Kummer Student Programs offer opportunities for all students. One example is the Badges of Entrepreneurial Excellence program, which allows students of all majors to experience the benefits of entrepreneurial pursuits.

Fred and June, you will be proud to know that, over the past five years, your gift has provided $14.5 million in student aid and programming support. 

 

 

In addition to the tremendous impact of your generosity on our students’ success, I would be remiss if I did not also mention the impact of your gift on faculty. Your gift has provided $5.7 million in funding for endowed faculty and faculty startup packages. This includes Kummer endowed professors, Kummer Impact professors, Kummer department chairs and Kummer research center directors.

Your gift has also inspired other donors to give to this wonderful university. Since 2020, alumni, friends, corporate partners and state and federal government fundings have nearly doubled your gift with a $277 million investment.

 

 

Fred and June, we are also making great strides in the second part of the Kummer mandate: to establish broad STEM outreach.

A little over four years ago, Courtney Jones joined S&T as director of the Kummer Center for STEM Education. In less than five years, Courtney and her able team have extended STEM education far beyond the walls of this great university.

Courtney oversees the center’s engaging programming for students in grades K-12 and for teacher development. Her teams host after-school programs, free tutoring, community outreach events, teacher conferences and workshops, and research experiences for both teachers and students. They take projects and experiments on the road in STEM Mobile vans. Vehicles retro fitted with engineering and science experiments. They have made 67 STEM Mobile visits to 29 Missouri counties.

The center’s biggest yearly undertaking is our summer camps, where students experience the STEM fields in fun and meaningful ways. We’ve welcomed over 3,500 K-12 students from 30 states and nine countries at 90 camps in the past five years and provided over $378,000 in scholarships.

During the past five years, Courtney’s team have hosted more than 50 events at S&T, bringing over 16,000 K-12 students to our campus to learn about STEM fields they may have never thought of before. The STEM Center also hosted many workshops and conferences for K-12 teachers.

Last fall, the center launched a free after school program for three Phelps County school districts, thanks in part to a grant totaling almost $2 million. Nearly 100 students are enrolled in this program, named “Miners in the Making.” Fred and June, you’d love to see this!

Another large undertaking is staffing of the Missouri State Fair, where children of all ages from all parts of the state come to our S&T area and fly drones, drive or program robots, check out virtual reality and watch live demonstrations.

 

 

Last but certainly not least, our third goal is to ensure economic impact in our region and state. Your transformative gift is doing that in many ways.

Starting in April, the Missouri Protoplex will begin full operations. You would be impressed with this facility, Fred, and with the Protoplex director, Dr. Richard Billo, who I mentioned earlier.

The Protoplex will be the first building of our Innovation and Advanced Manufacturing campus on the north side of Interstate 44. It is a massive, 116,000 square-foot facility that will serve as the research and development hub for manufacturers across the state. A national manufacturing innovation company, Solvus Global, based in Massachusetts, joins industry leaders Caterpillar and Boeing, as key partners in the Protoplex, set to be a hub for innovation, collaboration and workforce development in advanced manufacturing.

The facility will allow us to work with these companies on a large scale in a way that we could not imagine before.

With Dr. Billo’s leadership and our corporate partnerships, we project our manufacturing ecosystem will bring more than 2,200 jobs and $700 million to the Missouri economy in the next 10 years.

The Protoplex is just one capital project that is helping us transform the campus. Our newest facilities are designed to enhance the student experience, foster research and showcase S&T’s leadership in STEM.

 

 

The Kummer Missouri S&T Foundation has invested the over $231 million in S&T capital projects during the past five fiscal years. These projects are made possible by your transformative gift and even more additional funding from private donors, corporate partners, the state and the federal funding organizations. Despite the $23.1M expenditure, as of this morning the total amount of your $300 million gift is $420 million, highlighting the growth and additional philanthropic contributions.

Last year we opened our 50,000-square-foot Innovation Lab, a remarkable facility that includes spaces cherished by students across all disciplines. We are seeing high use of the spaces and enthusiasm from our students. It’s a place for possibility thinking and concept development. I wish you were able to see your vision come to fruition.

Last week we dedicated our Welcome Center. This 32,000-square-foot facility will serve as the home for our admissions team and a beginning point for S&T visitors, including future students and their families.

The Welcome Center is part of the Havener Arrival Complex, which creates a new front door to our campus. It was inspired by your gift and significant additional support from donors like Gary Havener.

Further, the Bioplex is currently under construction. It will be the future home to our newest research center, the Kummer Institute Center for Medical Engineering and BioInnovation. Dr. Stephen Roberts, who was the founding chief operating officer of the Kummer Institute, is overseeing our bioinnovation initiatives as S&T’s chief strategy officer. A national search is underway to identify and recruit the inaugural director for this center that will expand our engineering and science domains into the medical and medical technology fields.

 

 

You should also know that support from the Kummer Institute is enabling the following projects, just to name a few:

  • the renovation and expansion of our Applied Research Center – formerly named the Engineering Research Laboratory
  • the renovation of Schrenk Hall East for our biological sciences classes and teaching labs, in support of our new efforts in biomedicine and biological engineering and sciences
  • and an expansion of our geothermal field in the main campus.

These three projects will be completed in 2027.

Future plans also include a hotel and conference center for visitors in support of our newly achieved and greatly cherished R1 status. In September, Missouri S&T presented its five-year capital plan to the University of Missouri Board of Curators. This plan includes a 130-room hotel and 8,500 square foot conference center near Tim Bradley Way.

 

 

As this letter attests, I hope you agree that we are on the right trajectory in fulfilling your mandates.

Fred, you encouraged us all to think big, and you and June backed it up with the largest charitable gift in Missouri history. You have significantly raised our sights and our supporters’ confidence in our future.

The Kummer Institute that your generosity created has an unlimited potential to improve lives through STEM outreach and education. Your inspiration remains the responsibility of all of us who serve here.

On behalf of the Kummer Institute, Kummer Missouri S&T Foundation, Kummer College, Kummer Center for STEM Education, Kummer Student Programs, Kummer endowed chairs and professors, the university and the greater community of Rolla and the region, I say that we are proud to continue the great work of the institute in your name.

We therefore continue to remain grateful, Fred and June, that you decided, based on your own personal experiences, that this university’s mission is worthy of your support.

This support has made a tremendous difference in five short years, and we look forward to fulfilling your wishes in perpetuity in accordance with your mandate to elevate Missouri S&T, provide broad STEM outreach and ensure economic impact. 

 

Sincerely,

Mo Dehghani
Missouri S&T Chancellor