Dear Fred and June,
I prepare this letter today as part of our annual Kummer Day tradition. Every year, as we celebrate the anniversary of your gift, I provide a report to our campus community on the impact of your gift on our university.
Your gift continues to provide financial support for new buildings, new programs and new people. The Kummer Missouri S&T Foundation Board of Directors, working closely with campus leaders, continue to bring your vision to life.
The board established spending priorities and managed our resources so well that six years later, we have made significant investments in programs and infrastructure while growing the endowment.
Four of our original board members, Gary Havener, Joe Lehrer, Dr. Bud Peterson and Dr. Joan Woodard, completed their second and final terms this October. Fred, you helped select these original board members and served as the founding chair of the board.
Today, Kathryn E. Walker serves as the board's chair. An alumna, a former chief network and information officer and currently a manager of a venture-capital fund, she is an astute and capable leader.
The board’s members — many of whom you knew, and all of whom I know you would approve of carrying on the important work of the board — are R. Tim Bradley, David Braswell, Bipin Doshi, Gary Forsee, Maureen Midgley, Eric G. Politte, Sue Simmons and Richard Wacker.
The foundation remains in capable hands. Dr. Richard Brow, a longtime researcher, faculty member and leader at S&T, continues to serve 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 founding vice provost and dean of the Kummer College, continues leading the Kummer College of Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Economic Development. In November 2025, he announced a transformative $12.5 million gift from alumnus Dennis Jaggi and his wife, Janet Jaggi, to form the Dennis and Janet Jaggi School of Business within the Kummer College.
Dennis, who earned a mechanical engineering degree from S&T in 1970, became a successful entrepreneur and investor. Reflecting on his formal education, he wishes he’d learned about business and entrepreneurship while he was an engineering student, and that reflection inspired the Jaggi gift for the college.
“I’m hoping with this gift, we send students out that are engineers who have enough business knowledge that they can become successful,” he said during a reception in July. “Hopefully, some of them will come here and give a gift back to the university.”
The inaugural class of Jaggi School of Business students — a total of 45 first-year students enrolled in S&T’s business and management systems, information science and technology, and economics programs — each received a $1,000 Jaggi Disruptor Scholarship this fall.
Dennis and Janet are devoted to one another and to helping ensure the university’s success. In that way, Fred and June, the Jaggis remind me of you!
A major focus for the Kummer Institute is to support the continued development of the Missouri Bioplex, a new campus facility dedicated to bioinnovation research and collaboration with industry.
When completed in 2028, the 127,000-square-foot building will include research laboratories, teaching spaces, a cognitive neuroscience suite and specialized facilities for biomedical research.
This state-of-the-art facility reflects the university’s commitment to education and advancing research excellence. The Bioplex will serve as a hub for innovation, attracting top-tier faculty and students dedicated to addressing critical challenges at the intersection of engineering, medicine and biology.
The facility will also house S&T’s Center for Biomedical Research and is expected to strengthen collaboration across multiple academic disciplines.
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 sixth year.
Kummer Student Programs provides students with scholarships and opportunities to enhance their experience beyond the classroom. This year, 272 undergraduate students are new Kummer Vanguard Scholars, which brings the total number of students in that program to 1,004. 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 fellows to 48.
In addition to these scholars and fellows, Kummer Student Programs offers opportunities for all students. One example is the Campus Impact Challenge, held in September, which invites undergraduate students to create meaningful change in just 24 hours. Participants are placed on teams and asked to identify a campus or community challenge, explore the barriers that contribute to the issue and then present solutions to a panel of judges. This competition is a way for students to very quickly, at the start of the semester, find ways to put their entrepreneurial thinking into practice by being curious about a place, process or experience on campus. Through connections, they find ways to create greater value.
Fred and June, you will be proud to know that, over the past six years, your gift has provided $19.3 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 $9.1 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 set in motion a new era of possibility, demonstrating how one bold investment can shape the future. Since 2020, alumni and friends have carried that vision forward with an additional $200 million in charitable contributions.
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 five years ago, Courtney Jones joined S&T as director of the Kummer Center for STEM Education. In the past five years, Courtney and her able team have extended STEM education far beyond the walls of this great university. Today, Courtney serves as associate executive director of outreach and engagement and Roxanne Hanna leads the daily operations of the Kummer Center for STEM Education. Roxanne has been with the STEM Center for four years and was previously a K-12 school teacher.
The STEM Center provides engaging programming for students in grades K–12 and for teacher development. The team hosts 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.
More than 1,000 students in grades K-12 across 29 districts attended National STEM Day last November, and we expect over 1,000 students again this year.
The center’s biggest yearly undertaking is our summer camps, where students experience the STEM fields in fun and meaningful ways. We know that 1 in 4 summer camp participants will ultimately enroll at S&T. This summer, we welcomed 1,145 students ages 6-18 across 36 summer camps.
In addition to K-12 students, this year we launched a pilot program with K–12 teachers. The Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT) and American Council of Engineering Companies of Missouri, along with member companies, were lead sponsors and will continue to support the program at S&T for the next two years. The weeklong camp was named “Engineering A Better Future Teacher Academy” and held in June on Missouri S&T’s campus. Each of the 25 teachers who attended received continuing education hours, classroom-ready lesson plans and hands-on kits to take back to their schools. The purpose was to demonstrate to teachers the impact that engineers have on society and to inspire their students to consider engineering careers.
The center continues to host a free after-school program for three Phelps County school districts, thanks in part to a grant totaling almost $2 million.
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.
On April 15, nearly 500 people celebrated the opening of the Missouri Protoplex on the north side of Interstate 44. The 117,000-square-foot advanced manufacturing facility is the first building in Missouri S&T’s Manufacturing Technology and Innovation Campus.
You would be impressed with this facility, Fred, and with the Protoplex director, Dr. Richard Billo, who is a Distinguished Professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering.
The facility includes 40,000 square feet of high-bay manufacturing space and more than 60 industrial-scale pieces of equipment and manufacturing systems. S&T has already secured more than $22 million to support collaborations with its industry and research partners.
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.
Manufacturing is a major component of Missouri’s $389.9 billion economy. Manufacturing accounts for 11.6% of the state’s private sector employment, with 282,255 jobs across 7,636 establishments, according to the Missouri Economic Research & Information Center’s 2025 data.
Through the Kummer Center for STEM Education, S&T has also introduced over 22,000 K–12 students to manufacturing with support from a $9.2 million Missouri workforce development grant.
Through this initiative, the university is partnering with East Central College and St. Charles Community College on manufacturing education, workforce training and K–12 outreach efforts designed to introduce more students to advanced manufacturing and STEM careers at an earlier age.
To support S&T’s outreach activities, the Protoplex includes dedicated space for the STEM Center programs. By design, students visiting the space first pass through the Protoplex’s high-bay manufacturing area, where they can observe advanced production equipment in operation.
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.
In July, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced $38 million in funding for Missouri S&T’s Critical Minerals Tech Hub. The Kummer Missouri S&T Foundation committed $1.85 million to the successful proposal. The investment will help rebuild America’s domestic critical minerals supply chain while advancing regional innovation and economic growth.
The Kummer Missouri S&T Foundation has invested over $233 million in S&T capital projects during the past six fiscal years. These projects are made possible by your transformative gift and additional funding from private donors, corporate partners, and state and federal agencies. The Kummer endowment, established through your $300 million gift, now stands at $406 million, reflecting investment growth and additional philanthropic contributions.
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 throughout the main campus.
These three projects will be completed in 2027. To complement the Missouri Protoplex and Missouri Bioplex, we are also planning for and envisioning the Missouri Powerplex and the Missouri Geoplex.
Future plans also include a hotel and conference center for visitors. Last 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 unlimited potential to improve lives through STEM outreach and education. Carrying your vision forward remains our responsibility.
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 six 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