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The College of Applied Health Sciences' most prolific donors showed for the Krannert Award ceremony on Nov. 15. The new lifetime recognition honors Illinois' donors who've given more than $1 million to support schools, programs and scholarships.
Some of the College of Applied Health Sciences' most generous donors were on hand for the Krannert Award ceremony on Nov. 15. (Photo courtesy of UI Foundation)

The Krannert Awardees: Meet the prolific AHS donors honored by the university

By ETHAN SIMMONS

A home lab to study aging-in-place. Scholarships for innovative graduate students. An endowment for Illinois student veterans. An estate gift to fund wheelchair athletics for years to come. These are some of the transformative gifts that Illinois alumni have established in support of the College of Applied Health Sciences.  

To celebrate philanthropy at Illinois, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign established the Krannert Award in 2024.  The new lifetime recognition program honors Illinois’ most generous donors who’ve given more than $1 million to support schools, programs and scholarships on campus.  

It is named for Herman and Ellnora Krannert, philanthropists who established the Krannert Art Museum and the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. The first class of Krannert Awardees was honored at the KCPA on Nov. 15.  For many, it was an emotional evening that underscored why they decided to support Illinois. 

Meet some of the College of AHS’ most prominent donors who were recognized this fall for their generosity to the university.   

Michael Vitoux 
Based in Champaign, Illinois 
Major gifts: Support of health technology graduate students, wheelchair athletics
LAS ’68 

Descending from a long family line of University of Illinois attendees, Michael Vitoux has countless touchpoints with his alma mater. But one fateful encounter with a campus legend set Vitoux on the course to support Illinois for decades.  

Shortly after graduating from Illinois’ history program in 1968, Vitoux returned to obtain his graduate degree in sociology. For his first assignment in graduate school, he decided to tackle an unfamiliar topic: how paraplegia, or paralysis of the lower half of the body, affected families.  

To his shock, the vast University Library held only four pieces of work on the topic: three pamphlets and a small book. At his professor’s recommendation, Vitoux decided to speak with an eminent local expert: Tim Nugent, founder and director of the then-named Division of Rehabilitation Education Services, deemed the “father of accessibility” for his pioneering work on addressing and eliminating barriers that affected individuals with disabilities in the 1940s and beyond.  

Nugent’s assistant let Vitoux speak to the professor without an appointment, and Vitoux made the most of his time.   

“I covered my whole notebook on Nugent’s wisdom about paraplegia and how it affects the family and went back and wrote a massively good paper because I had him as a resource,” Vitoux said. “Dr. Nugent and the program for students with disabilities have always been in my mind.” 

After obtaining his master’s degree, Vitoux joined the rapidly growing Parkland College, established in Champaign in 1966. He taught sociology at Parkland for 40 years while keeping up his passion for fencing—he coached the sport at Illinois until the 1990s, then taught the sport from 2003 onward at The Point Fencing Club & School in Urbana, which he established. He also was a member of the College of AHS Board of Visitors. 

Vitoux’s first experience with giving to Illinois was through fencing. Vitoux competed for two Big Ten champion Illinois fencing teams under renowned coach Maxwell “Mac” Garret. After the sport was discontinued in 1993, an alumni scholarship set up in Coach Mac’s name to support fencing student-athletes—which Vitoux and other fencers had contributed to—was suddenly up for grabs.  

At Coach Garret’s request, the funds were directed to Illinois wheelchair athletics, and Vitoux has supported the Maxwell R. Garret Scholarship and wheelchair athletes since.  

In recent years, Vitoux has focused on supporting students enrolled in the Master of Science in Health Technology program in the Department of Health and Kinesiology. He funds two named awards: the Michael Vitoux Capstone Excellence Award and the Michael Vitoux Health Technology Scholarship. Both gifts are inspired by the research on aging performed by MS-HT students and the McKechnie Family LIFE Home, led by Professor Wendy Rogers. Vitoux’s parents donated money to the University of Illinois Chicago’s medical school to study gerontology.  

“Wendy’s program struck me as being the one that applies the research into the real world,” he said. “My parents helped fund basic research; I helped fund applied research—it’s bookending for me.”   

Of course, the best part of donating through scholarships is getting to meet the students he’s supporting, he said, and learning more about the research they’re doing to help the world.  

“I get to see this is making a difference in their lives, which is important to me,” he said. “I just really appreciate that there are people working their tails off to make better lives for people right now, here and now. For the university, that’s really important.”

Jim and Karen McKechnie (left, right) stand with Dean Cheryl Hanley-Maxwell (center)
Jim and Karen McKechnie 
Based in Champaign, Illinois  
Major gifts: Lead gift for the McKechnie Family LIFE Home, support of AHS health programs
LAS ’70 and AHS ’70  

The names of Jim and Karen McKechnie are on the McKechnie Family LIFE Home—an acronym for “Living in Interactive Future Environments"—a research lab built to support healthy aging in the home environment. But you can find their names elsewhere in Applied Health Sciences: on a laboratory in the Khan Annex; on an endowed professorship of Health and Kinesiology Professor Amy Woods; and supporting graduate assistantships in the Master of Science in Health Technology program.  

The McKechnies’ lifelong commitments to physical health have motivated repeated gifts to their alma mater. And with the College of AHS, where Karen graduated from in 1970, the connections have continued to blossom.  

They both joined the University of Illinois Alumni Association out of college. On Jim’s medical resident salary, the couple began their philanthropic giving by supporting the maintenance of the University Library.  

Jim went on to become an orthopedic surgeon, and Karen taught physical education before leaving her career to raise their three children. Now retired and living in Champaign, the couple has a rare gift: seeing the fruits of their generosity to the university while they’re still around.  

“You see so many presentations about donating money after you’re gone,” Jim said. “But doing what we’ve done, to see the product of it during our lifetimes, is truly satisfying.”

The McKechnie Family LIFE Home has filled up with new research, and inhabitants, every year since its inception. 

“Every time we’ve gone, there’s been a new robot, or robots,” Karen said. “It’s a meld of kinesiology and medicine and engineering.”  

But other gifts, like the James K. and Karen S. McKechnie Fellowship to fund graduate students, have been just as fulfilling. One recipient in the MS-HT program, Carson Smith, recently thanked them in person for their support before an Illini home football game.  

“He made it his business to come thank us again,” Karen said.    

The McKechnies, both in their mid-70s, still downhill ski on family trips and ballroom dance in their spare time. The interest in physical activity runs in the family: their daughter, Karianne Gardner, joined the Health and Kinesiology faculty as an adjunct instructor in spring 2024, herself a 2001 graduate of the kinesiology program. 

Kim and Shelly Pollock 
Based in St. George, Utah 
Major gift: Estate gift supporting students with disabilities at Disability Resources and Educational Services (DRES); named space in the Chez Veterans Center
ENG ’71 

Kim Pollock was wandering around campus during orientation week in the fall of 1967 when he witnessed something he’d never seen before: a group of students playing pickup basketball, all in wheelchairs. 

Kim had the polio virus when he was 5 years old and has used crutches since. He approached the group, which happened to have an extra chair available. Next thing he knew, he was on the court practicing his shot with the team.  

“I fell in love with the idea of being able to compete instead of just sitting on the sidelines,” Kim said. 

That encounter nearly 50 years ago transformed Pollock’s life. After playing pickup, he walked on to the Illinois men’s wheelchair basketball team and won two National Wheelchair Basketball Association championships in ’69 and ’70. In four years, he won the team’s Most Improved Player Award twice. 

Upon graduating, Kim embarked on a successful career in biotech and information systems that took him across the country with his wife Shelly, a longtime special education teacher and children’s author.  

Now based in St. George, Utah, the couple has dedicated a generous gift to Disability Resources and Educational Services through an endowment that will be conveyed after Kim’s passing. The gift will support future Illinois students served by DRES. 

“For me, the decision to give back was not even a decision,” Kim said. “It was a given. I would’ve been in a very different place if I had not gone to Illinois.” 

The gift bears a personal connection for Shelly as well. She graduated from the University of Cincinnati in special education in the then-emerging field of learning disabilities. Shelly worked in public schools for two decades and later helped college students at Penn State and through her private lessons in California. 

“I would’ve given anything to know Kim when he was in college,” she said. “I never grow tired of hearing his great stories.” 

The Pollocks have stayed in touch with Kim’s college buddies, now going on 50 years of friendship. Every time they come back to Urbana-Champaign is another chance to dust off the NWBA trophy in the Rehabilitation Education Services Building. 

“I was a very different person coming out of college,” Kim said. “When I retired and I had the means to give back and we were looking for different options, it was kind of a no-brainer. It was a way of saying, ‘Thank you for the opportunity.’ 

“Maybe through this gift, Illinois can have the same impact on some students’ lives that it had on mine.”

Susan and Michael Haney.
Susan and Michael Haney 
Based in Champaign, Illinois 
Major gifts: Student scholarship for Chez Veterans Center, myriad gifts across the university
BUS ’82 and ENG ’81, ’85 

Susan and Michael Haney have an eclectic philanthropic history at the University of Illinois, spanning the arts, STEM scholarships, education and social work. 

But their generous gift to the Chez Veterans Center is special to them both. In 2022, they set up the Ronald D. Paulsgrove Student Support Fund, an endowment to help student veterans with the non-academic costs of schooling: housing, travel, food and beyond. 

The fund is named for Susan’s late cousin, Ronnie, who earned a Bronze Star for his service in the Vietnam War. Despite enduring injuries that hurt his quality of life, “he kept his optimism, pretty much to the end,” Susan said. 

“Here was a really wonderful person,” Michael said. “The thought was, ‘Is there something that we could do in honor of him?’” 

Susan had plenty of family that were in the military: “Aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, nephews, the whole range,” said Susan, who attended Illinois on a Children of Veterans Tuition Waiver. “To come to the U. of I. and study and to live in the area is expensive.” 

Their gift to Chez-affiliated students mirrors much of their philanthropy with the university: funding underappreciated areas of need, specifically for students. 

Michael came to Urbana-Champaign for graduate school in 1977. He obtained his master’s degree and Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering and worked at Illinois as an engineer and lecturer for more than 30 years. Susan arrived in 1979, getting her undergraduate degree in accounting.  

While still an undergrad, Susan fell in love with “Ikenobo ikebana,” the Japanese art of flowet arrangement. It was this love that led to the couple’s first significant gift to the university: a $1,000 gift to support the building of the Japan House in the Arboretum. Now a professor in ikebana, Susan was a founding member of the Illinois Prairie Chapter of Ikenobo and travels across the continent to teach classes in the art. 

Since then, the pair has sponsored several gifts to the School of Social Work, including funding for internships, study abroad programs and a $100,000 commitment to the school’s student support fund. They’ve sponsored dozens of performances at the Krannert Center and set up a fund to support the Lyric Theatre and Illinois Theatre for student performers. 

“We really do it for the students,” Susan said. “We get a thrill to know that we helped to make that possible.” 

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