Missouri University of Science and Technology Archives

Two major gifts in one week for Missouri University of Science & Technology

October 16, 2020 By Alisa Nelson

Missouri University of Science and Technology in southern Missouri’s Rolla has had a big week. The school has announced that alumnus Bipin Doshi and his wife, Linda, have donated $10 million to the university. In a press release, the university says the gift is the largest individual donation to an academic program in school history.

Bipin and Linda Doshi (Photo courtesy of Missouri S&T)

The donation will go to the Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering to do the following:

*Create an endowment, which will name the department and provide funding for an endowed chair to be held by the department chair and two professorships in support of faculty members.

*The endowment will eventually support additional departmental needs including the buying of technology and upgrades, fellowships, and accelerating research.

Doshi is the retired chairman, president and CEO of Schafer Industries, a group of manufacturing companies based in South Bend, Indiana. He earned his bachelor of science and master of science degrees in chemical engineering from Missouri S&T. Doshi launched his career as a research engineer with U.S. Rubber Co., later Uniroyal, and was a vice president when he left the company after 25 years of service to purchase Schafer Gear Works, now Schafer Industries.

On Monday, the school announced that St. Louis businessman Fred Kummer and his wife, June, donated $300 million to a foundation supporting the university – the largest single donation in the history of Missouri higher education.

Missouri S&T is a STEM-focused research university of 7,600 students and part of the four-campus University of Missouri System.

Missouri S&T gets $300 million donation – a historic day for the school and state’s higher education system

October 12, 2020 By Alisa Nelson

Today is a historic day for the Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T) and the state. St. Louis businessman Fred Kummer and his wife June have donated $300 million to a foundation supporting the university he graduated from in 1955 as a civil engineer. According to a press release from the school, the gift is the largest single donation in the history of Missouri higher education.

Fred and June Kummer (Photo by Terry Barner/Missouri S&T)

The university says it plans to use the gift to:

•Create a new school of innovation and entrepreneurship

•Develop new areas for research

•Provide numerous scholarships and fellowships for students

•Create new research faculty positions

•Launch a shuttle service between S&T and St. Louis to bring students from the metropolitan area to Rolla for camps, campus visits and other activities

•Bolster the Rolla region’s economy in southern Missouri

•Launch a new, independent, university-affiliated research and development entity modeled after ones like the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. Missouri S&T says four new research centers – focused on infrastructure, advanced manufacturing, artificial intelligence and autonomous systems, and environmental and resource sustainability – will stand at the heart of this endeavor.

“This gift is transformative for S&T, the Rolla region and our state,” said Dr. Mo Dehghani, Missouri S&T chancellor. “For nearly 150 years, Missouri S&T has been known as the state’s premier technological university. Now, thanks to June and Fred, S&T will have the opportunity to become one of the nation’s leading universities for innovation. At the same time, this gift will make our school a center for entrepreneurship, thereby energizing the economy of the Rolla area and the entire state of Missouri.

“With this gift, we expect to be able to dramatically increase the size of our student body, recruit outstanding new faculty, establish powerful new centers of research, and engage with the community in new and exciting ways,” Dehghani said.

Fred Kummer, 91, is the founder and chairman of St. Louis-based HBE Corp., the world’s leading design-build firm for health care. The university says the Kummers have been major donors to Missouri S&T for decades.

“I owe much of my success to the education I received at Rolla,” Fred Kummer said. “My Rolla experience taught me how to think, how to work hard and how to manage my own career. June and I believe in the mission of this great university, and that’s why we have chosen to invest in S&T’s future success. We believe that Missouri S&T’s best days are ahead.”

The Kummers’ gift will be channeled into a new not-for-profit foundation, The Kummer Institute Foundation. According to an analysis completed by the University of Missouri-Columbia, the economic impact of the foundation is expected to fuel $250 million in gross domestic product to the Missouri economy during its first five years of operation and more than $2 billion over 25 years. The study says the impact does not include the potential of spin-off corporations and subsequent job creation that the initial $300 million gift is expected to produce, or the research and development activities to be accomplished by the institute’s four research centers.

Founded in 1870, Missouri S&T is a STEM-focused research university of over 8,000 students and part of the four-campus University of Missouri System.

Missouri study finds job candidates are rated lower in virtual interviews

September 8, 2020 By Alisa Nelson

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a rise in the number of employers doing job interviews through a video platform. Three researchers at the Missouri University of Science and Technology in southern Missouri’s Rolla have published a study showing job candidates are rated lower in virtual interviews than during in-person interviews.

Photo Tom Wagner/Missouri S&T, Portrait of Dr. Denise Baker, Dr. Devin Burns (in eye tracking glasses), Dr. Clair Ann Reynolds Kueny (in eye tracking glasses), research illustration of their work dehumanizing effects of video communications, group portrait of team. Image is copyrighted and all moral rights asserted by Missouri S&T Marketing and Communications Dept., Rolla, Missouri, USA

Dr. Clair Kueny, Dr. Denise Baker and Dr. Devin Burns, assistant professors of psychological sciences, have been working on the project for the past three years. The study includes 21 job interviews with 84 participants. Half of the participants were in the same room as the candidate and the other half were watching through video.

Burns says the participants were asked about the applicant’s level of competence, intelligence, likability and how likely they were to hire the person.

“Across the board on almost every single question, we see like two to three point differences on a 10 point scale where the people in the room with him rated him a 7 or an 8 and the people who watched over video rated him a 5 or a 4,” says Burns.

Differences were also found in the adjectives the participants used to describe the applicant. Face-to-face participants chose words like “experienced” and “intelligent”, while video participants used “unprepared” and “unenthusiastic.” Those who watched the interview through video also rated the candidate less capable of feeling emotions, planning and other dimensions to measure the differences between people and computers.

“In some ways, the people who watched it through video were really seeing this person as somehow less human,” says Burns.

Kueny says some participants who watched the interview online reported paying less attention.

“Which then lower attention is also related to lower impressions of the candidates,” she says. “It’s self-reported attention and it wasn’t like an objective way of really knowing who was paying what attention and what they were paying attention to but that’s one possible linking mechanism that we identified,” she says.

Kueny says being in front of someone adds pressure.

“If someone was also in the room with that candidate, they can’t sit there with their phone open on something else or have their laptop scrolling through. They have a pressure of that candidate being able to see them and pay attention to them too,” says Kueny.

Was the level of inattention enough to account for the gap in the ratings?

“It only brought us part of the way there,” says Burns. “I think it accounted for about 1/3 of the difference, but there was still 2/3 of the difference that are other factors about maybe about just getting to meet a person humanizes them or something like that.”

Kueny suggests standardizing the medium in which job interviews are done.

“This suggests that really it’s beyond just having a face-to-face and really suggests that we need to standardize so all interviews need to be done via Zoom or all interviews need to be done via in-person and you really can’t necessarily cut across the two,” says Kueny.

Burns says video interviews have advantages, including the pool of candidates from outside your region.

The study also found a potential similarity could happen in virtual education with the way students view their teachers remotely as opposed to in-person.

Missouri study: Super Bowl victory is economic win for team’s community

January 24, 2020 By Alisa Nelson

A Missouri University of Science and Technology study says when a NFL team wins the Super Bowl, the team’s metro area also scores a financial victory. The Kansas City Chiefs play the San Francisco 49ers in the Super Bowl on February 2.

Missouri S&T Economics Professor Michael Davis

Economics Professor Dr. Michael Davis says on average, NFL teams with 10 or 11 wins in the season will fuel about a $100 additional income per person.

“Which may not sound like a lot but $100 spread over millions of people is quite a bit of money,” he says. “What we’re looking at is the more general impact of people going to business that have nothing to do with the sports team. So nothing to do with the Chiefs, just a company that is headquartered in Kansas City is going to have a lot of Chiefs fans as employees.”

His analysis covers decades of data going back to 1969.

“If the local football team does well, you are happier,” says Davis. “Therefore, that happiness will then translate into either you being more productive at work – you go in on Monday, your team having won and you do a lot better job – or you consume more.”

Davis says his study does not consider hungover fans the day after a game.

(Thumbnail photo courtesy of Kansas City Chiefs/Twitter)