$27 million new gift to medical research from Tim and Barbara Michels cements a legacy born from the couple’s own family health crisis and follows their earlier $15 million gift

Tim and Barbara Michels, together with the Michels Family Foundation, have pledged $27 million to the Medical College of Wisconsin Cancer Center in Milwaukee, marking the largest personal gift in the center’s history and deepening a philanthropic relationship that began with the couple’s own family crisis more than a decade ago.

In recognition of the gift, MCW’s cancer research building — a sprawling facility that opened just last year to house more than 300 scientists — will be renamed the Medical College of Wisconsin Michels Center for Cancer Discovery, with a formal dedication ceremony planned for this fall.

The donation, announced in late June, is rooted in something deeply personal. Back in 2012, the couple’s daughter Sophie was just 11 years old when she was diagnosed with choroid plexus carcinoma, a rare and aggressive form of brain cancer that strikes children.

Nearly fifteen years later, Sophie is healthy and thriving, an outcome her parents credit directly to the precision oncology care she received at MCW.

“Our family knows firsthand what it means to face a rare cancer diagnosis with few treatment options and even fewer answers,” Tim and Barbara said in a joint statement.

“We’re investing in the Medical College of Wisconsin because we believe in their extraordinary scientists and physicians to turn today’s breakthrough cancer discoveries into tomorrow’s cures. No family should have to face cancer without hope, and that’s exactly what this gift is about—giving more families hope and giving cancer researchers the resources to deliver on it.”

This isn’t a one-off act of generosity.

It builds directly on a $15 million gift the family made back in 2022, which established the Michels Rare Cancers Research Laboratories at MCW in Sophie’s honor and was aimed at funding treatments for the kinds of ultra-rare cancers that rarely draw major research dollars.

That earlier gift was, at the time, the largest ever made to the cancer center — a record this year’s $27 million pledge has now shattered. Together, the two gifts add up to more than $42 million funneled into a single institution over less than five years, a pattern that looks less like a headline moment and more like a sustained, deliberate commitment.

Tim Michels is a co-owner of Michels Corp., the Wisconsin-based energy and infrastructure construction firm his parents founded decades ago and that he now runs with his brothers. The company has grown into one of the largest privately held construction and engineering firms in the country, and his personal fortune has been estimated at somewhere between $300 million and $350 million.

He’s also a familiar name in Wisconsin politics, having run as the Republican nominee for governor in 2022 — a campaign in which he promised to step away from the family business if elected, though the question never came up since he lost the general election.

Outside of politics and construction, though, the family’s philanthropic energy has clearly concentrated on one cause above all others: the fight against the disease that once threatened their daughter’s life.

MCW’s leadership hasn’t been shy about how much this gift means to the institution’s future. “We’re grateful to the Michels family for their remarkable kindness,” said the college’s president and CEO, John R. Raymond, Sr.

“The philanthropic leadership they’ve demonstrated will only further elevate the Medical College of Wisconsin as a burgeoning hub for exceptional medical research and a premier destination for leading cancer investigators and clinicians.”

The cancer center’s director, Gustavo Leone, framed the mission of the newly named building in equally sweeping terms, saying the goal is “to turn the pioneering breakthroughs happening here into progress that revolutionizes and alters the course of cancer for generations to come.”

So where does the money actually go?

MCW says it’ll be split across four priorities: recruiting top-tier precision oncology researchers and physicians, upgrading the lab infrastructure needed to turn scientific discoveries into real treatments, training the next wave of cancer scientists and biotech entrepreneurs, and pushing cancer prevention and early-detection programs out into rural and underserved corners of Wisconsin that don’t usually see this kind of investment.

Officials have called the gift “catalytic,” meaning they’re hoping it pulls in even more research funding and philanthropic support down the line.

With the naming ceremony still ahead this fall, the Michels family’s gift stands out as one of the most significant single-family commitments to cancer research announced anywhere in the Midwest this year — and a reminder of how personal experience so often shapes where the biggest philanthropic dollars end up going.