$27 million gift from Tim and Barbara Michels puts their family’s name on home for cancer discovery

At an ordinary parent-teacher conference, 11-year-old Sophie Michels collapsed.

Doctors at Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin in Milwaukee soon found the cause: choroid plexus carcinoma, a rare and aggressive cancer that begins deep inside the brain.

What followed was the kind of medical journey families rarely talk about out loud.

There was open surgery to reach a large tumor, several rounds of strong chemotherapy, a recurrence, more surgery, and years of searching for answers about a disease that very few people had studied.

Nearly 15 years later, the Michels family stood together on the Medical College of Wisconsin’s Milwaukee campus as new signage was unveiled on a five-story research building. It is now the Medical College of Wisconsin Michels Center for Cancer Discovery.

The dedication honors the $27 million gift from Tim and Barbara Michels and the Michels Family Foundation, announced by MCW earlier this year.

It is the largest personal gift ever made to the MCW Cancer Center.

Sophie is now healthy and thriving.

“We’re honored to have our family’s name associated with the groundbreaking cancer discoveries taking place at the Medical College of Wisconsin,” Tim and Barbara Michels said at the ceremony.

“While we don’t know where exactly the next cancer research breakthrough will come from, we do know it takes exceptional scientists with access to state-of-the-art resources to find it. We believe in the cancer researchers here and want to help accelerate their relentless pursuit of more answers, more treatments, and more hope for patients and their families.”

The building they have helped define opened last year. It covers 161,000 square feet and holds 53 laboratories and a 400-seat auditorium, and it cost about $157 million, including $10 million from the State of Wisconsin.

More than 300 scientists and staff work there. It is the only facility in eastern Wisconsin devoted entirely to cancer research.

The Michels gift is not meant for bricks and mortar. Instead, it supports the work inside: recruiting top precision-oncology researchers and clinicians, upgrading the technology that turns lab findings into treatments, training the next generation of cancer scientists and entrepreneurs, and expanding prevention and early detection across Wisconsin, with special attention to rural and medically underserved communities.

Precision oncology means tailoring prevention, diagnosis, and treatment to the genetic and biological profile of each patient’s cancer.

For the Michels family, the idea is personal, not abstract. Sophie’s cancer was rare enough that information was scarce and treatment options were few. Her care eventually took the family to Boston, New York, and Los Angeles.

“I’ve seen the quality of care, and it’s outstanding,” Tim Michels said when the gift was announced. “There’s no reason we can’t do that right here in Milwaukee.”

He has said he hopes the center’s work will contribute to cancer research worldwide while keeping a particular focus on rare cancers, which he calls underserved in oncology. Each of those cancers affects fewer than 15 people in 100,000 a year.

Together, though, they account for about a quarter of all new cancer diagnoses in the United States.

The dedication also marked a moment of leadership change at the college. Dr. John R. Raymond Sr., who led MCW for 16 years, accepted the gift shortly before handing the presidency to Dr. Shekar N. Kurpad, a neurosurgeon and longtime MCW faculty member who became the institution’s seventh president and chief executive.

“The Michels family shares our belief that a brighter future for cancer patients and their families is within reach,” Dr. Kurpad said.

“Their generosity gives us the courage and the means to pursue that future with even greater ambition and with a focus on precision medicine.” Dr. Gustavo Leone, director of the MCW Cancer Center, has described the center’s mission as turning the breakthroughs made there into progress that changes the course of cancer for generations.

The $27 million builds on a promise the family made four years ago, when Tim and Barbara Michels and the family foundation pledged $15 million to create the Michels Rare Cancers Research Laboratories at MCW.

At the time, it was the largest gift in the Cancer Center’s history. It was designed to support research into choroid plexus carcinoma and other cancers that rarely attract major government or private funding. At that announcement, Tim Michels recalled the early days after Sophie’s diagnosis.

“We are not scientists, but the family started calling me ‘Dr. Dad’ as we tried to learn as much as we could about Sophie’s condition and treatments,” he said.

“The more we learned, the more we realized the connection between support for research and new cancer treatments and cures.”

The new gift extends that commitment, and once again a family’s private search for answers has become an institution’s resource.

The family’s gratitude has also reached New York.

While the family was living on the East Coast, a scan showed Sophie’s tumor had returned. A friend recommended Dr. Mark Souweidane, director of pediatric neurosurgery at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and a pioneer of minimally invasive endoscopic brain surgery.

Earlier operations had kept Sophie in the hospital for days.

This time, Tim Michels remembered, “Sophie walked out of the hospital in 24 hours.” Later, the couple pledged $3 million to endow the Michels Family Professorship in Pediatric Neurological Surgery at Weill Cornell Medicine.

It was the first endowed chair in pediatric neurosurgery there, and the gift also funded Dr. Souweidane’s research into new ways of delivering drugs to the brain.

He now holds the Michels Family Professorship. A Michels gift also supports a global observership that brings neurosurgeons from abroad to New York to study intraventricular neuro-endoscopy, the technique that helped Sophie.

“We have been very blessed as a family, and we want to help others,” Barbara Michels said at the time.

Taken together, the couple’s announced commitments to cancer and pediatric brain-tumor medicine now exceed $30 million.

That generosity has deep roots in the family. Tim’s father, Dale Michels, was a pipeline welder who set out to start his own company. He and his wife, Ruth, founded Michels Pipeline Construction in Brownsville, the small Dodge County town where Dale grew up, and later made a former canning factory, where Dale had worked as a teenager, the company’s home base.

Ruth drove dump trucks when the work called for it and scouted jobs across the state. After Dale’s death, she became chairwoman and remained a guiding presence for the rest of her life. Ruth also oversaw the Michels Family Foundation, which has given millions of dollars to schools, hospitals, and community groups.

Its legacy includes Dale and Ruth Michels Hall and Michels Commons at St. Norbert College in De Pere, the Dale Michels Atrium at Marian University in Fond du Lac, and the Dale Michels Center for Heart Care at St. Agnes Hospital.

“My brothers and I knew all the decisions we made had to pass the ‘Mom’ test,” Tim said after her death. “They still will.”

Today Tim and his brothers serve as trustees of that foundation, which gives roughly $2 million a year, mostly close to home. Recent tax filings show $1 million to Marquette University Law School, $600,000 to the Agnesian HealthCare Foundation in Fond du Lac, and smaller gifts to the people and places that make up daily life in east-central Wisconsin.

These include parishes in Fond du Lac and Lomira, St. Lawrence Seminary, St. Mary’s Springs Academy, The Arc Fond du Lac, Special Olympics Wisconsin, the Fond du Lac Family YMCA, and a youth hockey association in Waupun.

Tim and Barbara also give through their own family foundation. Its largest single gift in one recent year, $1 million, went to Cornell’s medical school, and it has also supported Catholic women religious and their children’s schools.

Tim Michels’s own path helps explain the way he gives.

He graduated from Lomira High School, earned a political science degree at St. Norbert College, and served 12 years in the Army as an Airborne Ranger infantry officer, rising to major and at one point commanding the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

He then earned an MBA from the University of Chicago, came home, and joined his brothers Pat and Kevin in running the family business.

Over nearly three decades, the brothers have grown Michels from a $158 million regional contractor into an international energy and infrastructure company with billions in revenue and more than 10,000 employees.

Tim has also run twice for the statewide office in Wisconsin. Tim and Barbara have three grown children, Hank, Sophie, and Will, and Tim has said the lesson they tried to teach them was to pursue “the three Hs: heaven, health, and happiness.”

At the ceremony, the family’s name went up on a building filled with people who will likely never meet Sophie.

They are postdoctoral fellows running sequencers late at night, physician-scientists designing the next clinical trial, and young researchers just arriving in Milwaukee because the resources to do ambitious work are now there.

That was the point all along.

“We know from our experience with Sophie that the battle against cancer never ends,” Tim Michels said when the family made its first MCW gift.

“And we want to do our part to help other families too.” Four years and $27 million later, that part has a permanent address.