Through the generous support of our alumni and donors, the School of Kinesiology is advancing excellence and making its mark on campus and around the world.

2024-25 By the Numbers

• 194 student scholarships and awards given
• 86% increase in student recipients over the last 5 years
• $712,043 in total student support given - a 15.4% increase over last year
• 350 donors gave 834 gifts to our school
• 76% of donors gave $100 or less
• $3,113,943 total funds raised this year!
• Proportion of funds raised supporting each campaign pillar:
  • Faculty Excellence: 19%
  • Innovation: 56%
  • Student Success: 25%

Warsaw Family Office of Global Engagement

As part of a university-wide strategic plan, the School of Kinesiology has spent the past few years trying to secure more financial support for students interested in going abroad. The biggest boost to those reserves has come from Josh Warsaw, a U-M alum who sits on both the advisory committee for our Every Move Matters fundraising campaign as well as the university-wide Southern California Campaign Council. 

Warsaw’s recent gift has doubled Kines’ annual available funding to support students working, studying, and volunteering internationally. In recognition of this generous donation, the school’s Office of Global Engagement is now named the Warsaw Family Office of Global Engagement. 

“Giving to a cause like this will allow students to be more refined when engaging with other cultures,” Warsaw says. “International travel will not only better them as a person and help them grow culturally, but it is also going to give them an edge in their career. These days, it's very competitive out there. So it’s important to have all the right tools at your disposal.” 

Read the full story for more.

Donor Innovation Grants

Each year, up to five $5,000 Donor Innovation Grants are awarded to faculty and staff members for a special project that directly impacts our students and/or the community at large. Here’s what the grant recipients accomplished in 2024-25.

Pop-Up Safety Town in a Box: Safety Town camps, which teach young children about injury prevention concepts like helmet and medication safety, are a valuable experience — but they’re also expensive to host and require a lot of staff. So U-M Concussion Center associate director Andrew Hashikawa used funds from a Donor Innovation Grant to ship kits with educational Safety Town materials to designated resource centers across Michigan. Now early care providers and preschool teachers can borrow the kits, expanding the number of children who learn key safety procedures.

Insole Force Plates: With his Donor Innovation Grant, faculty member David Lipps purchased three sets of instrumented shoe insoles to use in MVS 452: “Scientific Inquiry Using Wearable Technology.” The insoles have sensors that act as portable force plates when slipped into a pair of shoes, allowing students to measure and analyze the forces exerted by the ground (ground reaction forces, or GRFs) on the body during activities such as walking, running, and jumping. This year, some MVS 452 students chose to compare how the forces changed in heels versus running shoes while others measured how different surface conditions (grass, concrete, a treadmill) affected GRFs.

KidSport: The long-running physical activity summer camp run by Kinesiology Community Programs directed its Donor Innovation Grant toward: 

• Expanding counselor orientation from three to five days
• Paying the lead counselor for KidSport Adaptive (KidSport’s camp for kids with neurodevelopmental and physical differences, who receive more personalized support)
• Purchasing new equipment, including yoga balls, a parachute, and a giant tic-tac-toe game.

Jones Movement Scholars: A new, donor-funded undergraduate research program, Jones Movement Scholars received support from a Donor Innovation Grant to pay for software and equipment that would help the participating students and their mentors during the research experience. Read more about this program.

How Can we Use AI in Scientific Writing?: When generative artificial intelligence started gaining traction, faculty member Kara Palmer wondered whether she could incorporate the technology into her scientific writing class to help students. Thanks to a Donor Innovation Grant this past year, Palmer taught two of her three class sections to outline and edit their own research papers using UM-GPT and, in the AI-based platform ResearchRabbit, to create interactive visualizations showing connections between existing papers (example pictured right).

Student Innovation Grants

This year, for the first time, we gave $5,000 to select student groups as well. Here’s how they used their funds to bolster innovative projects.

Special Olympics (SO) College at Michigan: Thanks to its Innovation Grant, the SO College at Michigan chapter brought 200 Special Olympics athletes and partners from chapters and universities across the Midwest to Michigan Stadium for the Unified Games at the Big House. The athletes and about 70 volunteers participated in on-field games and activities centered around inclusive physical activity, including football, soccer, and volleyball. An MC, a DJ, and guest speakers — including a gold-medal winning athlete at the Special Olympics World Winter Games — rounded out the positive vibes.

Michigan Sport Consulting Group (MSCG): To better emulate the professional life and work of a consultant, MSCG members applied for an Innovation Grant to cover a trek to Chicago. There, they met in person with a current client (Google) and other organizations with whom the group had developed relationships (Deloitte, the sports marketing agency Revolution). The students were also able to network and learn more about Chicago’s sport and consulting cultures with U-M and MSCG alums during their official meetings as well as meals.

U-M Powerlifting: This student org funded USA Powerlifting memberships and meet fees for 11 first-time powerlifting athletes with its grant.

Kinesiology Student Government (KSG): With its grant, KSG put on the Kinection Gala, an event that brought Kinesiology students, faculty, and staff together to recognize achievements and build community.

Human Performance & Sport Science Center (HPSSC) Athlete Innovation Lab

Before any of the sports seasons even started this year, the Stephen M. Ross Athletic Campus got a big win: The HPSSC Athlete Innovation Lab (HAIL) opened inside the Performance Center, which houses training facilities for nearly two-thirds of Michigan’s student-athletes. 

HAIL provides data to U-M’s athletic teams to help coaches customize training, recovery, and return-to-play plans. The data is collected — under the supervision of two HPSSC staff members — by U-M students interested in sport science who are learning how to apply their knowledge of exercise physiology to elite athletes. 

The first two students involved at HAIL were supported by a gift from the Evans Family. The donation allowed movement science master’s student Miles Brown and cross country athlete Ian Hill to spend the summer helping establish HAIL and enhance the resources available to coaches, athletic staff, and student-athletes. 

The pair set up and calibrated lab equipment and developed and tested possible assessment methods, including biomechanical analysis and lactate threshold — an important indicator of how long an athlete can keep up a sustainable pace. 

Each student also led an independent project: Brown ran a study exploring anaerobic speed reserve, a popular training optimization metric for middle-distance runners, and Hill developed and tested the protocol for resting metabolic rate testing that is now being put to use in HAIL. 

“I have learned a great deal during my time in HAIL,” Brown says. “The mentorship I’ve received has sharpened my technical skills and given me insight into what performance science research requires from inside the laboratory.”