Mar. 10—Missouri Southern’s Lions Forward fundraising campaign and the proposed new Health Sciences Innovation Building got a boost on Friday with the announcement of what MSSU President Dean Van Galen called a “transformational gift” from Dr. Robert Willcoxon and his wife, Dot Willcoxon.

The Willcoxons announced that they were giving $1 million to the five-year Lions Forward campaign to be used to expand health education at the university.

Van Galen said most of their gift would go to the construction of a $30 million Health Sciences Innovation Center on the Missouri Southern campus oval.

Part of the gift will go to create new opportunities for health science students and professionals across the region.

One part is the creation of an annual Willcoxon Innovation in Health Sciences Summit, which Van Galen said will bring nationally recognized leaders in the health care profession to Joplin for a gathering that could start as early as the fall of 2023.

“Our goal would be to have a nationally acclaimed speaker and also sessions focused on the future innovations in health care and health science,” Van Galen said. “We would plan to invite not only health care professionals but also students from Kansas City University, Missouri Southern, Crowder, K-12 students, to expose all of those students to a vision of what the future of health care can look like. It will be designed to be of interest to health care professionals, physicians, nurses and others in the allied health fields. We’re optimistic that this event will be a tremendous asset for the entire region.”

The gift will also fund the Willcoxon Scholars Program, which will provide money for health care research programs at Southern.

“It will support Missouri Southern students in the health sciences in conducting undergraduate research in cooperation with faculty,” Van Galen said. “This is an opportunity to go beyond what they learn in their formal classroom and actually conduct research, discover new knowledge, some of it which may some day impact how health care and health sciences are provided.”

Dot Willcoxon said she’s excited to see the advances their gift can bring for students at Missouri Southern.

“I hope this will bring more emphasis on Joplin being a very great community for all kinds of health care,” Willcoxon said. “Whether you’re interested in being a medical doctor, whether you want to be a dentist, whatever health care you are interested in, you can come here to the university and progress to those other schools.”

Dr. Lisa Beals, chair of the Missouri Southern’s McCune-Brooks Department of Nursing, said the Health Sciences Innovation Center will transform how she and her faculty can teach.

Part of the Health Science Innovation Center will include a simulation hospital, Beals said. “So imagine … being able to take students from all disciplines into a hospitallike setting with a working emergency department, operating room — which I’m an old operating room nurse — recovery area, general med-surg floor where they can take care of multiple patients in multiple ways.

The Willcoxons are long-standing supporters of MSSU. On campus, they have already left a legacy through gifts such as the Willcoxon Health Center, located inside the Billingsly Student Center. This new gift will significantly affect MSSU students’ lives, like the gifts given before.

Bob Willcoxon is a retired general surgeon, and Dot Willcoxon a career secondary education teacher.

They moved to Joplin in 1971, and Dot Willcoxon credits the late Joplin business leader Joe Newman Sr. with convincing them that they needed to support the university.

“I want people to know that Joe Newman Sr. was the one that got us involved with Southern in 2009 and Mike Pence (former president of the Missouri Southern Foundation Board who died in 2021) carried it on when I got on the board of the Southern Foundation,” Dot Willcoxon said. “We’ve always felt like we need to do things in the community in which we live, and we’ve lived here since 1971, over 50 years. We’re very passionate about health care and education. I’m a secondary ed teacher and I believe that teaching at all levels is very important in our lives. and where you live is where you should give.”