Academic Leadership Award recognizes Kooiman’s national impact | College of Human Medicine

June 28, 2024

Just like the saying goes, “Not all heroes wear capes,” the winner of this year’s Simmons Chivukula Award proves that not all academics are also educators. In fact, Jerry Kooiman may have been the most surprised of all when he learned he had won.

“This is going to sound a little strange, but I really haven’t been seeking out awards and, frankly, haven’t paid much attention to them,” said Kooiman, who is associate dean for external relations in the School of Medicine and chief external affairs officer for the Office of Health Sciences. “It’s great to be among those who have received such an award over the years. It’s one of the nicest awards I’ve ever received.”

The Simmons Chivukula Award for Academic Leadership honors an individual each year who encourages the success of others, builds networks and defines a clear vision for their unit at Michigan State University. Kooiman said his work mostly happens behind the scenes in academia – and that’s part of what he loves about his job.

“I love being in my car,” he says. “I go out and meet people where they are, shake their hands, look them in the eye and build trust and a relationship with them.”

When he was hired 17 years ago, Kooiman’s job was to create connections between MSU’s academic world and the health, business and philanthropic leaders of the Grand Rapids community. At the time, the College of Human Medicine’s headquarters in Grand Rapids was still a glimmer in the proverbial eyes of MSU leadership. In 2010, the college moved in.

“When I met him, he was holding a hammer and assembling furniture in our first newly rented classroom in Grand Rapids,” said Dr. Aron Sousa, dean. “His work was remarkable, period.”

Kooiman dismissed Sousa’s praise.

“This doesn’t happen in a vacuum,” Kooiman said. “I’m one person in a group of many people – I’ve had the privilege of working with some great colleagues who are as interested, or even more interested, in making a difference than I am. I consider it an award from my school and an award that my entire staff deserves.”

As associate dean for external relations, Kooiman has taken the lead in building community connections and partnerships for each major expansion of the college, starting with the Grand Rapids campus, where he and his wife live and it is the region Kooiman has represented for 12 years as an elected official — including in the Michigan House of Representatives.

When asked why he took the job at MSU, Kooiman smiled.

“I was really interested in how research is commercialized,” he said. “How can we (in Grand Rapids) become a center of commercialized research at the university from an economic perspective?”

The college’s footprint in Grand Rapids along the Medical Mile includes the $90 million, 100% donor-funded Secchia Center – the main building for the medical education program – and the MSU Grand Rapids Innovation Park, which includes the Grand Rapids Research Center, the Doug Meijer Medical Innovation Building and Perrigo’s North American headquarters.

Kooiman said when he was tasked with developing the Grand Rapids campus, his first thought was, “This is going to be great. And it was.”

Further college expansion

It wasn’t long before Kooiman was involved in further expansions at MSU – particularly at the college’s Flint campus.

“We were there for 45 years, training medical students in the hospitals, and yet Flint’s health outcomes were in the bottom range of Michigan’s 83 counties,” Kooiman said. “I thought, ‘How can that be? How could we have been there for so long and not had any impact?'”

“For me, this was a change of direction. We needed to do more than just train medical students. We needed to think about our role in improving the health of the population.”

Kooiman spent several months meeting with “every organization that seemed to be connected in any way to health issues,” he said. “A lot of the feedback was, ‘Don’t come and study us – we’ve been through all this and then we read how bad we are and that doesn’t help us.'”

“We knew we had to help them get things right.”

Part of building the new Flint campus was recruiting physicians and researchers for the local hospitals the college partnered with, including doctors like Dr. Mona Hanna, a College of Human Medicine graduate who uncovered the Flint water crisis in 2015.

“If we hadn’t done what we did before the water crisis, I’m not sure how long it would have lasted,” Kooiman said. “How do we take the resources of a medical school and use them for advocacy, developing new programs and helping people there stay healthy or get healthy?”

The college’s Flint facilities continue to expand. The former Flint Journal Building was expanded by 37,000 square feet to include space for 18 new tenured faculty members in the Charles Stewart Mott Department of Public Health.

A lasting impact

Kooiman has been involved in a number of other impactful projects for the college. The MIDOCs program, launched in 2017, is designed to bring more physician residents into underserved populations across the state. Physicians in the MIDOCs program commit to working in a rural or underserved urban area in Michigan for two years after completing their residency.

“I worked with the state legislature for about five years to create this program,” Kooiman said. “After a lot of pushing and prodding, we got the state legislature to allocate $6.5 million in general funds to be matched by university medical schools. We were then able to tap federal funds to create training programs in medical fields where there was a great need in the state of Michigan, as well as in areas of the state where there was a lack of graduate medical training.”

“If you were to draw a line along U.S. Highway 10, from Ludington across the state to Midland and then Saginaw, there would be only three residency programs in the state above that line. The best predictor of where a resident will practice after they finish their residency is where they did their residency. So if you don’t train residents in those rural areas, it’s harder to get them to practice there.”

The second class of MIDOCs residents graduated in June 2024.

“I think (the impact of this program) will be long-lasting,” Kooiman said. “Those are the things that really excite me.”

What’s next

The Simmons Chivukula Award winner has no intention of taking his foot off the gas any time soon – neither figuratively nor literally.

“I just spent three days in Washington, DC, with a group that’s focused on graduate medical education in tribal communities,” he said. “Another project is in the Traverse City community – how do we create a hub for healthcare innovation there? And the (Henry Ford Health) project in Detroit – how do we develop better pathways there? And how do we get students in high school more interested in STEM programs? And how do we alleviate the lack of mental health care in Northern Michigan?”

“A lot of really fun, really impactful projects,” Kooiman said.

By Lisa Hayes