Fiscal Year 2025 Update

Carle Illinois College of Medicine

The Transformative Power of Your Investment

Four medical students in white coats stand together in a lab, looking at an object out of frame.

On behalf of everyone here at the Carle Illinois College of Medicine, thank you for your generous support throughout the 2024–2025 academic year. Your commitment to our mission allows us to continue to advance innovation in medical education and transform the future of healthcare.

This year marked a historic milestone: CI MED received full accreditation from the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME)–a testament to the strength of our program, our people, and the shared vision of our community of supporters.

We also welcomed 64 exceptional new students, selected from a pool of over 3,000 applicants from some of the most prestigious undergraduate institutions in the country, while our fourth cohort of physician innovators have been accepted into fantastic residency programs.

As we reflect on the past year, the impact of your generous support is clear in helping us shape the future of medicine. Thank you.

With gratitude,

Jessica Breitbarth

Associate Dean for Advancement
Carle Illinois College of Medicine

$13,703,803

Dollars raised

345

Gifts

First-time donors

New funds supporting scholarships, fellowships, and named faculty positions

Data reflects Fiscal Year 2025 (July 1, 2024 – June 30, 2025) and is current as of August 1, 2025.

Alma Mater wears her white coat and stethoscope to honor the Carle Illinois College of Medicine at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Carle Illinois achieves milestone accreditation

The Carle Illinois College of Medicine at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the world’s first engineering-based medical school, has received full accreditation from the Liaison Committee on Medical Education. The college, which launched in 2017 and graduated its first class in 2022, operated under provisional accreditation until the LCME’s full review could be completed.

“Since its founding, CI MED has embodied the Illinois spirit of interdisciplinary collaboration. Students are trained not just as physicians, but as innovators capable of designing and implementing technology-driven solutions to improve health care systems, practices and patient outcomes,” said Chancellor Robert J. Jones. “Full LCME accreditation empowers the college to continue transforming health education and care delivery for generations of physicians to come.”

First global summit fuels health care innovation, awards $250k in donor funds to student entrepreneurs

Health care innovators and educators from around the world kick-started their quest to change the future of medicine and medical education at the first Global Summit of the Global Consortium on Innovation and Engineering in Medicine. The summit – hosted by Carle Illinois College of Medicine – brought together medical educators, entrepreneurs, industry and government leaders, and future medical innovators on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus to collaborate on tangible advances to health care education and delivery across the globe. The event highlighted the work of engineers and physicians-in-training to prototype new solutions to revolutionize patient care.

The Summit featured the Global Health Innovation Grand Challenge Pitch competition to showcase groundbreaking solutions to real-world health problems. The top student teams were awarded funding to pilot and validate their solutions across the Consortium’s new global network of medical schools and hospitals, with insights and guidance from industry and regulatory agencies.

Read More.

Dean Mark Cohen presents an oversized check reading $75,000 to three female medical students, for their Menopatch project.

donors Dave Downey and Jane Hayes, sitting together.

In honor of Phyllis Wise, long-time donor commits additional gift to fund professorship, scholarships

One of CI MED’s faithful donors, Dave Downey, has committed to a generous $2 million gift to the college. Half of the gift will fund a professorship in clinical translational research or innovation; the other half will support a student scholarship with preference for a student from Illinois. Downey’s gift honors former Chancellor Phyllis Wise, who played a crucial role in in founding CI MED, the world’s first engineering-based college of medicine.

Downey has been enthusiastic in embracing the vision of CI MED’s founders. “The university has one of the best public engineering colleges in the world. Carle Illinois leverages our faculty’s renowned engineering and technical skills and applies them to all aspects of medical training and innovation,” Downey said.

Downey and his wife Jane Hays have been deeply involved in the Champaign-Urbana, Carle Health, and University of Illinois communities for years.

“To thy happy children of the future, those of the past send greetings.”

To Barb Lewis, these words are more than just an inscription on the iconic Alma Mater statue, they are words to live by. The LAS grad (73, Political Science) has spent much of her life supporting others, volunteering with children in Illinois and now at her home in Utah. A chance conversation with a friend made her think about supporting students at her alma mater in a new way. “That got me thinking about funds sitting in my retirement accounts, which could be put to scholarship use now.”

When it came to what to name the new fund, Barb knew just the thing. “I realized in 2023 that I had been a ‘happy [child] of the future’ for four years, and one of ‘those of the past’ for 50 years!” Now, the “Greetings from the Past and Funds for the Future” Fund will provide for the needs of CI MED students in perpetuity, thanks to her generosity.

Barb Lewis, standing with her arms held wide, in front of the Red Mountain Elementary School building in Utah.

A screenshot of the VOCA Health app, reading “Normal”, next to a full-body photograph of medical student Shreya Rangarajan, wearing a white coat and stethoscope.

Parents of CI MED graduate sponsor innovation award for future students

Mitra & Ramaswamy Rangarajan hadn’t heard of Carle Illinois College of Medicine before their daughter Shreya applied to the class of 2025. During her time here, Shreya created VOCA Health, a platform designed to improve monitoring and outcomes for adults who are affected by voice disorders. Impressed by the support she and other CI Med students received, they created a new fund to elevate an exceptionally innovative student’s work, hoping to inspire new generations of CI MED students to follow in Shreya’s footsteps and become physician innovators.

Read more about VOCA Health.

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