McKinley Grant-Past Projects

Past Projects & Recipients

First awarded in 2004, the Janet McKinley '74 Family Grant program is designed to encourage the pursuit of creative, entrepreneurial projects that have an impact on the grant recipient and the community at large.

Below are brief descriptions of past projects. Hopefully, these will serve to spark your ideas!

• Exploring the Role of AI in Healthcare Equity, Hackensack, New Jersey, 2025
  This project looked at how artificial intelligence (AI) is changing healthcare, especially for underserved communities. While AI has the potential to improve care and make healthcare more efficient, it also comes with risks, like reinforcing existing biases or weakening the human connection between doctors and patients. The recipient helped analyze how AI is being used in minimally invasive surgery and found that it could help reduce surgeon burnout and improve outcomes. However, the research also raised important questions about bias, privacy, and trust in AI systems.
• NeuroNerds: Community Neuroscience Education Initiative, Ithaca, New York, 2024
  The award recipient founded NeuroNerds, an educational outreach initiative aimed at introducing Pre-K through 8th grade students to foundational concepts in neuroscience and psychology. Over the course of the project, the recipient developed, taught, and refined more than 40 hours of age-adaptable lessons covering topics such as the brain, body, and sensory systems. Six core lesson plans were presented weekly to over 100 students at the Greater Ithaca Activities Center (GIAC). Following the success of the program, the recipient received offers to continue the collaboration with GIAC and is currently working to establish NeuroNerds as an official student organization at Cornell University.
• Eliminating Wasteful Demolition Practices, The Research for Change, Broome County, New York, 2023
  The McKinley Grant helped the recipient bring together high-school students in South Central New York to conduct an evaluation of harmful demolition practices in their communities and collaborate in designing policy solutions. The program collected construction waste data from a research site using photography, drone scans and 3D modeling. The high school co-researchers in collaboration with the Circular Construction Lab at Cornell shared findings with local policy makers suggesting preserving and adaptively re-using a city structure instead of considering demolition, to reduce excessive waste.
• Improved Seed Varieties as A Mitigation Strategy for Climate Change, Kenya, 2022
  The McKinley Grant help the recipient’s research project which explored improved seed varieties as a low-cost approach to cushioning smallholder farmers in Kenya against adverse effects from climate change. Research and development of improved breeding of climate smart seed varieties can deliver great impact to farmers: higher yields, resistance to biotic stresses, climate change adaptation and improved nutrition.
• Beef Donation Program, New York, 2022-23 
  The McKinley Grant helped support the purchase of five steers which will be raised from calving to finishing, around 18 months, for the purpose of donating the beef to human concerns. Each steer will be raised by youth who already have farm knowledge and the necessary facilities. The project started by getting calves donated from dairy farms and will end with USDA packing processing the protein. The goal is by the fall of 2023, hundreds of pounds of beef will be dropped off at local human concerns and food pantries.

• Medmune, Ghana, 2021
  The McKinley Grant helped the recipient's work supporting healthcare in predominantly underserved Ghanian and African communities, focused on the following objectives. First, the promotion of public health and medical education on illness, safety measures, and best practices via science communication and infographics. Second, the distribution of health resources and personal protective equipment to alleviate stress on local healthcare systems. And third, the documentation and reporting of physician information to improve future health plans, aid Ghanian and African physicians in better treating their patients, and produce data-driven insights in medicine.