Kenneth Karbowski

Many of Karbowski's high school classmates enrolled at colleges in Pennsylvania. But an incipient curiosity about social, health, and natural sciences led him to research other options, and Michigan kept coming up as a leader in all those fields. 

Intrigued, he scheduled a campus visit, which immediately sealed the deal. 

“They had me at ‘hello’,” he recalls. “I visited the place and just fell in love with it. I'm like, ‘hey, no matter what I pursue here, they're great at it!’”

Karbowski first enrolled in what is now known as the School for the Environment and Sustainability due to an interest in urban planning and environmental stewardship, subjects he remains passionate about today. But his growing fascination with the social sciences, as well as wide-ranging interests in other disciplines, soon led him to LSA Psychology.

The interdisciplinary nature of LSA's liberal arts model appealed to him as a student, and he continues to view it as a powerful lens for helping students understand themselves and their place in the world. Courses with professors like Naomi Lohr and Toni Antonucci allowed him to conduct interviews with real-world patients and introduced him to key concepts in lifespan psychology and gerontology, which would become a focus of his MPH research. Classes on many other subjects—including Sociology, African American Studies, History of Science, Statistics, and even Astronomy—were also influential: some for their content, others for the professors’ teaching and mentorship styles. LSA gave him space to explore freely, gaining broadly translatable skills and an openness to multiple perspectives that would prove crucial to his career in healthcare and university administration.

Karbowski was also influenced by Project Outreach, Psychology's long-running service-learning program, in which he served at the Ypsilanti Psychiatric Hospital and a halfway house near Northville. Those experiences showed him firsthand how socioeconomic factors shape patient outcomes and motivated him toward a career in administration and public policy.

"In Project Outreach, I saw that people's trajectory in the healthcare system is often a function of their wealth (or lack thereof), and that profoundly affected me," he reflects. "I started thinking about where I could have the most impact: as a clinician working one-on-one with patients, or instead from a policy perspective? At that time, the School of Public Health offered relevant training through its Community Health Program (which has since transformed into the Department of Health Behavior and Health Equity). The program offered specialized training in both mental health and gerontological program administration, career themes that powerfully intersected with my interests in psychology and connected back to my classes with Dr. Antonucci and Dr. Lohr, among many others. That all resonated with me, so I enrolled as soon as I finished my undergraduate studies."

After earning his MPH, Karbowski completed an administrative residency at the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Buffalo, New York. Since then, he has held increasingly elevated administrative positions at hospitals and academic departments across Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Washington.

He believes the skills he gained as a Psychology major have been invaluable throughout his career.

"Psychology students tend to have the empathy and understanding needed to work well with others and with teams. The U-M psychology program, with its myriad course offerings in intuitive subject areas, really helps you develop that. But other, and perhaps less obvious, elements of the psychology curriculum—such as remarkably strong training in scientific methods and statistics—also add incredible strength to the Michigan experience,” Karbowski explains. "Those quantitative skills prepared me for graduate school and everything thereafter. In my various roles, they have helped me to understand business finances, of course. But they also helped me to build partnerships with faculty. For instance, I can attend grand rounds and follow the presentations’ logic and outcomes because psychology taught me those methods of thinking. That helps faculty see me less as a ‘bean-counting’ bureaucrat than as a business partner who has a genuine interest in (and reasonable understanding of) their academic world. It also helps me to critically evaluate information in all forms, which is so important in making sound decisions. That scientific/critical mindset all started with Psychology, and Michigan is absolutely stellar in how it teaches that paradigm."

Karbowski intends for the new fund to provide broad strategic support for the Department of Psychology, with preference given to programs supporting undergraduate or graduate students with demonstrated financial need. 

“Truly, a day rarely goes by when I don’t think about my Michigan experience and how it helps in meeting the challenges I face. What’s even more remarkable, having had the privilege of working in academic environments all these years, is how Michigan always surfaces as a leader in this space. I constantly appreciate the tools that U-M, especially LSA and the Department of Psychology, have given me, and how their programs, and their successive generations of students, continue to lead, inform, and inspire.”