Faculty and Staff

Regents roundup for June 2025

lblouin — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 15:38:05 +0000

Regents roundup for June 2025 lblouin Mon, 06/16/2025 - 11:38

Budget approval

The university’s FY2026 budget was approved.

Interim Chancellor Gabriella Scarlatta provided the following university updates:

In April, ��-Dearborn was recognized as an “Opportunity University” in the Carnegie Foundation’s new “Student Earnings and Access Classification”
There have been several additional executive transitions, following President Grasso’s new appointment:
- Ghassan Kridli, dean of the College of Engineering and Computer Science, is serving as interim provost
- Armen Zakarian, vice provost for research, is serving as interim dean of the College of Engineering and Computer Science
- Associate Provost Joan Remski is serving as interim vice provost for research
- Stein Brunvand, associate dean in CEHHS, is serving as associate provost for faculty development and digital education
- Chancellor Scarlatta noted the spirit of cooperation and camaraderie on the ��-Dearborn campus and expressed gratitude to everyone who has stepped up during this leadership transition

Personnel Appointments

The following reappointments were approved:

Mahesh Agarwal, chair, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, CASL, effective July 1, 2025 through June 30, 2028 (also associate professor of mathematics, with tenure)
Lisa Martin, chair, Department of Health and Human Services, CEHHS, effective July 1, 2025 through June 30, 2028 (also professor of health and human services, with tenure, CEHHS, and professor of collegewide programs, with tenure, CASL)
Yunus Zeytuncu, associate dean, CASL, effective July 1, 2025 through June 30, 2028 (also professor of mathematics, with tenure)

The following joint or additional appointments or transfers of regular associate or full professors and selected academic and administrative staff were approved:

Stein Brunvand, interim associate provost for digital learning and faculty development, effective May 15, 2025 (also professor of education, with tenure, CEHHS)
Susan Everett, interim associate dean, CEHHS, effective June 1, 2025 through June 30, 2026 (also professor of education, with tenure.
Joan Remski, interim vice provost for research and dean of graduate studies, effective May 15, 2025 (also professor of mathematics, with tenure, CASL)
Nitya Sethuraman, chair, Department of Behavioral Sciences, CASL, effective July 1, 2025 through June 30, 2028 (also associate professor of psychology, with tenure)
Armen Zakarian, interim dean, CECS, effective May 13, 2025 (also professor of industrial and manufacturing systems engineering, with tenure)

Adoption of retirement memoirs

Daniel E. Little, professor of philosophy, CASL, ��-Dearborn; professor of sociology, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, and professor of public policy, Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, ��-Ann Arbor, June 30, 2025. The regents named Daniel E. Little professor emeritus of philosophy, professor emeritus of sociology, professor emeritus of public policy and chancellor emeritus of the University of Michigan-Dearborn.
Brian Patrick Green, professor of accounting, COB, June 30, 2025. The regents named Brian Patrick Green professor emeritus of accounting.
Karen Strandholm, associate professor of strategic management, COB, June 30, 2025. The regents named Karen Strandholm associate professor emerita of strategic management.

Other

��-Dearborn’s 2027-2028 academic calendar was approved.

###

View the Board of Regents’ meeting agenda.

Administration & Governance

Faculty and Staff

Chancellor

Off

Mon, 06/16/2025 - 15:36

Get details from the June U-M Board of Regents meeting.

A 30-year family story continues on campus

stuxbury — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 18:16:09 +0000

A 30-year family story continues on campus stuxbury Wed, 06/04/2025 - 14:16

This Father’s Day will be Security Officer Stephen Sersen’s first since retiring from ��-Dearborn. He gave 35 years of service to the university — and, in return, ��-Dearborn became a big part of the Sersen family story.

“This place is my home away from home. I worked with some of the finest officers in public safety, I had a fulfilling career and I watched my daughter grow up here,” said Stephen, who retired in summer 2024. “What’s not to love?”

His daughter Julianne attended the Early Childhood Education Center when it was in the Henry Ford Estate cottages in the 1990s. As Stephen went about his workday, he’d see her playing on campus or getting pulled in a wagon while on walks.

“I have these memories seeing their faces peeking over the side of a wagon with their class. It was pretty incredible that I got to experience that while at work,” he said. After a pause, Stephen continued with a smile, “But I’d have to be careful when I was patrolling that Julianne didn’t see me. If she did, she'd want to come with me.”

While sitting next to her dad at the Renick University Center recently, 2019 alum Julianne added: “I’ve always been a bit of a daddy’s girl. I’m glad that we got the chance to work on campus together before he retired.” Julianne is a ��-Dearborn student enrollment services coordinator.

Shortly before Father’s Day, the father-daughter duo — who worked at the university together before Stephen’s retirement — met up on campus. Stephen saw his daughter’s renovated office area in the Renick University Center. The day of the visit also happened to be his 60th birthday. “I couldn't think of a better way to spend my birthday, I’m at a place that I called home for over 35 years and with my daughter,” he said.

Inspired by her dad’s stories of campus, Julianne said working at ��-Dearborn was a goal of hers. When she was younger, she recalled her dad coming home from work and talking fondly about the people he met on campus. He’d share stories about helping students walk safely to their cars and the friendships he made with the people he worked with, and talk about how both diversity of thought and respect for one another coexisted on campus.

“I love this place. There are so many points of view here,” Stephen said. “We learn so much from each other. Even with different thoughts, cultures and religions, everybody treats each other with respect. I know from being a security officer how safe it is. We all peacefully coexist at ��-Dearborn. There are important lessons that people in power could learn from the students, faculty and staff here. It really is a special place and it really does shape you as an individual.”

Julianne said in addition to her dad’s words and life lessons, she also had many happy memories of heading to A&W for a root beer with her dad, taking walks on EIC trails or having lunch together in the RUC cafeteria. Stephen often chose the pepperoni pizza, while Julianne went for a sandwich and soup combination, especially when the soup du jour was chicken tortilla. And, when off campus, they often attend concerts and sporting events together — U2 is a family favorite — and cheer for the home teams. They plan to watch the Tigers play the Reds on Father’s Day.

Stephen’s wife of 36 years, Patricia, was his original ��-Dearborn connection. “Patricia and I were high school sweethearts at Thurston (in Redford). She is the one who really introduced me to ��-Dearborn. I’d visit her on campus when she was an education student. I’ve been on campus pretty regularly since the early ’80s,” he said. “After we got married in 1989, Patricia saw there was a posting for a security officer on campus. I applied and the rest became a part of my family’s history.”

Julianne said her preschool years and their overlapping work years weren’t the only time she and her father spent time together on campus. In grade school, Julianne and her older sister Rachel attended many Bring Your Child to Work Day events with their dad. And, after high school, Julianne enrolled at ��-Dearborn, graduated, and is currently pursuing her MBA. Prior to starting her job at ��-Dearborn in 2023, Julianne worked at ��-Ann Arbor as a community center manager.

“I couldn’t be more proud of her. I’m proud of both of my daughters,” said Stephen, noting that Julianne helps connect students to college opportunities and Rachel, who graduated from Schoolcraft College, works in special education. “Both of them have careers where they are helping others.”

It’s been nearly 30 years since Julianne held her dad’s hand while walking into preschool on campus. She thinks about his impact on her life regularly. And she credits him with her love for her career and her connection to the university.

“My dad has been my rock, my superhero,” Julianne said. “Throughout life, he has been there every step of the way. Every heartbreak, every celebration. I hope to be just like him.”

After a pause, he replied, “You are like me — only better.”

Article by Sarah Tuxbury

Faculty and Staff

College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters

Public Safety (Police)

Staff Senate

Off

Tue, 06/10/2025 - 18:13

Retired Security Officer Stephen Sersen and daughter Julianne’s ��-Dearborn connection has spanned decades — from his 35-year job at the university to hers today.

Father-daughter duo Julianne Sersen and Stephen Sersen are pictured in the Renick University Center. Photo by Annie Barker

Remembering John Kaszewski

stuxbury — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 11:29:04 +0000

Remembering John Kaszewski stuxbury Mon, 06/02/2025 - 07:29

There’s a Siberian husky calendar on the wall in the Facilities Operations building. Every year, John Kaszewski — a 50-year ��-Dearborn employee who delivered mail across the university — replaced it with an updated edition. Even after he retired earlier this year, Kaszewski would come back to the office to see his friends and flip the calendar page.

“John loved dogs. John had an American Eskimo and, most recently, a Siberian husky. There wasn't a day that went by that he didn't show a picture or two or talk about them. He would share stories, pictures or videos,” says Mail Services Manager Bonnie Southerland, who worked with Kaszewski for 40 years.

But, in June, Southerland changed the month. Kaszewski, who retired as Mail Services’ motor vehicle operator in January, died May 9, aged 68.

“This has to be one of the hardest things I've ever had to do,” Southerland says when talking about Kaszewski for this article. “I just wish John could have enjoyed his retirement. We are sure going to miss John greatly.”

Kaszewski started at ��-Dearborn in September 1974 when he was 17, graduating high school only months before. He first worked in the university cafeteria and, not too long after, shifted over to work as the Mail Services motor vehicle operator in the Facilities Operations department.

“John never looked back. This was his forever job,” Southerland says. “John handled the shipping and receiving and deliveries on campus. Over the years, he delivered so many packages that he knew how to identify things by heart. He would sometimes announce what the package was to the surprise of the recipient before he even handed the package over to them. John was an all-around good guy — always pleasant, kind, sincere, smiling and willing to lend a helping hand.”

Last November, Kaszewski was honored for his 50 years of service at the Chancellor's Staff Recognition Awards. The audience gave him a standing ovation.

Kaszewski was one of the first people Southerland met at ��-Dearborn when she began four decades ago. She says he was a wealth of information at that time and his campus knowledge only grew over the years. “Many times when someone new was hired, John would give them the history of the buildings or would just tell them something he saw in his time here,” she says. “John never wanted to take time off as he loved his job and was just that dedicated. He enjoyed the campus atmosphere and people he worked with over the years. I miss John. We all miss his warm heart and smile.”

Outside of work and his huskies, Kaszewski loved being an uncle and great uncle, as well as fishing and watching rocket launches and air shows.

Here is a link to his obituary — it’s straightforward and family-focused, just like Kaszewski’s nature — for people who may want to share a memory.

Article by Sarah Tuxbury

Faculty and Staff

Facilities Operations

Off

Mon, 06/02/2025 - 11:27

Longtime staff member John Kaszewski, who retired in January after 50 years at the university, passed away May 9. He was 68.

John Kaszewski, left, was honored at the Chancellor’s Staff Recognition Awards Ceremony in November, where he received a standing ovation. He is pictured with then-Chancellor Domenico Grasso. Photo by Annie Barker

New faces, new responsibilities for Department of Public Safety

kbourlie — Wed, 28 May 2025 13:55:12 +0000

New faces, new responsibilities for Department of Public Safety kbourlie Wed, 05/28/2025 - 09:55

��-Dearborn’s Department of Public Safety is in the midst of a significant transformation. Over the last year, DPS has increased its workforce by hiring six more officers, with plans to hire an additional six officers by August 2025.

As the University of Michigan system branches into new locations — such as the Marygrove Learning Community in Detroit — Dearborn DPS’ responsibilities have expanded across Wayne County. DPS officers currently provide service to Marygrove in conjunction with the Detroit Police Department, with DPS officers responding from the Dearborn campus during the day and working on site overnight. The department plans to transition to round-the-clock coverage at Marygrove to provide consistent service and build essential relationships within the community. “As U-M expands our presence in Wayne County, there's a potential that we would support more areas as well,” notes Deputy Chief Paul Tennies. This could include the U-M Center for Innovation in Detroit which is expected to open in spring 2027.

DPS’ primary focus, however, will remain the Dearborn campus and its affiliated programs. With funding from Ann Arbor to facilitate its expansion, “we're getting more service, more people, and without any impact to service or budget for our campus,” Tennies says.

With increased staff and responsibilities comes new equipment and upgraded technology. This includes advanced radio systems, computer-aided dispatching, and installation of physical security systems, like security cameras at Marygrove.

With many new faces in the department, Reporter chatted with three DPS employees who were recently hired or promoted about what led them to a career in law enforcement and why they chose to serve at ��-Dearborn.

Deputy Chief Paul Tennies

Joining the ��-Dearborn Department of Public Safety in April 2024 as a captain — and recently promoted to deputy chief — Tennies brings with him more than 20 years of experience in law enforcement. While Tennies has spent the bulk of his career with Northville Township, retiring in 2021 from his role as the chief of police, his journey in law enforcement started right here at ��-Dearborn. While a student in the behavioral sciences program, Tennies got a campus job — and soon after a full time offer — as a security officer with Campus Safety. He transferred to Ann Arbor, working in hospital security and at the campus police department. He ended up leaving ��-Dearborn for a program that enabled him to get his associate’s degree and police certification simultaneously.

After completing the police academy at Schoolcraft College, Tennies was hired by Northville Township in 2002. “Like most cops, I did a little bit of everything. I was a patrol officer, a field training instructor, investigator, undercover officer with the DEA and the state police, and then held leadership positions across the organization and retired as chief of police,” he says.

In his day-to-day role with the department, Tennies serves as the operations commander responsible for “scheduling, hiring, personnel, issues, strategy, budget — kind of everything but the kitchen sink,” he says. DPS’ growth in recent years — not just in size but expectations — has brought both challenges and opportunities.

“The department is about 50 years old, starting as a security agency, and is moving into a full service law enforcement agency. That requires a lot of effort to make sure that we're in line with some of our other partners who have been doing police work for 75 to 100 years. We’re embracing that challenge, supporting our team to make sure that they have what they need to be successful,” says Tennies. “The benefit of working in a university environment is we typically have the ability to put the time and effort into situations that sometimes you don't get to in cities just based on volume. We're able to build relationships and work to find solutions with a lot of resources that the university has invested.”

Sergeant Sean Murphy

While Sergeant Sean Murphy has been with the Department of Public Safety for 10 years, his connection to campus goes back even further. A CASL alum, Murphy graduated with his bachelor’s in political science and criminal justice in 2013. After receiving his diploma, Murphy attended the police academy before joining the Canton Township Police Department. After about a year, Murphy came back to work on ��-Dearborn’s campus as a public safety officer.

“I think because I went to school here as an undergrad, it's interesting to see how much has changed and how much has stayed the same since I was a freshman,” he says. “Seeing a lot of familiar faces that I've built relationships with since 2008 and seeing their journey is rewarding.”

Murphy earned his second diploma from ��-Dearborn in December after graduating with his master of public administration and policy. He was also recently promoted to sergeant. Building relationships with staff and students is something Murphy prioritizes in his role.

“We recognize that sometimes people need help with things that aren't necessarily criminal or law related. I think that our officers really take the time to interact and help our campus community in ways that typically you don't think of a police officer doing,” says Murphy. “The way I think of it is something that could take us five minutes could completely change the course of someone's day and be the make or break of whether that person's having a good day or not. And I think that we have a really good group of officers who recognize that.”

Murphy emphasized, however, that he wants the campus community to feel comfortable engaging with him and other officers anytime — whether they need assistance or just want to chat.

“It doesn't have to be someone having a bad day or a victim of a crime. We want to have the relationships where if you see us in the UC, you can stop and talk to us about non-police related matters like sports or whatever else is going on,” he says.

Public Safety Police Officer Quentin Maxey

From a young age, Quentin Maxey knew he wanted to be a police officer. “My mom will tell you and validate that, at a very early age, I always wanted to be a police officer, from dressing up in police costumes for Halloween and watching a lot of the old sitcoms of cops. This was my chosen profession from a very young age,” says Maxey. He also drew inspiration from his grandfather, Gilbert Maxey, the first African American police officer in Indianapolis.

Maxey’s career began in 1995 at the Detroit Police Academy. After graduating, he rose through the ranks, working in various divisions including gaming, bicycle patrol and as a shift lieutenant in downtown Detroit. After retiring from the Detroit Police Department, Maxey joined the ��-Dearborn Department of Public Safety in September of 2024, bringing with him almost 30 years of law enforcement experience.

For him, transitioning from the bustling streets of Detroit to the slower pace of the ��-Dearborn campus isn't a retirement job, but a fulfilling second career. Maxey says his favorite part of the job is being there to help — even with something as simple as a vehicle lockout or retrieving a left-behind item.

“We had a student who lost his coat, and I was instrumental in helping him relocate it. His winter jacket had some pretty valuable items inside — obviously, his wallet, his personal ID – but he actually had his dad's house keys, who resides in the City of Cleveland. So to be able to unite the jacket with the student who called for our service was very rewarding,” says Maxey.

DPS is available 24/7, 365

All three officers had the same message when it comes to safety on campus: If something doesn’t seem right, notify Public Safety right away. While people may hesitate to call because they do not want to be a bother, Tennies says it is the complete opposite. “We would much rather you call and it be nothing than not hear about something and not be able to support the community,” he insists.

Adds Murphy: “We're here, 24/7, 365. There's always someone here, no matter the day or the time, and our main focus is your safety. So if they ever need anything, reach out to us and have us assist.”

Story by Kathryn Bourlier. Photos by Annie Barker (Deputy Chief Tennies photo courtesy of Paul Tennies)

Faculty and Staff

Public Safety (Police)

Off

Wed, 05/28/2025 - 13:53

DPS has scaled up with more staff and modern technology. Find out what it means for our campus — and beyond.

Photo by Annie Barker

A bond strengthened through love, advocacy and ��-Dearborn

stuxbury — Thu, 08 May 2025 16:10:00 +0000

A bond strengthened through love, advocacy and ��-Dearborn stuxbury Thu, 05/08/2025 - 12:10

Graduate program coordinators Sherry Boyd and Rebekah Awood have each worked in ��-Dearborn’s College of Engineering and Computer Science for decades. They have the same role at the college, but are responsible for different programs. And their offices are, literally, five steps away from each other.

Awood, a 2001 alum who started working at ��-Dearborn in 2005, and Boyd, who started at CECS in 1998, are a good team. They love their students. They travel together. They spend holidays together. And they share a family bond: They are mother and daughter.

“But I don’t call her ‘mom’ at work — that would be a little weird for people who didn’t know that I’m her daughter,” Awood says with a smile. “We are a lot alike. We are both detail-oriented, methodical and practice empathy. Of course we love each other, but we genuinely like each other, too. I am fortunate to have that with my mom.”

For Mother’s Day, Awood took her mom to Sheeba restaurant, which serves Yemeni Mediterranean cuisine — Boyd’s pick. They both had it for the first time at a CECS holiday party a couple years ago. “The food is so good. One of the best things I received from working here is what I have gained from meeting people from different cultures,” Boyd says. “You learn about people, food, places, traditions and celebrations. I came here from a Baptist background and now have a Shiva statue in my office. Through my co-workers and students, I’ve learned so much — I’m always learning something new. It keeps me young. Well, feeling young anyway.”

Awood says CECS graduate students — especially the international students — often see her mom as their mom, too. Boyd has attended a student’s wedding in Morocco. She met an alum’s new baby at Naamkaran, a Hindu baby-naming ceremony. And she listens when they come to her in difficult times — like health scares, domestic violence situations and financial hardships.

“Our job is to keep our students on track for graduation. But what we do here goes beyond academics,” Boyd says. “I have impressed upon all of my students that this is your life — and you need to make the choices for your life. Don’t let life happen to you. You have support and options, even when the situation feels impossible.” Without missing a beat, Awood adds, “We will create a safe space for you. We are here to listen and we also know there are great resources on campus and in the community.”

Sitting at a table in her daughter’s office, Boyd talks about how instrumental supportive people have been in her own journey. “I had a friend who saved my life and saved my children’s lives,” says Boyd, who is a mother of six, with Awood being the oldest. There’s also Jeremy, Rachel, Joanna, Julia and Sarah — in that order. “This wonderful friend listened, she cared and she helped me escape from an abusive relationship,” Boyd says. “We are sitting here today because of her. One person who listens and advocates for you can make all the difference. That was more than 30 years ago. But I live my life with that in mind.”

Through Boyd’s first husband, she was a member of the Independent Fundamental Baptist church. Boyd, who grew up in Dearborn Heights, met and married her ex-husband as a teenager. She moved out of Michigan at his insistence and he slowly separated her from parents, friends and family. They belonged to several IFB churches including the First Baptist Church of Hammond, Indiana, which is featured in the 2023 HBO docuseries, “Let Us Prey: A Ministry of Scandals.” Boyd says she and the children were surrounded with messages of racism and sexism, as well as physical abuse. “When I voiced my concerns to church leaders, they told me to pray for him, to stop complaining and being bitter. I was told the worst thing possible for my children was divorce,” Boyd says. “I didn’t know to what extent he was physically abusing the children — he threatened them with more beatings if they told me. When I realized what was going on, I needed to leave. I needed to save my kids.”

Sitting across from her mom, Awood recalls the day their new life began. “It was the summer before I turned 13. My mom woke me and said we were leaving. We snuck away. The abuse from my dad — physical, mental and emotional — was so bad that it’s hard for people to even comprehend when we’ve been through,” says Awood, her eyes welling with tears. “My mom got us away from that.” Awood helped her mom gather her siblings, who were ages infant to 10, and their belongings.

In the early 1990s, Sherry Boyd and her children took a family photo after starting their new life in Michigan.

They left their Indiana home and stayed with the aforementioned friend, who helped them make arrangements to move to Michigan, where Boyd’s parents still lived. In addition to her friend in Indiana, Boyd says Wayne County’s First Step, a domestic violence crisis center and shelter, supported the family by giving them a safe space to reside and assisted them in the transition to living in Michigan. State resources from Michigan’s Department of Health and Human Services — which provided some food, child care and shelter costs — gave Boyd the help needed to become independent.

“My mom and I are bonded. Not a trauma bond, but a close supportive one that has been forged by fire,” Awood says. “As an adult, I think how she must have felt as a parent in that situation. We are both very maternal. Family means everything to her and to us.”

After the move, Boyd started school at Schoolcraft Community College. The campus was within walking distance from her new home. “I don’t know if I fully believe in Providence any more, but that worked out in our favor,” she says. “I got an associate’s degree and that really helped me in this new life I was creating for us.” That degree led to a support staff position at an accounting office.

Awood says her mom was vocal about the importance of earning an education: “She told us that we weren’t allowed to get married until we had earned a college degree. She saw how important it was in her own life.” Awood listened. She was admitted to ��-Ann Arbor, but decided to enroll at ��-Dearborn. It was closer to home and she liked the smaller size. “Our campus feels so approachable and welcoming. It felt right and it was — I loved my time here,” says Awood, who did a study abroad trip to Valencia, Spain, worked as a student at the Early Childhood Education Center and has met people from all walks of life. “I was isolated for a large part of my childhood and grew up hearing about the importance of sameness. There was a lot of talk about white supremacy. That didn’t sit well with me even as a child — at what shade of tan, beige or brown do we become different? It didn’t make any sense,” Awood says. “I got to see how wrong those racist teachings were when I was a student here. On campus, so many people from a variety of places and backgrounds came together. We helped each other with our goals. We cared for each other. Diversity is beautiful and it’s what makes us stronger.”

Hearing about her daughter’s positive experiences at ��-Dearborn, Boyd started looking for job opportunities at the university. Then one day in 1998 — through a newspaper ad — she found one: A $12-per-hour five-month temporary administration position in the ��-Dearborn Alumni Office. Boyd applied and was hired. “I saw it as a way to get in the door so they could get to know me,” she says.

When that ended, Boyd was hired for a position in CECS — her work home for the past 27 years. First hired in the college’s co-op office, she worked there for about a year and a half. Then she was hired in the Department of Interdisciplinary Programs in 2000 as an administrative assistant. Boyd’s role has evolved over time to her current position as an automotive engineering and data science graduate student coordinator.

After Awood earned her bachelor’s degree in international and Hispanic studies in 2001, she began working at a southwest Detroit nonprofit organization where she helped connect low-income families to child care and other needed resources. She enjoyed the job, but there were concerns about the organization closing due to a lack of state funding.

So just as Awood inspired her mom to look for a job at ��-Dearborn because of her good experience as a student, Awood started to look for a position at the university because of her mom’s positive experience as an employee. Awood was hired as a mechanical engineering graduate student coordinator in 2005. But she didn’t work directly with her mom until 2017, when CECS’ Department of Interdisciplinary Programs — where Boyd worked — was dissolved and one of its programs was absorbed by the mechanical engineering department.

Awood says working at ��-Dearborn has given her more than a great career. She also met her now-husband, Brian, in 2005 through her job. He was a ��-Dearborn information technology staff member.

Sitting in Awood’s office, the two women are surrounded by photos of children — including Awood’s children, Ben and Abby, and her nieces and nephews; thank you cards from students and a picture of a vacation cottage on Lake Huron. They are all reminders of the life they enjoy, the family they have and the memories they continue to build at ��-Dearborn and beyond.

Story by Sarah Tuxbury

Faculty and Staff

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Staff Senate

Off

Thu, 05/08/2025 - 16:08

Two CECS colleagues, Sherry Boyd and Rebekah Awood, share a connection that goes beyond working together for 20 years — they are mother and daughter.

Graduate program coordinators Sherry Boyd and Rebekah Awood are mother and daughter in addition to colleagues. Photo by Annie Barker

The Administration Building and Social Sciences Building are getting makeovers

lblouin — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 12:24:20 +0000

The Administration Building and Social Sciences Building are getting makeovers lblouin Wed, 04/23/2025 - 08:24

Moving the College of Business and College of Education, Health and Human Services, both now housed in the Fairlane Center, to the main campus is one of the key parts of ��-Dearborn’s current Comprehensive Campus Plan. If all goes according to schedule, the faculty and administrative staff from CEHHS will make a move to what’s now the Administration Building in time for the Fall 2026 semester. (The building will also likely get a new name!) By late the following year, COB plans to take up residence in a renovated Social Sciences Building, much of which has been vacant ever since the College of Arts, Sciences and Letters brought its social science faculty to the CASL building a couple years ago, though some classes are still taught there.

Facilities teams will be kicking off one of the first big steps in that process in just a few weeks when they relocate administrative staff from the AB to temporary offices in the SSB in order to make way for construction teams. Director of Facilities Planning and Construction Emily Hamilton, who’s overseeing both projects, characterizes this as a more “modest” renovation than the recent overhaul of the Renick University Center’s first floor. But like that project, one of the guiding principles is to do a lot more within the same amount of space. Business Affairs will consolidate Financial Services and Student Accounts into the existing suite. All other administrative departments within the AB — the Chancellor’s Office, Provost’s Office, Office of Research, External Relations, Institutional Advancement and Alumni Engagement, and Human Resources — will be consolidated into the east wing of the building, making the west wing available for CEHHS. Hamilton says to accomplish that, the design teams are taking advantage of hybrid and remote work schedules, a dramatic decrease in the need for paper file storage, and shared reception areas, which have left many units needing less physical space. This new administrative wing of the building is also gaining a kitchen, a flexible meeting room space, a few flex offices and a copy room, all of which can be used by any of the administrative units.

Most of the renovation budget is being funneled into the CEHHS wing of the building, where the plan calls for new faculty offices, a dean’s suite, a college-level advising office, two classrooms, open student collaboration and lounge spaces, and several multipurpose spaces that faculty and staff can use for meetings or lunch breaks. Hamilton says that if the budget allows, the team is also planning to update the underutilized open space in the middle of the building. Cosmetically, the interior is getting new paint, carpet, ceilings and some modern sliding office doors like those in the renovated RUC, which save a lot of space compared to conventional in-swing doors.

A rendering of an open collaboration area in the renovated Administration Building. Credit: Neumann/Smith Architecture

The renovation of the SSB is currently in the early design phase, but Hamilton says they’re already discussing some exciting renovation ideas. On the exterior, the east side of the building will be getting a new, more welcoming entry. And inside, the team will be rethinking the two auditoriums. In conjunction with the Registrar's Office, the facilities team recently completed a space utilization study and found that there is diminishing need for this once-quintessential style of college classroom. (She says COB doesn’t use this classroom style at all anymore.) In a portion of these spaces, the plan calls for removing every other row of fixed theater seating so the new wider terraces can host fixed tables and moveable chairs, suitable for case study use. The design team is also investigating making a portion of these rooms ground level to house the college’s labs, including its flagship Bloomberg Lab. Similar to the lab’s current location in the Fairlane Center, you can expect lots of glass, so passersby can look in on the action. The SSB’s main hallway will also be widened to carve out more informal hangout and collaboration spaces for students, as well as space for events.

With both the AB and SSB, Hamilton says the facilities team has collaborated closely with the colleges to create designs that best serve their needs. Work on the AB is currently out for bid and will begin this summer. Because the SSB is being used to temporarily house the administrative units, work won’t start on that project until the AB renovation is complete.

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Want to learn more about ��-Dearborn’s plans to reshape its physical campus? Check out our recent story on the Comprehensive Campus Plan. Story by Lou Blouin

Faculty and Staff

University-wide

College of Business

College of Education, Health, and Human Services

Facilities Planning

Off

Wed, 04/23/2025 - 12:16

It’s been two decades since all four of ��-Dearborn’s colleges were on the main campus. One of the first big steps in the plan to bring COB and CEHHS back is kicking off in June.

The Administration Building is set to become the new home of the College of Education, Health and Human Services. The renovation includes several new informal hangout and collaboration spaces for students. Rendering by Neumann/Smith Architecture

Natalie Sampson named Distinguished Professor of the Year

lblouin — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 12:32:16 +0000

Natalie Sampson named Distinguished Professor of the Year lblouin Wed, 04/16/2025 - 08:32

Anyone who knows Natalie Sampson knows one of her more endearing (and perhaps Midwestern) traits is her reluctance to be in the spotlight — even when the attention is obviously due. Whenever we interview her about her work, which often has some connection to grassroots community organizations, she is quick to play up others’ hard work and contributions and lower the volume on her own. So it’s unsurprising that it's been a little uncomfortable for Sampson since the Michigan Association of State Universities shared that she had been selected as one of three Distinguished Professors of the Year for 2025. The news wasn't even public yet and Sampson was already sweating whether the invitations for her allotted guest list of seven for the Lansing awards ceremony should include her colleagues. "I didn’t want to bug them — ask them to drive to Lansing. They’re busy!” Sampson says, laughing. Luckily, her longtime friend and collaborator, the straight-talking Associate Professor of Sociology Carmel Price, told her to get over it. "She was, like, ‘They’re going to be upset if you don’t ask them.’”

Sampson’s aversion to attention is perhaps amplified a bit by the fact that, for much of her life, she’s not always been exactly comfortable in the world of academia. She says she definitely did not grow up with an eye on becoming an academic. Her father, who was an airline mechanic, and her mother, who was a customer service representative, grew up in an era where college degrees weren’t necessarily seen as prerequisites for solid, well-paying jobs. But both she and her older sister excelled in school, and their parents were huge cheerleaders when their daughters landed at the University of Michigan. In retrospect, Sampson sees it as a moment of generational transition in her own family — and one that also says something about the region. “My parents grew up at a time when it was Papa Ford and Papa Chevrolet, and people did quite well for a very long time without going to college,” Sampson says. “So for my family, this college thing was a different trajectory — especially because my sister studied sociology and I did environmental studies. I was lucky because my family was always very supportive. But I think there was this curiosity about what this would translate to.”

It took a little exploration during her undergraduate years at U-M to find her niche. Sampson says she gravitated to her major because she liked the outdoors, but not all of the coursework clicked: “I remember taking the woody plants class and memorizing all the different Latin names and the different kinds of acorns and thought, ‘Well, I’m definitely not going to be a conservationist,’” she says. However, through U-M’s Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program, which is akin to ��-Dearborn’s Summer Undergraduate Research Experience, she found something that was a little more her speed. She got paired with a faculty member who was doing research around the health impacts of truck traffic on people living in neighborhoods near Detroit’s Ambassador Bridge. During her assignment, she got to talk with dozens of people in the neighborhood and witness some of the inner workings of grassroots community organizations. “I remember thinking, ‘This is research? If this is research, then I like research,’” she says.

It was indeed research — or a particular brand of research that was coming of age in the public health discipline at that time. Sampson says beginning in the late 1980s, some academics in the field were going through a bit of a what-is-it-all-for moment. There was an impulse to not simply use research to document, say, epidemiological trends, but to try to more deliberately use the data to actually improve, well, the public’s health. This sometimes meant interacting more directly with community organizations who were taking on big corporations or government agencies, or interrogating long-held assumptions about academic research, like the value or validity of “objectivity.” During her master’s program at Portland State University, Sampson got exposed to more examples of this kind of “action-oriented research.” During one of her internships, she collaborated closely with a small nonprofit that was working with residents on issues related to asthma. “I saw faculty listening to residents, and their experiences were shaping the research. I started to see, ‘Oh, this is how it works,’” she says.

Today, it’s easy to see the imprint of this approach on Sampson’s work. Along with Price and several partners, she co-created Environmental Health Research-to-Action, the flagship program of which is a summer academy that teaches high school students to do things like air and water quality monitoring, and to understand how environmental health science can support policy work. She’s also been working with community organizations and other academics on a plain language initiative, which is pushing government agencies like the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy to use language that is understandable to everyday people, so they don’t feel alienated from decision making processes. And a few years back, during the planning stages of the Gordie Howe International Bridge — a project that promised to bring a vast amount of truck traffic to a neighborhood already burdened by poor air quality — her team’s community health survey of residents in Southwest Detroit helped push the city and state to agree to a landmark $45 million community benefits package. That agreement included an unprecedented relocation program that provided some residents of Detroit’s Delray neighborhood with the option of moving to a renovated Detroit Land Bank home. In typical Sampson fashion, she’s quick to point out that, in her opinion, her work made an impact because the timing was right. “This result is 100% due to the fact that this group had been organizing for 10 or 20 years, but they took that data and used that to support their argument for this community benefits agreement,” she says. “At that moment, the data just fit into that story.” Now, she says, another group, which is trying to get the city to design truck routes that don’t go through residential neighborhoods is using similar data that their community-academic teams are continuing to collect. The organizers’ work recently prompted the city to propose a new truck route ordinance.

Several years ago, Valeria Cossyleon, right, and Janine Hussein, left, were among the students who helped Sampson collect door-to-door health surveys in Detroit's Delray neighborhood. Photo by Lou Blouin

That community organizations, who are good at community organizing, and academics, who are good at collecting and presenting data, could collaborate in practical ways to improve the public’s health is something that makes intuitive sense. But in practice, Sampson says it doesn’t always work smoothly. As she sees it, the key ingredient is trust: University researchers who aren’t from the community, and who might speak in technical jargon, are often greeted with a healthy degree of skepticism by local residents, who don’t know how durable or broad their allyship is. Sampson says there were plenty of times early in her career where her status as an academic made her feel out of place in community meetings. But that has changed over time — and because of time. Trust, she says, is built through relationships, and relationships don’t arise out of thin air. Nowadays, she rarely feels that kind of awkwardness, namely because she’s been working with the same communities for years, sometimes decades. “That’s one reason I feel like it’s been a blessing for me to come to ��-Dearborn. I got to come back and work with people that I worked with as an undergrad when I was 20 years old,” she says. “Simone Sagovac, who now runs the Southwest Detroit Community Benefits Coalition, I know I have a picture of us somewhere at some meeting and I’m 20 years old, and I have an eyebrow pierced, and I’m not dressed professionally. And now here we are, a couple decades later, and we’re older ladies, some of us with gray hair, still working together, still trying to collect the data, because there’s so much frickin’ work to do.”

In the classroom, Sampson is always nudging her students to think about the practical applications of environmental health science too. She says she’s benefited greatly from teaching the same two courses — Community Organizing and Introduction to Environmental Health — for years now, which has enabled her to continually refine the curriculum. One of her go-to assignments in her environmental health class is to ask each student to bring in their municipal drinking water quality report, which local utilities are required to provide to residents. It’s a simple but powerful prompt. For one, many students discover for the first time things about their drinking water that aren’t great. And even the sheer challenge of deciphering these technical reports reveals that government documents aren’t always presenting important scientific data in ways that are easily understood — which in turns, stunts residents’ abilities to push their public officials when there is a problem. And for many semesters in her community organizing course, it’s been a staple assignment for students to partner with community groups on practical projects, like a collaboration a few years ago where students helped a group in south Dearborn write a grant proposal to support their work around air quality. She also recently did something she thought she’d never do: create a textbook. It has a benign sounding name: “Environmental Health: Foundations for Public Health.” But the content, featuring contributions from a diverse range of leading voices in the field, is far edgier, emphasizing the broad scope of the discipline, including the community-based approaches that originally inspired her.

Now a couple decades into her own public health journey, Sampson senses she might be entering a moment of transition. She says it’s a little weird to look around and see that she’s now one of three senior faculty members in the Health and Human Services Department. One of her colleagues, who’s just a little younger than her, recently recoiled when she casually referred to them both as “middle age.” And she’s also increasingly interested in exploring other approaches in her quest to make environmental health science universally accessible, including ones that utilize the arts. She’s also feeling more of a generational divide in the classroom, especially the past few years. In particular, she’s observing an increasing reluctance of students to talk — “like, at all” — in class, something she attributes a little bit to COVID, but mostly to the fact that young people’s lives are increasingly lived online. It’s something she can sort of relate to. “I never talked in class as an undergrad,” she says. “And I’m definitely sympathetic to students who are feeling anxiety about that. But many of them are going to be clinicians. A huge part of their jobs is going to be talking to people. So you have to practice. Definitely, one of my biggest priorities as an instructor is just creating any opportunity to make them talk.”

She also tries to keep their spirits up. Public health can, frankly, be a depressing subject much of the time, and she does feel like younger generations are living with a different kind of weight on their shoulders as they realize most of their lives will be lived in the climate change era. During her periodic efforts to bring them up to speed on current events, she makes sure to find at least some good news from the world. And it’s now one of her standard assignments to challenge them to do something for their mental health. (This semester, they are listening to a playlist of songs, crowd-sourced from the class, that get them pumped up.) She concedes that this kind of positivity can sometimes be a “performance.” But it’s also something that keeps her own motor going. “It’s funny: Sometimes I feel like I’m just getting started. And some days I feel like I’m ready to retire!” she says. “But there are always opportunities to reinvent.”

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Story by Lou Blouin

College of Education, Health, and Human Services

Health and Human Services

Off

Wed, 04/16/2025 - 12:30

The associate professor of public health talks about her sometimes uncomfortable relationship with academia, the politics of community-centered research and the challenge of getting today’s students to talk in class.

Associate Professor of Public Health Natalie Sampson, far right, says she loves that she's been able to teach the same two courses for much of her career, which has allowed her to both experiment with and refine the curriculum. Photo by Annie Barker

Is the generative AI hype bubble about to burst?

lblouin — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 13:08:28 +0000

Is the generative AI hype bubble about to burst? lblouin Mon, 03/10/2025 - 09:08

The release of ChatGPT in November 2022 sparked some of the broadest societal discussions about the promise and perils of artificial intelligence in recent memory. In the year after its debut, it was easy to find stories about the potential for large language models, the AI technology underlying ChatGPT and similar products, to totally restructure certain industries. Some looked out even further and worried that AI could eventually threaten human civilization.

In retrospect, the expectations were perhaps too tall for what was, at the time, a fascinatingly good chatbot that was still prone to lying and inexplicable hallucinations. Even with these limitations, investors have been bullish about the technology, with investments in generative AI technologies topping $1 trillion. But now, two years on, with super compelling use cases yet to materialize, some are starting to wonder whether the industry could be dangerously overvalued and overhyped. After all, the most commonly deployed uses — customer service chatbots, AI enhanced search (which has inspired an internet backlash and interesting workarounds), AI summaries of product reviews and help writing emails — aren’t life-changing. Even in the field of coding, where LLMs have arguably shown the most practical promise, applications are still limited. Moreover, there are huge concerns that ChatGPT and similar technologies are actually doing damage to society, by helping students cheat, erasing recent reductions in energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, and capitalizing on creators’ work without their permission.

Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Paul Watta says these are all valid concerns. His own take is that it’s “going to be tough” for big bets on generative AI to pay off, and it’s completely possible the industry is heading for a reality check soon. (More on this below.) But he’s also not writing off the potential for some game-changing use cases to still emerge. His main reason for tempered optimism is that LLMs have undergone quite a lot of meaningfully technical evolution over the past two years, a story that often gets lost in the media’s coverage of generative AI. He describes the initial releases of ChatGPT and similar products as “chat tools,” whereas the new generations are “reasoning models.” Watta says the former were basically extremely powerful predictive text machines: Based on a text-based prompt, the model would use its knowledge of the patterns of human language to string together words that felt like an appropriate answer. Sometimes the outputs were really great. Other times, particularly when the technology failed to capture the full meaning of the prompt, its answers were frustratingly unhelpful. This is, for example, why early generations of LLMs generally failed as customer service chatbots. They simply couldn’t accurately interpret the nuances of people’s troubleshooting questions, let alone integrate with things like databases of relevant customer information.

Watta says reasoning models emerged to overcome these shortcomings. The main difference is that a reasoning model essentially thinks before it speaks. Rather than generating a quick text-based output based on a single computational line of thought, a reasoning model breaks a prompt down into its component parts to try to better understand the context of the task being asked of it. It then considers multiple options for its response and chooses an answer based on refined numerical parameters established during the model’s training that steer it toward more desirable results. The newer models can also quickly ingest and respond to new information. “That’s really one of the best use cases for it right now. It can take in all kinds of documents — like business prospectuses from a bunch of companies — and generate a summary report for you that’s really quite good,” Watta says. “So that’s something that might have taken an intern 30 hours to do, and now you can do it in minutes.” Because of this fundamentally different architecture, reasoning models also do a reasonably good job of showing how they arrived at a conclusion. Original LLMs were black boxes — not even their designers had a clue how they were coming up with their responses.

The other reason that Watta is still not counting out LLMs is that the technology is evolving very rapidly. Watta says that Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI (maker of ChatGPT), boasts that every version they release is a 10-fold improvement and that the newest version, expected any day now, could surpass that pace. That’s fast even for the tech sector. There is at least some concrete evidence to demonstrate that progress. For example, Watta keeps an eye on competitive programming challenges on platforms like Kaggle, where companies post real-world unsolved programming problems for the world’s best developers to tackle. The earliest releases of LLMs were essentially non-competitors as coders. But Altman says internal benchmarks for their most recent model put it in the Top 50. Watta wouldn’t be shocked if the pending releases of ChatGPT or other models end up in the Top 10, or even land at No. 1.

Watta pulls up a website showing what ChatGPT actually looks like: huge data centers that use massive amounts of electricity. Watta says electricity consumption by AI-based technologies could become a hot-button policy issue in the future. Photo by Annie Barker

Even more interesting than the pace of development is that there now appears to be legitimate competition in the LLM space. Earlier this year, the Chinese startup DeepSeek released an LLM model that caused instant disruption. The big revelation wasn’t that DeepSeek was better than ChatGPT — though Watta says, by some benchmarks, DeepSeek slightly outperforms the best models out there. It was that this startup had managed to build this almost-just-as-good reasoning model using far less powerful technology, thanks to a U.S. trade policy which banned the highest-powered graphics processing units from being sold to Chinese companies. These chips, made by the U.S. company NVIDIA, were assumed to be essential to creating high-quality LLMs. “They appear to have proved that idea wrong,” Watta says. “What the DeepSeek team did is the classic startup story that Silicon Valley used to do. Startups never have enough resources, so you have to optimize what you have. The big players become lazy, they don’t look for new ideas, and so they overspend to solve a problem. A startup can’t do that. That’s how the little guy beats the big guy.” Moreover, Watta says it’s notable that DeepSeek made key features open source and published technical details about how they arrived at their performance breakthroughs. U.S. companies typically have just published benchmark performance but don’t share the details of how they got there.

Watta says, for him, the biggest takeaway from DeepSeek’s release wasn’t technological; it was its impact on the markets. The day after DeepSeek’s debut, NVIDIA’s stock fell by 17%. “The market lost half a trillion dollars. From one release. That’s scary,” he says. He argues that indicates we may be entering a period where venture capitalists become more discerning about their investments in LLM development. Moreover, that’s just one of many possible “bottlenecks” Watta and others foresee. There’s still the nagging question of how much more these models can be improved, given that they thrive on consuming human-produced data and that supply could run dry in the next few years. Newer models still lie and hallucinate, though not as much. In addition, some are growing increasingly worried about the electricity consumption of LLMs and AI-based technologies more generally. Currently, AI accounts for about 3% of global electricity use, but that number is expected to grow in the coming years. (By one estimate, a single ChatGPT query consumes about as much electricity as a light bulb does in 20 minutes and 10 times as much as a standard Google search.) Moreover, this growth in electricity demand from AI comes at a time when the push toward electrification in the transportation and heating sectors is already expected to strain the electric grid. Watta says if AI is seen as the reason for spikes in electricity cost, brownouts or an impediment in the fight against climate change, the public could sour on the industry.

Similarly, he says LLMs could run into hurdles with existing privacy law. Watta says one of the more hopeful applications for these new reasoning models could lie in solving complex medical problems. “But when you’re talking about people’s medical information, we have strict regulatory frameworks, like HIPAA, which are designed to protect people’s privacy. With something like that, there is no room for error,” he says. “People have already gotten a little uncomfortable with these technologies making decisions that impact their safety or their financial lives. Now what if someone uses the technology to make a virus that kills millions of people? That could create a major backlash. Even if it wasn’t something that catastrophic, if people’s views go negative, that could constrain the development and shake the markets, which could have large economic consequences. Because, at least for now, the markets are still betting on a big pay day.”

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Story by Lou Blouin

Faculty and Staff

Opinion or Voices

Technology

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Off

Mon, 03/10/2025 - 13:07

Two years after the launch of ChatGPT, generative AI has yet to produce a game-changing use case. Professor Paul Watta breaks down whether the trillion dollar bet on generative AI will pay off or go bust.

Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Paul Watta. Photo by Annie Barker

Campus Colleagues: Becky Richardson

stuxbury — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 19:36:10 +0000

Campus Colleagues: Becky Richardson stuxbury Tue, 02/04/2025 - 14:36

Becky Richardson’s desk — complete with its encouraging messages — is often one of the first things people notice when walking into the SOAR Program’s office in the College of Arts, Sciences and Letters Building: “All who enter as guests, leave as friends.” “Take the risk or lose the chance.” “Today is the day.”

There’s also the traveling sign that she’s given out to SOAR (Support, Opportunities, Advocacy and Resources for nontraditional undergraduates) students. That one reads, “Tough times don’t last, but tough people do.”

“Our students have been through a lot. Many of our students face personal and financial obstacles, most are raising families and many also care for older adults. That’s a lot of responsibility,” says Richardson, SOAR program assistant. “As silly as it might seem, seeing motivational words helps keep them in your head. I want these signs to remind our students that on tough days, they can get the support they need in the SOAR office — even if that’s just to vent. I have tissues ready for sad tears and happy ones.” With its mission to increase access to post-secondary education for nontraditional adult learners experiencing socioeconomic challenges, SOAR offers up to three semesters of partial tuition support and help with supplies like books and technology, along with other needs.

Richardson recently received the University of Michigan's Distinguished Diversity Leaders Award. A champion for students, Richardson advances a welcoming, supportive environment at ��-Dearborn. She’s an advisor and co-founder for ANTS, the nontraditional student organization; a co-counselor for ��-Dearborn’s chapter of Alpha Sigma Lambda, an honor society for adult learners; a Center for the Education of Women+ Scholar who now serves on their scholarship committee, and a member of the ��-Dearborn Prison Education Working Group.

In this month’s Campus Colleagues, Richardson shares why education advocacy is so important to her and how a little bit of the right support can go a long way.

Find people who will support you with your goals — they are out there.

Richardson says education is an equalizer. It helps grow skills and confidence and changes lives. She knows this from experience.

Richardson and her husband lost their jobs during the recession. Their home and cars soon followed. Then, after years of struggling and moving from place to place with their four children, a Michigan Works caseworker offered some advice. “He suggested going back to school and told me about the SOAR Program at ��-Dearborn. It changed my life,” she says.

It sounds like a nicely wrapped up story. But Richardson says it was a struggle for the seven years — from 2011 to 2018 — she took to earn her bachelor degree in behavioral sciences and women’s and gender studies. She says the SOAR office, and SOAR Director Ellen Judge-Gonzalez in particular, helped her see things that she didn’t see in herself.

“I originally wanted to get a degree where I didn’t have to interact with people. I wanted to work in a medical lab. My previous jobs were doing collections and working at a funeral home. As much as I tried to be positive, I was meeting people at their worst times and it wore me down,” Richardson says. “When I was a student, Ellen kept encouraging me to join student groups and work at the registration desk for events. She saw a natural ability in me when it comes to working with people. She later hired me as a student employee for SOAR and that turned into the fulltime position that I have today. Helping people transform their lives is hard, but rewarding. It’s exactly where I need to be.” Richardson has worked in the SOAR office for a decade.

The office itself is also a refuge because it’s a place where SOAR students share their stories of tribulations and triumph. Richardson says hearing how people overcome challenges is motivating. “You want to find people who help you feel less alone on your journey,” she says. “They will help you keep moving forward even on the hardest days.”

Richardson says she never expected to find a college initiative like the SOAR Program. But going through state social services programs and following up on advice shared with her changed the trajectory of her life. “It might not feel like it right now, but there are people who want to support you,” she says. “Don’t give up. Don’t be afraid to ask for help. And be ready to give it your all when a door opens.”

For adult learners considering a return to school to earn their first bachelor’s degree, check out the SOAR Program.

SOAR Program Assistant Becky Richardson, holding award, is pictured at the Jan. 28 awards ceremony in Ann Arbor with, from left, Disability and Accessibility Services Coordinator Judy Walker, SOAR Director Ellen Judge-Gonzalez, ��-Ann Arbor Executive Assistant to the President Brenda Rutkey, who is Richardson's sister, and Sociology Professor Francine Banner. Photo by Michigan Photography

After reaching goals, look for ways to pay it forward.

With her kids and husband — as well as many ��-Dearborn colleagues and professors — cheering her on at the ��-Dearborn Fieldhouse, Richardson says she will never forget her December 2018 graduation day. “When I walked across the stage, I could hear people yelling my name,” she says. “It was surreal to actually experience something that had only lived in my mind for so long.”

She says many of the same people also nominated her for the U-M award. Nominators were Judge-Gonzalez, Sociology Professor Francine Banner, Criminology and Criminal Justice Lecturer Aaron Kinzel, CASL Advising and Academic Success Administrative Assistant Maureen Sytsma and Disability and Accessibility Services Coordinator Judy Walker.

“This award is something I didn’t see coming. I almost didn’t believe it was real when I first got the email. The subject line said, ‘Congratulations’ and it came in at 4:26 p.m. in the afternoon right before the holiday break began. After all of the spam email warnings we’ve gotten, I thought maybe it was one of those,” Richardson says with a laugh. “But it was very real. It’s amazing to be at a place where the people continue to lift you up.”

Richardson works to express her gratitude through service to others. When SOAR students tell her they are behind on rent or their utilities are shut off, she connects them to financial support opportunities or organizations. If courses are a challenge, she lets them know about academic support services on campus. And there’s her open-door policy for her students. “Sometimes all we want is to know someone cares,” she says. “It’s important to remember where you come from and to be that person you once wished was there for you. I can’t say I’m perfect, but I try.”

Richardson is also an education advocate for citizens reentering society after prison. She served as a teaching assistant for a ��-Dearborn program at Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility and has seen the successes of some of her formerly incarcerated SOAR students like ��-Dearborn graduate Penny Kane.

“It’s as simple as, treat people how you want to be treated. What shocked me the most when I first worked in the prisons is how the women are trained to see themselves. When I asked their names to sign in, the women started listing off numbers. I kept saying, ‘No, I want to know your name and how to address you.’ Over time, they used their names instead of numbers — it changed the whole dynamic in such a positive way,” she says. “The returning citizens population is one group I am passionate about helping. I know people who have done their time and have difficulty getting jobs or an education because they were once in prison. Why are we still penalizing them beyond their sentence?”

In the SOAR office on an early Wednesday morning, Richardson makes coffee and heats water for tea — she wants it ready for the students who drop in to use SOAR computers or just want to talk. She organizes a virtual meet-up for her remote students. And she seeks out scholarship opportunities to help a student in need.

“I’m here today — with my college degree and a job I love — because of all the people who supported me. I want to be that person for someone else,” she says. “I’m here to pay it forward.”

Story by Sarah Tuxbury

Awards

Faculty and Staff

Inclusion or Diversity

Student Success

College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters

Student Engagement

First-Generation Programming

Off

Tue, 02/04/2025 - 19:35

SOAR Program Assistant Becky Richardson recently received a U-M award for leaders creating a welcoming and supportive working environment. Richardson’s advice? ‘Treat people how you want to be treated.’

SOAR Program Assistant Becky Richardson works to create a welcoming space for students. Photo by Sarah Tuxbury

How can we make driver assist features play nice together?

lblouin — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 13:14:53 +0000

How can we make driver assist features play nice together? lblouin Mon, 01/27/2025 - 08:14

The periodic cycles of excitement and disappointment over the emerging future of fully autonomous vehicles sometimes overshadow the reality that our vehicles are steadily getting more intelligent. Blind spot monitoring, which is often standard in new cars, will give you an alert anytime a driver (and maybe even a pedestrian) enters an area that generally represents the vehicle’s blind spot. Adaptive cruise control automatically maintains a preset distance to the car in front of you. Lane keep assist varies by vehicle, but in vehicles with electronic power steering, it can nudge your vehicle back between the lane markers if you start to drift too far. Autonomous emergency braking forcefully engages the brakes if your car detects an imminent frontal collision. And a total of eight 2024 models available in the U.S. offer some version of hands-free driving under certain conditions. This is on top of more convenience-focused technologies, like cars that parallel park for you and those with optional one-pedal driving, where the driver brakes and accelerates with a single pedal.

Assistant Professor of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering Areen Alsaid says these driver assist features have the ability to reduce driver workload and make driving safer. But as an expert in human-technology interactions, she’s also been wondering if the learning curve associated with this growing list of advanced features could limit their benefits. “For example, I have a vehicle that has both lane keep assist and adaptive cruise control, and I was under the impression that you couldn’t have them both engaged at the same time, but I tried it and I totally could,” she explains. “That sort of made it like an AV, because the car was controlling both its speed and lateral orientation within the lanes. I definitely did not expect that.” She says sort of like an AV, of course, because, in her vehicle, she discovered these features only remain engaged as long as she has her hands on the steering wheel. But for Alsaid, the experience underscores an important caveat about new driver assist features: When drivers are purchasing a vehicle equipped with several of these advanced technologies, they don’t automatically understand how they work, what their limitations are, and if features will interact with each other in ways they find intuitive. It’s only once drivers become more familiar with how these technologies function that they can fully reap their benefits.

Doctoral student Duha Alkurdi is helping Alsaid with a new project that explores how drivers respond to using multiple driver assist features simultaneously. Photo by Julianne Lindsey

Alsaid says there is a growing body of research on individual driver assist technologies, but researchers are just scratching the surface on understanding the various scenarios when multiple features are operating simultaneously. As part of a new project funded by Toyota, Alsaid is hoping to build some foundational knowledge in this space by studying how drivers behave as they use multiple longitudinal features — technologies that, as contrasted with lateral features like lane keep assist, control the forward momentum of the vehicle. These include things like adaptive cruise control, one pedal driving, forward collision warning, autonomous emergency braking and hands-free driving at low speeds. In the first stage of her study, she’ll observe 10 participants as they engage multiple driver assist features in real vehicles on real roads, monitoring their behavior with cameras and real-time questions, as well as biometrics, like eye tracking and heart-rate monitoring. Using some of the initial insights from this experiment, she and her student research assistants will then design a full driving simulator experience, where dozens more drivers will be confronted with challenging driving situations.

Alsaid says after this initial study, the team will review the results and try to identify areas where the interactions between features and the user interfaces can be made more intuitive for drivers. Her hope is that their work in this area can help drivers adapt more smoothly to these new features so they can enjoy the full potential of their smarter new cars.

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Story by Lou Blouin

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering

Off

Mon, 01/27/2025 - 13:14

Assistant Professor Areen Alsaid says the growing suite of semi-autonomous technologies have the ability to make driving safer, more convenient and less stressful. But we’ll only fully realize these benefits if the learning curve doesn’t confuse drivers.

Assistant Professor Areen Alsaid (right), pictured here with doctoral student Shiva Rasouli, has been using a driving simulator to study how drivers respond to interactions between driver assist features. Photo by Julianne Lindsey

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