Technology

Can we make accessibility ‘universal’?

lblouin — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 13:46:55 +0000

Can we make accessibility ‘universal’? lblouin Mon, 07/21/2025 - 09:46

The world of accessibility and disability accommodations seems to evolve continuously, as new technologies emerge, social attitudes toward disabilities shift and laws are updated. When we last wrote about disability accommodations in 2022, one of the major issues was how the university was meeting rising demand for accommodations, as the social isolation students experienced during the pandemic and the transition back to in-person life fueled an increase in accommodations requests for anxiety and depression. At that time, the approach to accommodations most often focused on the individual: A student with anxiety, for example, could meet with someone from Disability and Accessibility Services, who might recommend an accommodation like additional time to take tests. DAS would then send an email to that student’s instructors detailing the nature of the accommodations, and their professors would make the appropriate arrangements. DAS would also serve as a resource for faculty if they needed help, say, figuring out how to adjust the timed test option for an individual student in Canvas.

This is still how the process works today, and individual accommodations are still very much a thing (more on this below). But talk with those who work within this space and you’ll likely also hear about a push for “universal” accessibility, which may have the effect of reducing the need for one-off, individual accommodations. The thinking is that many of the most common accommodations for those with the disabilities — flexible deadlines, video captioning, making readings screen reader-friendly, providing options on assignments or assessments, or posting lecture slides ahead of time — actually benefit all students. Multiple studies have demonstrated, for example, that captions on video content increase understanding and retention for viewers. Digitize a reading in a screen reader-friendly format and anyone can listen to a reading while they’re commuting or cooking dinner. Providing slides before class gives students an opportunity to pre-digest material and engage at a deeper level. Getting to choose between a test and a project to demonstrate what they’ve learned grants students more autonomy and lets multiple learning styles shine. In other words, if we design the learning experience with accommodations in mind, we end up benefiting everyone — and ultimately reduce the time faculty invest in implementing accommodations for individual students.

Many instructors at ��-Dearborn have made these kinds of adjustments to their courses in the past few years, often with support from the Hub for Teaching and Learning Resources, which provides course design services, big and small. If faculty haven’t started moving in this direction already, though, it’s likely they’ll be thinking more about it very soon, at least when it comes to anything online, says ��-Dearborn’s Director of Digital Education Chris Casey. That’s because in 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice issued a new rule under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act that requires public institutions, including colleges and universities, to ensure that all web content, mobile applications and other digital technologies are usable by people with disabilities. That means by April of next year — the compliance deadline for an institution of ��-Dearborn’s size — all websites, documents (such as PDFs), university communications (including emails) and digital tools have to meet the new federal guidelines for accessibility.

To meet this compliance deadline, U-M has created digital accessibility training for all faculty and staff, which provides practical guidance for creating and maintaining accessible digital content. For the past year, Casey’s team and other campus units, especially the Hub and the Provost’s office, have been busy helping faculty make the transition. Casey says it’s good that they’ve gotten a running start because they’ve unsurprisingly encountered some challenges. PDFs, for example, “are just a nightmare, in general,” Casey says. For years, PDFs were a popular choice for digitizing everything from journal articles to math worksheets. The problem is that screen readers, the technology blind and visually impaired people commonly use to listen to text, often lose a lot in translation. It’s not just the low-quality, 30-year-old scan of a journal article or a handwritten math worksheet that causes problems either. Take, for instance, a standard journal article that has images, charts, tables, subheadings and is formatted into two columns. Our eyes can generally make quick organizational sense of how the information is supposed to flow. But Casey says, left to its own devices, a screen reader often garbles that “reading order” that our eyes and brains find so intuitive.

Casey says his team does have some tools to help faculty with specific accessibility challenges. Some applications, like Yuja Panorama, a Canvas plugin that can peruse documents and identify accessibility issues and recommend fixes, work pretty well. But with those nightmarish PDFs, the solutions might not always be straightforward. If it’s a journal article, Casey recommends faculty check with a subject-matter librarian or the publisher to see if the source already exists in an accessible format or if the publisher has plans to have an accessible version available before the compliance deadline. If those options don’t work out, he says they do have some automated PDF remediation tools, but gives them a “50/50” effectiveness grade. If automatic remediation fails, Casey says faculty may have to try manually adding accessibility features to the PDF, though he warns that’s an adventure that can “get super in the weeds super fast.” He concedes that, when possible, sometimes the best option might be for faculty to retype a document (assuming that doesn’t violate copyright laws) or consider an alternative source that doesn’t have accessibility challenges. Other tools, like the custom generative AI alt-text generator created by ��-Flint Distance Learning Director Nick Gaspar, are working much better. Alt text is a way of describing visual elements, like images and charts, to make them accessible to people using screen readers. Casey said their team test drove the generator with everything from artwork used in an art history class to scatter plot graphs from the math department and got very good results. “With this alt-text generator, I finally feel like we have something that we can say to faculty, ‘This works,’” he says.

Not all accessibility hurdles will be cleared with a quick technological fix, however, which is why Casey’s team is trying to get in front of faculty as much as possible so he can give them a more detailed picture of what it might take to bring their online course materials into compliance. “Faculty are very busy, and some, understandably, want sort of the five-minute version of this,” he says. “But every course has its own needs. So it’s not like there’s a one-size-fits-all solution for every course,” he says. As a starting point, he recommends faculty take a two-hour Canvas course that his team has created, which provides a detailed overview of the major compliance issues and recommended fixes. His team is even offering a $200 incentive for the first 250 instructors who complete the course. In addition, every Tuesday throughout the summer, his office is hosting Zoom sessions focused on specific digital accessibility issues, like how to deal with tables, using Yuja Panorama or how color choices impact readability. Over the past four months, Casey’s team has also held in-person sessions with every department, and they plan to keep that going through the fall and winter semesters.

Of course, much of the labor of updating course materials ultimately falls to faculty, who already have a lot of demands on their time. Understandably, many faculty are feeling a little stressed about the work that’s required to bring their online course materials into compliance, says Maggie Rathouz, an associate professor of mathematics education who also volunteers as an accessibility liaison for her department through DAS. “To be honest, the mood isn’t great,” she says. “It’s not at all that we don’t want to help our students. I think basically everyone gets why this is important. It’s more that we aren’t experts in this stuff, and yet it’s going to fall to faculty to become experts and make these changes, which takes time. I mean, it would be great if this was something AI could help with even more, because then faculty could spend their time on the implementation of these changes and how to teach with these changes.”

Casey says he totally gets that, which is why his office is trying to lighten that burden by providing efficient training sessions, compensating faculty for at least some of their time, and regularly evaluating new technologies that can help with the transition. His office is also providing 250 small grants for instructors to hire a student in their discipline to assist with accessibility work. Rathouz says things like that are helpful — to a point. Personally, the $200 incentive nudged her to sign up for the Canvas course, though she says she actually hasn’t taken it yet and has been “dragging her feet” when it comes to making some accessibility updates to her courses. Similarly, she says it would be helpful to have a student do some of the work but notes that student workers will still require a fair bit of guidance from a faculty member.

Overall, Casey says he feels good about where ��-Dearborn is at as it approaches the April 2026 compliance deadline. Paradigm shifts, even little ones, take time, and a little foot dragging is only human nature, especially when faculty have a lot of other obligations. But he’s hopeful that this new culture around digital accessibility will end up being one of those things that feels like a bit of a lift up front, but then becomes second nature as faculty move forward with creating new courses and materials. It should also be noted that even as this culture of universal accessibility grows some roots in the digital space, individual accommodations will absolutely still be available to students. Knowing faculty are already feeling a little stretched by accessibility-related issues, DAS Coordinator of Case Management and Support Hillary Degner-Miller says their team recently created a new faculty guide that provides the most essential information about the individual accommodations process, including examples of situations faculty are most likely to encounter. Since 2023, DAS has also been utilizing department-level volunteer faculty liaisons, who both serve as a resource for their colleagues about accommodations and help DAS staff better understand where faculty are coming from. Moreover, Degner-Miller says that her slice of the accessibility domain, which tends to focus more on accommodations for individuals, is also experimenting with a more universal approach. The next addition to the faculty accommodations guide will be a section on universal design principles, which can help faculty create course materials that are usable by everyone, regardless of disability. In the end, everyone’s hoping what feels like a time burden at the moment will feel like a big time saver in just a few years.

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Want to learn more about digital accessibility at ��-Dearborn? Check out the university’s new Digital Accessibility website. Staff should also read the July 23 email from Chancellor Gabriella Scarlatta and Vice Chancellor for Information Management Carrie Shumaker regarding accessibility training for staff. Story by Lou Blouin

Accessibility or Affordability

Faculty and Staff

Inclusion or Diversity

Hub for Teaching and Learning Resources

Mon, 07/28/2025 - 13:45

A spring 2026 federal digital accessibility deadline is ushering in a new paradigm for disability accommodations.

A two-hour Canvas course is helping faculty study up on new federal accessibility guidelines for online content. There's currently a $200 incentive to take the course.

News

A team won a surprise victory at this year’s Senior Design competition

lblouin — Mon, 19 May 2025 12:08:15 +0000

A team won a surprise victory at this year’s Senior Design competition lblouin Mon, 05/19/2025 - 08:08

Of the five seniors on their team, only Micah Hagedorn says he thought they had a shot at the Best in College award — the top honor at the College of Engineering and Computer Science’s annual Senior Design Competition — and that was only after the team earned a nod for the best project from the Mechanical Engineering department. Just weeks earlier, things were not going well for Hagedorn and teammates Nicole Kormos, Rosa Carapia, Kenny Conuel Oralde and Emmet Reamer. Multiple times they’d had shipments of biological materials spoil when the supplier mistakenly shipped them to the Ann Arbor campus. And Carapia spent weeks trying to figure out their not-so-state-of-the-art microscope — at one point resorting to contacting the rep whose business card had been attached to the device who knows when. “It was the last couple weeks and I was, like, ‘Oh my gosh, this isn’t going to happen,’” Carapia says. “I was really thinking, ‘Our presentation was just going to look dumb because there’d be nothing there.’”

The team bumped into quite a few challenges, in part, because their multi-faceted project was one of the more ambitious in the competition. Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering Caymen Novak had it on her to-do list for some time to bring an imaging technique known as traction force microscopy to the Dearborn campus for the first time. TFM is used often in mechanobiology to study how cells interact with their microenvironments, and Novak thought it could be very useful for her current work, which is investigating how sex-based differences influence pulmonary fibrosis, a lung disease marked by significant scarring and stiffening of lung tissue. “So just to explain it briefly, you have a gel with fluorescent beads in it, and you put cells on it, so the cell interacts with the surface and pulls on it,” Novak explains. “Then, you take some ‘before’ pictures of the cells and the fluorescent beads, then you lift the cells off and take an ‘after’ picture. By measuring the movement of the beads, you can get a representation of the amount of force the cell is exerting on the surface.”

Novak had used this technique in her postdoctoral work at The Ohio State University, but there, she was plugging into an established lab setup. She hadn’t ever personally created the gels or configured the microscope for this type of imaging, and the analysis protocol was a closely guarded secret of the project’s principal investigator. So when Kormos, who’d been working as a student researcher in Novak’s lab, asked Novak if she had any projects for her and her Senior Design teammates, Novak immediately thought of the TFM setup. “I thought, ‘This sounds like a really ambitious Senior Design project. Let’s see how far they get,’” Novak says. Kormos took the idea to her teammates, who all liked the idea. They sketched out a plan for who would do what and got to work.

Because TFM is an established technique, there was actually quite a bit of literature out there to guide them. But it’s hardly a plug-and-play technology. The gels, for example, can’t be purchased off the shelf. You have to buy all the ingredients and make your own gel from scratch, fine tuning the chemistry so you have a medium with the proper stiffness for the kind of cells you want to study. Kormos and Reamer took on that part of the project and ran into several challenges. “You’d think because this has been done before, it would be pretty straightforward, but you follow the recipe, and sometimes your gel just doesn’t form,” Kormos says. “So we had to do some digging and figure out which component was doing what. Then we learned you had to add this component before that one or it wouldn’t work, or you have to dilute something just before you add it. So it took some troubleshooting before we found the proper protocol.” And then there was the unexpected challenge of even getting the materials properly delivered to their lab. Despite specifying the correct Dearborn campus address, Reamer says the distributor shipped their biologically sensitive components — one costing $400 for 50 milligrams — to the Ann Arbor campus not once but twice. When the third shipment finally made it to the lab, it arrived a week late. “I spent a lot of time on customer service,” Reamer says, wryly. “That was probably my biggest contribution to the project.”

After overcoming multiple shipping snafus, Nicole Kormos (left) and Emmet Reamer successfully created the custom gels that are used in traction force microscopy.

Carapia, meanwhile, was wrestling with the lab’s less-than-ideal microscope to see if they could get it to work for TFM. She got some initial guidance from a couple other researchers on campus who also use this particular instrument. She made some initial progress — only to discover that she’d need to integrate a totally different camera-software setup than the one she’d just spent the past few weeks learning. Then, a weeks-long email back-and-forth with the person on that business card ended up in a dead end. In the end, Carapia relied on her engineer’s instincts, rolled up her sleeves and figured out most of it herself.

Rosa Carapia (left) took on the challenge of adapting the lab’s older microscope, with help from teammate Emmet Reamer.

Hagedorn and Oralde tackled the analysis part of the project. Essentially they would have to write and tweak software to properly measure the displacement of the fluorescent beads and then convert those measurements into forces, given the known characteristics of the gel. Hagedorn dug into the published literature and found an open-source algorithm he thought they could work with. “By the end, it was pretty good, but initially, we got a lot of random arrows that were pointing in random directions,” Oralde says. “And we had to tweak variables and figure out what the right contrast was for the images, so the algorithm was tracking points that were relevant and not just random,” Hagedorn adds.

Micah Hagedorn (left) and Kenny Conuel Oralde show off the software they built to measure displacements and calculate corresponding forces that the cells exert.

All the effort finally — and somewhat unexpectedly — paid off. With just a week or so to go until the Senior Design Competition day — and following a 19-hour session in the lab — they got their final set of images to work, measured the displacements and calculated the corresponding forces. The students say they would have loved to have had more time to run a mini-study with their technique, which was their original plan. (They joke it may have been possible had their FedEx packages arrived on time.) But they’re ultimately satisfied with the results. Novak is now digging through their final report to see what her next moves will be. “I’ve still not gotten hands-on with this myself, so I’ll have to see if I can make this process work, or possibly throw it to another Senior Design team to keep working on it,” Novak says.

Regardless, she’s impressed with the team’s hard work and tenacity. “It was interesting to watch them experience the difficulties of research,” Novak says. “They were, like, ‘We were there for hours trying to take these images.’ And I’m, like, ‘Yep, that’s how it works.’ But you have to admire their dedication in forcing this project to work on any level. In research, everything takes three times as long as you predict, often because of silly things, like deliveries going to the wrong address, which are totally beyond your control. And then you have to put way more effort in than you think. So that was a little eye-opening for them. But I’m sure they’ll feel it was worth it because they won everything! It doesn’t get better than that.”

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Story by Lou Blouin. Photos by Annie Barker.

Awards

Experiential Learning

Undergraduate Research

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Mechanical Engineering

Off

Mon, 05/19/2025 - 12:07

Assistant Professor Caymen Novak threw an ambitious project to her Senior Design team. It almost didn’t work out. Until it did.

From left, seniors Kenny Conuel Oralde, Emmet Reamer, Rosa Carapia, Nicole Kormos and Micah Hagedorn took home the top prize at this year’s Senior Design Competition for their work on an imaging technique known as traction force microscopy.

News

Class of Spring 2025: CECS graduate Mahendra Kakad

lblouin — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 13:12:37 +0000

Class of Spring 2025: CECS graduate Mahendra Kakad lblouin Mon, 04/21/2025 - 09:12

Back in his home country of India, ��-Dearborn graduate student Mahendra Kakad already had a good life and a good job. He actually already had a master’s degree and had been working in the automotive industry for eight years as a design engineer, including with a startup that was building electric mopeds as a way to put EVs within reach for more consumers. But a few years ago, Kakad, who describes himself as an “aspirational, self-motivated person,” started to think more strategically about what he wanted the next stage of his career to look like. If he ever wanted to make a bigger impact on a company, say, as a chief technical officer, he knew he’d likely need to complement his advanced technical skills with managerial ones. With two teachers for parents, he says he’s always loved education. And when he learned about the engineering management master’s program at ��-Dearborn, which was located in the heart of one of the world’s biggest automotive centers, he thought it was a good bet to help him take that next step.

Engineers have a reputation for being super analytical thinkers, and Kakad definitely used that mindset to shape his new life in the United States. From the outset, he sought out advice from his fellow students who were in the second year of the program to get a sense of what he needed to do to be successful. One of their first recommendations was to get involved in as many things as possible outside of his studies. So he joined student government; he connected with the vibrant Indian Graduate Student Association; he lent his expertise to MASA, the student rocketry team. “I was on campus almost all the time — even Saturdays and Sundays,” he says. “The only time I was really at my apartment was when I was sleeping and eating dinner.” His on-campus presence helped him check another box on his wishlist: getting an on-campus job. One day, at an event, he bumped into John Cristiano, the College of Engineering and Computer Science assistant dean for research development and strategic initiatives, who remarked that Kakad seemed to be “everywhere.” Kakad mentioned that he wanted to work on campus in order to gain some experience, and Cristiano and CECS Dean Ghassan Kridli scooped him up, creating a program assistant position to help him manage corporate relations. “The system is very different in India. So I sort of saw the job as ‘kindergarten’ for me. I could help support myself financially and also get to know what the work culture is like in the United States,” Kakad says.

At this point, Kakad was still just a few months into his studies, but he was already preparing for a future job search. As an international student, he wasn’t authorized to work off campus, even at an internship, until he’d completed 18 credits, something that was still more than six months away. He started working with a recruiter, noting on his resume when he’d be work-eligible, but he generally found employers weren’t planning that far ahead. So, after getting some advice from his classmates and the staff at Career Services, he used the time to continue tweaking his resume to fit American norms. With his years of experience in industry, Kakad thought he’d be an attractive candidate and set himself what seemed like a reasonable goal: get an internship offer by January 2024. But he saw that target come and go, even as students younger and less experienced than him were lining up their internships. It was disappointing, but like a good engineer, he saw the lack of response as motivation to retool his resume.

One day when he was feeling particularly frustrated, he went to the Tesla website and directly applied for “15 or 20 jobs.” In early February 2024, he finally got a bite. Interestingly, it wasn’t for any of the positions he'd applied for, but a hiring manager had seen his resume in the system and reached out directly to ask him about his interest in another job. He spent the next few days methodically prepping for the half-hour interview. He created a Google doc mapping all the key features of the job description onto his own skill set. He got on LinkedIn and learned as much as he could about the hiring manager. He called a couple of his old colleagues back in India to get their advice. The interview went well, and a couple hours later, he got an email stating he’d made it to the next round of interviews. In a few more days, he finally had an offer.

The internship at Tesla was a technical engineering position, similar to the work he’d been doing back in India. But he says it was a great introduction to how an American workplace functions. Americans are often characterized (in contrast with Europeans, presumably) as workaholics who sometimes don’t even exhaust the often meager amount of vacation time their jobs allow. But Kakad says Americans have nothing on people in many Asian countries. In his former position, seven-day work weeks were the expectation and it was hard to ever really turn work off. “For example, in my previous roles, if you’re given an assignment, your manager might come up to you and ask, ‘Have you mailed that guy?’ And if you say ‘yes’ — ‘Have you called that guy?’ If you say ‘yes’ — ‘Have you messaged that guy?’ If you say ‘yes’ — ‘Have you met that guy?’” Kakad says, laughing. Here in the U.S., he was happy to see that people generally took weekends off and that managers gave their employees more agency. Even at Tesla, where he says they “stretch a little bit,” any weekend work is lower-key, and you definitely shouldn’t be bombarding your colleagues with emails and phone calls.

The internship at Tesla went very well. Kakad was the only one in his group who got to travel internationally, and he visited nearly all the Tesla manufacturing facilities in the United States. As it wound down, he started applying for full-time positions within the company. This time, the job search was decidedly less bumpy. “I remember it was Feb. 6 last year that I got the interview call from Tesla for my internship and Feb. 6 this year that I got the offer for my full-time job,” he says. Better still, this new position is more in line with what he was hoping going back to school would lead to. Rather than working as a design engineer, he’ll be working more on the manufacturing side as a supplier industrialization engineer, helping coordinate the production and ensure the quality of components as they pass from the design phase through a complex manufacturing process. He credits his ��-Dearborn professors — particularly Professors Shan Bao and Onur Ulgen and lecturers Roger Klungle and Faisal Khalaf — with preparing him for this new role in which knowledge of quality control processes and systems engineering will be crucial. “The quality of the instructors we have at ��-Dearborn is really next-scale,” he says. “They are working with big companies. They are working with the Department of Defense. And they have years of experience in industry and academia. So it’s been a privilege to get to know them and learn from them.”

Kakad is definitely looking forward to this next chapter, which will involve a move to California. Through the post-completion Optional Practical Training portion of his student visa, which includes a STEM extension, he currently has work authorization through 2028. And he recently got more good news: The application for his H-1B visa, which would allow him to extend his stay in the United States even further, was recently selected in the government’s lottery process and should be active in 2026. But he’s also a little sad to be leaving Dearborn. “When you come to the United States from another country, I think the state where you end up sort of becomes your home away from home,” he says. “I really like Michigan. I’m a nature lover. And I’ve made so many friends here. I’ll miss those days where you’re on campus and you just bump into a professor and have a nice conversation. But my journey at Tesla has also been very good, and as I look ahead, I carry both the values I brought from home and the experiences I’ve gained here. I’m excited to contribute at the intersection of engineering and leadership.”

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Story by Lou Blouin

Careers or Internships

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering

Off

Mon, 04/21/2025 - 13:12

The spring master’s graduate used an engineer’s mindset to navigate a tricky job market and land a job at Tesla.

Photo by Annie Barker

News

How postdocs help faculty take research to another level

lblouin — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 16:34:51 +0000

How postdocs help faculty take research to another level lblouin Mon, 03/31/2025 - 12:34

When students complete a doctoral degree, they’re at the top of one of the highest mountains in higher education. But just like undergraduates facing post-graduation anxiety, postdoctoral life can represent a fraught time for recent PhD graduates. For those interested in long-term careers in academia, they’re likely embarking on job searches for highly competitive faculty positions. And if someone wants to work in the private sector, employers in at least some industries seem to balk at hiring highly trained applicants with little industry experience — simply because they generally command higher salaries than those with less-advanced degrees.

Director of Research Development Vessela Vassileva-Clarke
Photo by Julianne Lindsey

But there is another option for recent PhD grads: working as a postdoctoral researcher. As the name suggests, this is a research position at a university, typically lasting one to three years, that someone takes after they finish their PhD. ��-Dearborn Director of Research Development Vessela Vassileva-Clarke says this may be an attractive route for a number of reasons. For example, if a person isn’t quite sure whether they want to go into academia or industry, a postdoc position can simply buy someone a little time to figure it out, while they continue to stay active and build a research portfolio. And for those who are definitely interested in faculty positions, doing a postdoc can help someone burnish their CV if, say, they weren't able to publish as much as they’d liked during their PhD program. In addition, depending on the arrangement between the researcher and their faculty advisor, Vassileva-Clarke says a postdoc position might give someone a chance to log some teaching experience — or even pursue an externally funded grant for a research project that they co-lead with a faculty member. Moreover, a postdoc gives recent PhD grads experiences in other core parts of academic life that they may not have gotten in their doctoral programs, like proposal writing.

��-Dearborn currently has about a dozen postdoctoral researchers working on campus, the vast majority of whom are working with faculty in the College of Engineering and Computer Science. Rongheng Li, who finished his PhD at ��-Dearborn under Mechanical Engineering Professor Ben Q. Li in 2019, says the opportunity to do a postdoc actually grew organically out of his doctoral research experience. His research focused on some of the advanced mathematical challenges associated with the use of nanoparticles in photovoltaic systems, which is seen as a promising way of improving output from solar panels. But then one day, toward the end of his PhD program, Li found himself chatting with Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Xuan (Joe) Zhou. The two of them discovered that a lot of the same mathematical methods Li was using in the area of photovoltaics might have interesting applications for battery research, which is Zhou’s specialty. Now, as a postdoc, Li is working on several of Zhou’s funded projects, including one exploring how well used EV batteries perform when used in a grid-tied storage system.

“A lot of my prior work has been very theoretical, so working with Dr. Zhou is giving me a chance to learn in a more experimental setting,” Li says. “I’m learning new instrumentation, and I got to visit the clean room in Ann Arbor, where they are working on a variety of projects. So I think it’s going to be quite valuable for me to get this hands-on experience, including with batteries, which is a technology that’s so important for the future.” Another big payoff for Li: He’s getting to work closely with the research team’s industry partners, which is helping him see how private sector projects are managed and how their teams work. After his postdoc, he thinks he’ll likely be applying for faculty jobs in the United States. But he’s not opposed to a position in the private sector, and he thinks the practical experience he’s logging during his postdoc will make him a more competitive candidate.

Rongheng Li completed his PhD at ��-Dearborn in 2019 and now works as a postdoctoral researcher. Photo by Annie Barker

Gajendra Singh Chawda followed a different path to ��-Dearborn for his postdoc. Chawda finished his PhD in electrical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in early 2022 and took a postdoctoral research position there after graduation. But he really wanted to get experience at an American university, and when he saw a posting for a postdoctoral research position working with Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Wencong Su, he felt like it would be a great fit. Chawda’s work focuses on the complexities of integrating renewable energy into the electric grid and renewable energy access for economically disadvantaged communities — which happen to be two of Su’s research interests. Currently, Chawda is working on some foundational research on high-frequency AC microgrids — a technology that many researchers and industry experts see as vital for modernizing the electric grid so it can accommodate more renewable energy and battery storage. Chawda says one of the other big perks of the position is that he gets to work as a lecturer — the first time he’s had the opportunity to teach students outside of a lab setting.

Moreover, it’s also been an exciting time for his family. His wife and daughter accompanied him for this adventure in the United States, and Chawda says his daughter loves her school in Dearborn Heights. “She’s always so excited to come home and show me what she’s done at school,” he says. “The American education system is a lot different. In India, I would say it’s more focused on books and, here, students seem to do a lot of activities. For example, she came home the other day and was so proud to show me the house that she built.” Like Li, Chawda says he’s hoping to find a faculty position at an American university after his postdoc and thinks having that experience on his CV will boost his chances of success.

Aside from the professional benefits to postdoctoral researchers, Vassileva-Clarke says there are huge benefits for their faculty supervisors. “The impact is tremendous. Postdoctoral researchers are just so helpful to faculty members because they are already trained and highly skilled, so they can help a faculty member with so many things that are so time consuming, like proposal writing, hands-on research in the lab, or research training and mentoring of students,” Vassileva-Clarke says. “PhD students are super helpful too, but you still have to train them, advise them, and then some of them find out research is not their calling. So a postdoc really extends the bandwidth of the faculty member.”

Assistant Professor of Organic Chemistry Christos Constantinides
Photo by Annie Barker

Assistant Professor of Organic Chemistry Christos Constantinides can vouch for that. As an early-career faculty member working towards tenure, he was excited to recently land a large grant from the U.S. Department of Energy supporting research that could improve nuclear magnetic resonance-based technologies like MRI. But with a demanding course load teaching organic chemistry to undergraduates, he frankly needs help with the very labor-intensive, advanced chemistry that the DOE-funded project demands. A postdoc was really his only option, since some of the work is too advanced for the undergraduate students he’ll also be hiring for the project, and his department doesn’t have a PhD program he can use to recruit doctoral students.

When he posted the position, Constantinides was surprised to get 65 applicants. He finds that pretty encouraging given that ��-Dearborn just recently earned an R2 designation and he’s still in the process of making his name in the field. But as someone who did a three-year postdoc himself, which he says is a prerequisite to getting a tenure-track position in his discipline, Constantinides gets the logic. “You can go work for a big name at a big university, and if everything goes well, you’ll get your publications and, most importantly, get a letter of recommendation from your mentor. You’re basically going to get a job at that point. But if you don’t get the letter, it can be the kiss of death,” Constantinides says. “That big name — you’re going to see that person maybe one or two hours a week. And, frankly, they don’t need the publications. Me, though? I need the papers. So if you come work with me, you’re going to get more support, more mentorship and hopefully more publications. It’s kind of a gamble either way, but for some people, this postdoc opportunity is going to feel like a good bet.”

###

Story by Lou Blouin

College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters

Natural Sciences

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Office of Research

Off

Mon, 03/31/2025 - 16:31

Postdoctoral researchers on campus are another sign of ��-Dearborn’s growing research culture. But what exactly do postdocs do, and why can they be a game changer for university research?

Postdoctoral researcher Gajendra Singh Chawda is currently researching high-frequency AC microgrids with Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Wencong Su. Photo by Annie Barker

News

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.”

###

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

News

For a ��-Dearborn student and professor, the influence goes both ways

lblouin — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 13:06:36 +0000

For a ��-Dearborn student and professor, the influence goes both ways lblouin Mon, 02/24/2025 - 08:06

In 2020, Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Wencong Su was looking for an undergraduate student to assist with a project focused on adding innovative energy efficiency measures to the already LEED-certified Engineering Lab Building. At the time, Su was teaching all graduate courses so he didn’t have many undergrads in his orbit. So Su asked for a little help from one of his graduate assistants, who emailed the job posting to the students in a 200-level lab. LaRico Andres, a sophomore and recent transfer from Henry Ford College, thought it sounded interesting and reached out to Su with his resume. Su remembers Andres didn’t exactly fit the description of the type of student who usually applies for these kinds of opportunities. Andres was a few years older than Su, already had a full-time job working as an instrument tech at the Great Lakes Water Authority, and his GPA at the time wasn’t knocking anyone out. But after the two chatted for a little while, Su offered him the job. Andres was personable, seemed excited to learn, and though he was a research novice, it turned out his background in instrumentation was actually quite relevant to the types of things they would be investigating in the ELB.

Andres excelled on the project and it led to many more opportunities to work alongside Su. On one project supported by the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps — a program that helps researchers translate their laboratory work into marketable products — Andres traveled to conferences in Orlando, San Diego and Austin, completing a flurry of more than 100 interviews with industrial professionals in seven weeks about a product Su’s lab was developing. On another project, he and Su created an app that used the ELB’s building management software and the utility’s fuel profile to give users an idea of what being a building occupant added to their personal carbon footprint. As you’d expect, Andres picked up a lot of skills working with Su. But as often happens when two people spend a lot of time together, Andres and Su also started talking about things other than their work. Andres jokes that they initially bonded over the fact that they “both like to eat.” But the conversations gradually grew more personal. Both men had daughters, so they talked about their kids. Su shared some of the challenges he faced when he first came to the United States for college and he knew very little English. Andres reciprocated with stories about some challenges he faced growing up in Detroit, not always having enough money to pay all the bills at once, and some things that happened when he was younger that tripped up his plans to go to college earlier in his life.

Su says he enjoyed Andres' perspective — in part, because Su is someone who’s interested in people, and the ups and downs of Andres’ life made for a compelling personal story. In addition, Su says he’s always been interested in Detroit, and through Andres, a lifelong Detroiter, he enjoyed learning about a side of the city that “you don’t hear about on the TV news.” Interestingly, at a certain point, both men noticed that many of their personal conversations weren’t actually that separate from their field of study: energy systems. For example, Andres shared stories about how, in his family, when the power would go out, that meant you didn’t open the fridge so his grandfather’s insulin wouldn’t spoil. Or how, if the power was out long enough, they’d start barbequing the meat they had in the freezer so it wouldn’t go to waste. Or how he and his relatives used to take turns refilling his grandmother’s boiler when she couldn’t afford to fix it right away. “The biggest burden a lot of my people have is energy, whether it’s fuel, gassing up your car going to work, or just trying to keep your house warm,” Andres says. “I know what it’s like to struggle to pay a utility bill and choose between paying that bill on time or buying food. I know people whose furnaces go out and can’t afford to get them fixed. That’s the impact energy has. Energy helps. But if you don't have a lot of money, energy can be a burden.”

Andres’ testimony left an impression on Su, and eventually the two of them started kicking around ideas for projects focused on energy justice, an emerging field that focuses on equity, affordability, accessibility and participation in the energy system and the ongoing transition to new energy technologies. That lens became the cornerstone of their 2023 Summer Undergraduate Research Experience project, in which Andres helped create an interactive mapping tool that explores the connection between historical real estate redlining and disparities in energy access in metro Detroit. Using Andres’ dashboard, a user can quickly toggle through different layers and explore whether a neighborhood is formerly redlined, where current utility outages are and their causes, locations of renewable energy installations and EV charging stations, as well as census data that provides demographic information about the people currently living in the neighborhood. One of the big reveals from Andres’ work is that metro Detroit neighborhoods that were historically redlined tend to be lower-income, non-white, have power outages that tend to be longer, and have less access to renewable energy and EV charging infrastructure. Their work on the app led to an IEEE conference publication in 2023.

Andres shows off an interactive mapping tool he helped create that explores the connection between historical real estate redlining and disparities in energy access. Photo by Annie Barker

After the project, Andres was nearing the end of his undergraduate career, and Su began asking him a little more frequently and persistently if he’d ever thought about grad school. Andres says that honestly wasn’t on his radar when he initially transferred to ��-Dearborn. At that time, his thinking pretty much revolved around the straightforward calculus that getting an engineering degree would help him get a higher-paying job and lead to a more comfortable life for him and his family. But after working in Su’s lab, particularly on the energy justice-focused mapping project, he says his perspective began to change. “If I did the safe thing and got a job, yeah, that would help me. But working with Professor Su helped me see what it is that I really wanted to do. And what I really wanted to do was help people,” Andres says. To do that, Andres decided to take a chance and continue his education, enrolling in the department’s doctoral program, where he’s now continuing his work alongside Su. Andres is still just in his first year of the program, but the pair have already started discussing ideas for Andres’ dissertation research. Not surprisingly, energy justice topics are rising to the top of their list. One idea they’ve been kicking around recently is creating a machine learning-based app that would use weather and outage data to forecast the likelihood of power outages, sort of like the snow day prediction models that have become super popular with parents and kids. “A technology like this could have multiple applications,” Su says. “It could help a utility identify where they need to upgrade their infrastructure to make it more resilient, or where they might need to deploy the most crews ahead of a storm. But it could also directly help people. Like, if you saw that there was a 90% chance you were going to lose your power for five hours tomorrow, people could charge their batteries or make a trip out to get food.”

Andres says it’s still a little wild to think he’s in a PhD program, and the future he’s contemplating for himself now is much different than the one he was thinking about a few years ago. For the time being, he’d love to continue to do research in the energy justice field and develop innovative ways to help people. He also wants to start a nonprofit that gets young people excited about things like sustainable energy technologies and smart cities. Ultimately, if all goes well, he’d love to be a college professor just like his mentor. “It’s funny, the opportunities that come up in your life,” Andres says. “Like, what if I had ignored that email? What if I hadn’t stepped out and emailed professor Su? He saw something in me that I didn’t even know about myself. And he probably doesn't even know how many other people that’s going to touch. My daughter and little cousins, they all get to see that, ‘Hey, Uncle Rico is gonna be a doctor.’ Because of Professor Su, I’m setting a new example for the people in my life. My wife, sister and other family members, everybody is, like, ‘Wow, you was always smart.’ I just went the long way. And I’m just glad I have an opportunity now to make an impact in the community.”

That a college professor would have such a profound impact on a student isn’t super surprising. It’s what many faculty shoot to achieve every day. But Su says Andres has also had a big influence on him. On a personal level, he finds Andres' life so inspiring, and admires his work ethic, the personal sacrifices he’s making to be part of the PhD program, and his vision for using research to help people in his community. Their relationship has also had a big influence on Su’s own work. “For example, losing power for one hour in a wealthy neighborhood compared to a disadvantaged neighborhood, it has totally different impacts. Or if you lose power, then that suddenly becomes a food issue for some people. I never really thought about stuff like that before,” Su says. “Now, I'm thinking more about how our research has the potential to help people. Because, otherwise, maybe you’re just publishing a paper with some very fancy solutions and complicated equations. But how are you helping average people?”

###

Story by Lou Blouin

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Off

Mon, 02/24/2025 - 12:56

Unlikely collaborators who met through a job posting, first-year PhD student LaRico Andres and Professor Wencong Su have forged a partnership that’s left a lasting mark on both men.

Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Wencong Su (left) and doctoral student LaRico Andres have teamed up on a number of research projects focusing on energy justice. Photo by Annie Barker

News

Helping nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy go hi-res

lblouin — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 13:48:43 +0000

Helping nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy go hi-res lblouin Wed, 02/19/2025 - 08:48

Whether you’re talking about MRI, which doctors use to image tissues in the body, or the brand of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy used by organic chemists, Assistant Professor of Chemistry Christos Constantinides says the core idea behind the technique is basically the same. You start with a sample — in organic chemistry, it’s a compound you want to know the structure of, and in an MRI, it’s your body — and you surround it within a powerful magnet. The magnetic field causes the nuclei in the atoms in the sample, which have naturally occurring random spins, to momentarily align these spins with the external field, either in a parallel (lower energy state) or antiparallel orientation (higher energy state). Then, you shoot radio waves at the sample, which causes the spins of the parallel-spinning nuclei to momentarily flip to an antiparallel state. When you turn off the radio waves, these flipped nuclei then “relax,” returning to their original orientation. That releases a small amount of energy as an oscillating magnetic field, which induces an electrical signal. This signal is detected and processed to generate an NMR spectrum in the case of molecular analysis. For MRI, it can be used to create an image of tissues in the body.

Constantinides says NMR is an extremely powerful technique, but it still has some limitations. Notably, certain substances give off very weak signals when they relax out of their “excited” state, which means the spectra generated through NMR often don’t tell you everything you want to know. Scientists have discovered various ways to enhance NMR’s powers. For example, with MRI, contrast dyes can help doctors see more details in the brain, heart, blood vessels, soft tissues and tumors. In materials chemistry, Constantinides says organic chemists use what are called polarizing agents, which are chemical compounds that are added in solution with the sample. Chemically speaking, these compounds are “radicals,” meaning they have at least one unpaired electron (most atoms have electrons which orbit the nucleus in pairs). In an NMR environment, Constantinides says these unpaired electrons are able to influence the nucleus of the molecules in the sample through spin polarization transfer mechanisms, indirectly assisting the “flipping” process that is essential to NMR imaging. “This basically increases the sensitivity of the technique,” he says. “So for molecules that are difficult to get a good NMR spectrum because they give very weak signals, by adding a little bit of this organic radical substance, it basically amplifies the signal and you get more detail.”

Polarizing agents have greatly enhanced NMR spectroscopy, but they aren’t universally effective. For example, Constantinides says today’s most common polarizing agents, known as nitronyl nitroxides, can only be used with certain kinds of substances, because these radicals react with compounds that oxidize easily. With a new $600,000 project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and in conjunction with the Ames National Laboratory, Constantinides is looking to create novel polarizing agents that don’t have these limitations. He says when he describes this project to others, it ends up sounding like a lot of physics, because of the potential applications for NMR and MRI. But the day-to-day work will be a lot of advanced and, at times, unglamorous synthetic organic chemistry. During the three-year project, Constantinides estimates they’ll create 50 to 100 new derivatives of a class of molecules known as Blatter radicals — each of which takes weeks and a carefully planned sequence of chemical reactions to create. “Each compound requires six to 10 different steps,” he says. “One step can take multiple days to set up the chemical reaction, then you have to process it, clean it up a little bit and remove all the inorganic stuff, purify it, and then characterize it to see if you’ve made what you think you’ve made.” To assist with the labor-intensive research, Constantinides is hiring a postdoctoral research fellow and several undergraduates, which will give students an opportunity to get hands-on experience in some very advanced chemistry.

Constantinides in the lab with student research assistants Haidar Dakdouk (middle) and Carter Allen (front). Photo by Annie Barker

Even with this patient, methodical approach, Constantinides says success in organic chemistry is never assured. Over the years, he’s refined multiple techniques for creating certain kinds of molecules. But when you’re making something totally new, he says you never really know which methods will give you the best result — or whether your plan will even work — until you actually try it. “Maybe all of them fail, and then you have to try something totally different. It can be a lot of trial and error,” he says. As each new polarizing agent is created, Constantinides says they’ll first characterize it using the NMR setup at ��-Dearborn. After that, they’ll send the new compounds to the Ames National Laboratory, where they will be mixed in solution with substances that have well-known NMR profiles. By seeing how much of a boost in the signal the nuclei give off, they’ll know which new polarizing agents have the most potential to enhance NMR techniques.

Constantinides says some of his preliminary published research on this topic has shown a lot of potential for Blatter-type radicals, which is why the DOE has funded further work in this area. He says if all goes well, he’s hoping for two big applications: One, it’ll give materials chemists like himself tools for providing detailed characterizations of molecules which have been hard to study using other techniques. The even bigger payoff would be if one of the new molecules they create is suitable for use in MRI, which would give doctors much higher-resolution images of tissues and tumors.

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Story by Lou Blouin

Faculty Research

Research

Technology

College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters

Natural Sciences

Off

Wed, 02/19/2025 - 13:48

Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, used in technologies like MRI, helps scientists see the unseen. New research from Assistant Professor Christos Constantinides could help magnify NMR’s powers even more.

With a new $600,000 project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Assistant Professor Christos Constantinides is hoping to create novel chemical compounds that can enhance nuclear magnetic resonance-based technologies, like MRI. Photo by Annie Barker

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For a ������-Dearborn student and professor, the influence goes both ways

Helping nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy go hi-res

For a ��-Dearborn student and professor, the influence goes both ways