Undergraduate Research

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.

A ‘SURE’ benefit: Students gain research skills to open doors for careers, grad school

stuxbury — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 15:51:25 +0000

A ‘SURE’ benefit: Students gain research skills to open doors for careers, grad school stuxbury Mon, 09/23/2024 - 11:51

��-Dearborn prides itself on project-based learning, faculty mentorship and research opportunities for undergraduate students. The university’s SURE — Summer Undergraduate Research Experience — program combines all of these to give students an advantage when it comes to resume building or grad school applications.

“The magical thing about the SURE program is an ability to see and explore what you are interested in — and you get paid to do this work so you are able to put in the energy, time and effort,” says College of Arts, Sciences & Letters senior Anna Lariviere.

The SURE program pairs faculty mentors and undergraduate students for an 8-12 week summer session where student researchers conduct hands-on research, attend professional development sessions and participate in social outings. They receive a stipend for their work. .

SURE project participation increased 48% this year and provided opportunities for 49 students, who worked in areas ranging from medical research to social justice. See the complete list.

Here’s what two students gained from this year’s experience. Additional SURE projects were featured in last week’s Reporter.

Brendan McCloskey with faculty advisors Associate Professor Maggie Yi Guo and Professor Young Ro
Project: User assessment of security threats

Before company data breaches seemed like a regular thing, there was the shock of the 2013 Target data breach. Cybercriminals stole 40 million credit and debit records and 70 million customer records. Management Information Systems Associate Professor Maggie Guo, a technologist, and Operations Management Professor Young Ro, a behaviorist, researched the event at length at the time. “The breach happened because someone did not update their software,” says Guo, noting there wasn’t much other research on the topic. “So what can leaders do to best motivate people to update their software?”

After taking a hiatus from that particular research project due to the pandemic and competing priorities, the two faculty members resumed the work after learning that 2023 had the highest number of data breaches on record. According to the Identity Theft Resource Center 2023 Data Breach Report, 2023 saw a 72% increase in data breaches since 2021, which held the previous all-time record.

Enter Brendan McCloskey, a College of Business junior majoring in information management systems who often sits at the front of the class. McCloskey learned about the research work from Guo, who taught his IT-related business classes.

McCloskey spent his summer working with Guo and Ro to develop and pilot test a Qualtrics survey that explores what conditions need to exist for a person to update their computer software to protect data from a breach. This motivational understanding can help CIOs and other business leaders work to develop resources, like training videos, that play to the psyche of the computer user. McCloskey, who enjoys the technological side of business, says he’s never done research before and he wanted to get experience in database and cybersecurity work. “I now have experience in different sectors of business systems, which opens more doors for me,” McCloskey says. “I also learned how to take in and analyze relevant information fairly quickly through the literature reviews and analysis I did over the summer. That’s a skill that will help me in the future too.”

McCloskey helped the two professors conduct their first test study. Together, they learned that motivating factors include physical proximity and perceived potential loss. McCloskey also helped contribute to the publication of an abstract about these results, which was recently accepted as a topic of presentation at the 2024 Decision Sciences Institute’s Annual Conference in November. They are currently seeking funding so McCloskey can attend the conference and present this work.

McCloskey says the SURE program not only provided additional opportunities for him, it also made him more comfortable reaching out to his professors and feeling more connected to campus. “I’m an introvert — surprise, an introvert who likes IT— and I don’t like to put myself out there. But I did and it was a very good experience for me. I am glad Dr. Guo asked me to work with her,” he says. “I learned new software, saw the level of detail that goes into research and met new people. I also am more confident in my abilities.”

Anna Lariviere with faculty advisor Associate Professor Harmony Reppond
Project: Bait and switch of the American dream: Persuasion tactics of MLMs

Avon is calling — as is Tupperware, Amway, Scentsy and other multi-level marketing businesses. But are they selling a realistic picture of the success someone can achieve through what they offer? And what tactics do MLMs use when trying to sell the American dream?

Senior Anna Lariviere, who is majoring in psychology, wrote a persuasive paper on the 2021 Netflix documentary series “LuLaRich” for a composition course during her freshman year. What the CASL student didn’t know at the time was that, across the CASL Building, Psychology Associate Professor Harmony Reppond was beginning her own exploration into the topic.

Fast forward three years: After taking Reppond’s social psychology course, Lariviere learned that her professor conducted 51 interviews with people involved in MLMs. In those candid interviews, interviewees — many of whom were college educated — said they didn’t learn about MLMs in college and were not prepared for the outcomes they experienced. Reppond wanted to provide psychologically relevant information for MLM information seekers based on the data she’s gathered like recruitment and sales tactics.

Lariviere, who plans to attend graduate school for clinical psychology and wants to work in healthcare, wanted to get involved with research but wasn’t sure if she’d be able to get that type of experience as an undergraduate. She says Reppond’s project gave her the opportunity she sought. “This gave me a chance to build skills and see how all the psychology classes I’ve taken come together. I’ve learned how to do this work in silos — like one class may focus on a certain aspect of psychology research — but this helped me apply it in one project,” she says.

Throughout the summer, Lariviere read through interview transcripts to look for emerging themes. “Even though the interviewees were from several different MLMs, they had common experiences. We figured out the factors at play between the people,” Lariviere says. Themes that emerged included high-control groupthink (pressure or a desire to conform) and social proof (where someone is influenced by the actions of others). Based on the themes, Reppond developed a persuasion tactics code book and she and Lariviere are working on a publication.

Lariviere says the experience confirmed her love of her chosen career field and will help her stand out when it comes to applying for graduate school. And Reppond says Lariviere is an excellent student and researcher whose work will help the public better understand MLM tactics.

“This is not saying something is good or bad. It’s about showing the system at play and how persuasion impacts people. We see it as an awareness piece,” Reppond says. “We want to give people researched information so they can make better educated decisions for themselves.”

Story by Sarah Tuxbury

Research

College of Business

Off

Mon, 09/23/2024 - 15:50

Nearly 50 students from all four colleges took part in the 2024 Summer Undergraduate Research Experience. Hear from two of them.

COB Professor Maggie Yi Guo and junior Brendan McCloskey did research on data security breaches. Photos by Annie Barker

Spring ’24 grad parlays research and baseball experience into MLB job

lblouin — Mon, 10 Jun 2024 14:27:20 +0000

Spring ’24 grad parlays research and baseball experience into MLB job lblouin Mon, 06/10/2024 - 10:27

Matthew Williams doesn’t remember a time when he didn’t picture himself in baseball. When he was a 4-year-old kid, the dream was playing in the big leagues. As he got older and more realistic, he imagined being a coach or a strength and conditioning trainer might be where he’d land. His associate degree in exercise science from Grand Rapids Community College put him in a good position for that. But after graduation, he decided to keep going with his education and transferred into the business program at ��-Dearborn, where he also scored a starting position as an outfielder and pitcher on the baseball team. “My thinking was maybe I’d open my own training facility, and I knew the baseball side of things. But I didn’t know anything about running a business,” Williams says. About a semester in, however, he figured out the business curriculum wasn’t for him. Baseball remained the dream, but he’d have to find another path.

Williams took a straightforward approach to finding a new major: He did a thorough survey of the university’s online program catalog and tried to find something that matched his interests and exercise science background. He’d never thought about engineering, but among the course offerings in the mechanical engineering program he found several biomechanics classes. He decided to place his bets there, and it turned out to be a much better fit. He found Associate Professor Amanda Esquivel’s courses particularly interesting, and when he discovered she ran a bioengineering lab that focused on athletics and injury prevention, he reached out to see if she had any open positions. “It was kind of a chance thing,” Williams says. “I didn’t really know that doing research with a professor was something you could do, but a friend of mine was telling me about their experience, so I just sent Professor Esquivel an email and hoped she’d have something available.” It turned out Esquivel did, and Williams landed a position as an undergraduate research assistant. For someone who loved sports and exercise science, it was pretty much a perfect part-time job. In the lab, Williams got to work on several projects that used wearable sensors and video motion capture to research how various movements strain the body, with a goal of preventing ACL injuries. Though many of the studies focused on girls’ soccer, Esquivel also helped Williams with his own independent study, where he analyzed open source data collected on baseball pitchers.

Williams played three years for ��-Dearborn’s baseball team and owns several team records, including most career home runs. He had to miss the April commencement ceremony for a game. He hit three home runs that day, the most ever by a ��-Dearborn player in a single game. Photo courtesy ��-Dearborn Athletics

Williams wasn’t necessarily thinking about it when he started in Esquivel’s lab, but the work was basically setting him up for that career in professional baseball he’d been searching for. Elbow injuries, long a problem for pitchers, have become a full-blown plague in the modern game. Today’s pitching is all about velocity, and as athletes try to throw harder and harder, they’re almost literally ripping their elbows apart. Even young pitchers are having to resort to Tommy John surgery — the sport’s now-routine remedy for ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction, named after a former MLB pitcher. Fear of catastrophic elbow injuries is also why starting pitchers going deeper than five innings is now the exception not the rule, something many fans and critics have pointed out has fundamentally changed the nature of the game. Williams says teams now closely track pitching speed and total innings pitched in an effort to ensure their star players don’t end up on the disabled list — or out of baseball altogether.

In the past few years, teams have also started using biomechanics labs to reduce injuries and evaluate prospects. Using the same technology that Williams used in Esquivel’s lab, trainers try to figure out if aspects of a pitcher’s throwing motion are putting them at risk for injury, as well as whether changes to their pitching mechanics could help prevent injury. With high-speed cameras, force plates in the pitching mound and wearable sensors affixed to an athlete’s legs, torso, pelvis, shoulders and elbows, Williams says engineers can actually track how energy flows through the body at critical stages of the pitching motion. The data reveal, for example, if a risky amount of torque is being placed on the throwing elbow. You can also measure whether a change in motion, like a slightly earlier rotation of the pelvis, can reduce strain on the elbow without sacrificing velocity.

As a baseball player, Williams knew that biomechanics labs like this were becoming a big thing in the sport. So as graduation approached, he started looking into whether he could parlay his ��-Dearborn experience into a job. “I basically Googled ‘MLB and biomechanics’ and found a job posting with the Kansas City Royals to work with their pitching prospects in Arizona,” Williams says. Not surprisingly, with Williams’ history as a pitcher, lifelong baseball player and someone who had experience working in the same kind of biomechanics lab, the Royals snatched him up. Williams says it’s basically a dream job — aside from the fact that it’s with one of the Tigers’ division rivals and it’s not actually playing baseball. However, he’s not ready to accept that his playing days are behind him. He points out that he still has one year of college eligibility. And if he decides to go to grad school at some point, he’ll likely take a look at his chances of making the school’s baseball team when deciding where to apply — even if that means being the oldest guy on the field. That, or he says he’s considering trying out for the independent league team near the city he’ll be living in in Arizona — though there’s no chance he’d give up his job with the Royals even if he made the roster. “The pay is like $200 for three months. So, yeah, probably not worth it,” he says. His years at ��-Dearborn, however, seem like they were.

###

Story by Lou Blouin

Careers or Internships

Research

Athletics

Mechanical Engineering

Off

Mon, 06/10/2024 - 14:26

After working in Associate Professor Amanda Esquivel’s bioengineering lab, ��-Dearborn slugger Matthew Williams landed a gig working with pitchers in the Kansas City Royals’ biomechanics facility.

��-Dearborn baseball player Matthew Williams. Photo courtesy ��-Dearborn Athletics

Amanda Esquivel is pushing student research into its next phase at ��-Dearborn

lblouin — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 14:09:47 +0000

Amanda Esquivel is pushing student research into its next phase at ��-Dearborn lblouin Mon, 03/25/2024 - 10:09

Amanda Esquivel knows firsthand how having an opportunity to do research as an undergraduate can change the course of your life. When she was a young engineering student at ��-Ann Arbor, she went in with a plan to get her bachelor’s degree and find a solid job in the automotive industry. But during her first year, she got a heads up about a program that the campus had started to recruit more undergraduates to work in research labs. Esquivel remembers leafing through the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program’s “huge book of 400 research projects” that students could apply to work on, and she landed a spot in a lab where she’d end up spending a year and a half. “That was my first experience seeing that there are undergrad students, master’s students, Ph.D. students and faculty all working together to make these things happen,” she says. “I mean, I had no parent, no aunt or uncle who had any sort of job like that. So until then, I didn’t really think of ‘research’ as a job — like, as something you could do with your life.”

After a brief stint in an ill-fitting automotive engineering job, Esquivel did indeed decide to make research the thing she’d do with her life. She enrolled in a master’s, then Ph.D., program at Wayne State University — a life move she likely wouldn’t have considered without her prior lab experience. She knows not every student who does undergraduate research is going to follow that path. And she thinks it’s totally OK if students try working in a lab and decide it’s not for them — or choose to apply what they’ve learned to their lives or careers. But Esquivel believes strongly that every student — especially students, like she was, who don’t have someone in their personal life guiding them toward these opportunities — should get a shot to do this kind of work. Throughout her career at ��-Dearborn, Esquivel has poured her energy into making this happen. In her own bioengineering lab, undergraduate researchers power much of the work, and she’s watched several continue into master’s and Ph.D. programs, in part, as a result of their experience. (She jokes that the only reason she recently and reluctantly joined LinkedIn is because it’s the best way to keep tabs on all the great things her former students are doing now.) And a few years back, she was part of the team that launched the Summer Undergraduate Research Experience, a cohort experience that provides paid student research positions in faculty labs across campus, along with a variety of skill development workshops.

By nearly every measure, Esquivel says SURE has been a huge success. It’s grown every year, and it’s attracted the diverse pool of applicants the program was intended for. But Esquivel believes the program — and undergraduate research in general — will need a steadier foundation if it’s going to continue to grow at the university. Right now, Esquivel says SURE is funded largely with contributions from the Provost’s Office and a recent contribution from Enrollment Management, as well as a dedicated fund that supports 10 students. “Luckily, we’ve been able to fund every student so far, but I think if we want to continue to grow the program, we need a more sustainable way to fund it," Esquivel says. "And the funding is so important because, in my opinion, if these student positions aren’t paid, they’re only going to be available to students who are in a financial position to be able to work for free.”

To that end, Esquivel is using her current Provost Fellowship to help shore up funding for SURE. She recently worked with Institutional Advancement to set up a dedicated fund for the program, a key bit of financial infrastructure that will help organizers fundraise and court donors. And she’s currently working on ideas to extend opportunities like SURE beyond the summer. “Especially for any kind of lab science, the longer that you can do it, the more you’re going to get out of it. With a summer experience, students are really just getting started and then it’s over,” she says. One other thing Esquivel is focusing on during her fellowship: Getting more faculty to apply for the National Science Foundation’s Research Experience for Undergraduates Sites program. REU Sites provides funding for cohorts of 10 students to do work around new or ongoing NSF research awards, which a growing number of ��-Dearborn faculty are laying claim to. To date, just a handful of faculty have hosted an REU Site at ��-Dearborn, though Esquivel is hoping that the strong attendance at her March REU workshop for faculty is a sign that could soon change.

For Esquivel, it’s lots of little steps like this, more than big initiatives, that are likely to move the undergraduate research culture forward at ��-Dearborn. The reality is that funding for extras is always going to be a little tight. And we may never have a big book of hundreds of research opportunities that students can simply browse and pick from. Building on the current momentum will take creativity, pluck, generosity and people like Esquivel making the pitch that undergraduate research can be a life changer — especially for students who never imagined research was a thing you could do with your life.

###

Do you have a story about how undergraduate research made a difference for you? We’d love to hear about it. Drop us a line at umdearborn-news@umich.edu. Story by Lou Blouin

Faculty and Staff

Research

University-wide

Mechanical Engineering

Off

Mon, 03/25/2024 - 14:05

Undergraduate research has some solid momentum at ��-Dearborn. With her 2023-24 Provost Fellowship, the associate professor of mechanical engineering is focusing on how to keep it going.

Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering Amanda Esquivel

Class of Fall 2023: CECS graduate Olivia Pellegrini

lblouin — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 15:53:35 +0000

Class of Fall 2023: CECS graduate Olivia Pellegrini lblouin Mon, 12/11/2023 - 10:53

High school robotics clubs or computer science classes provide many students with a gateway to a college experience in a STEM field. Unfortunately, College of Engineering and Computer Science senior Olivia Pellegrini’s small Downriver high school didn’t have anything like that. What she did have was a big brother who looked out for his younger sister. When she was in high school, he was studying computer engineering at ��-Dearborn, and recognizing his sibling’s love of math, he started teaching her all the stuff he was learning in his introductory computer science courses. “I guess we sort of had our own little computer science club at my house, just the two of us,” Pellegrini says. The brotherly mentoring had an impact: When Pellegrini graduated, she followed in his footsteps and enrolled at ��-Dearborn, where she zeroed in on a major in computer science.

After working her way through her introductory classes, Pellegrini discovered a passion for cybersecurity. She loved that the courses were often built around real-world projects. In one of Professor Di Ma’s classes, for example, they dug into the security vulnerabilities of actual Android apps. In a course with Associate Professor Anys Bacha, the students got to recreate the infamous Samy worm attack on MySpace, one of the seminal attacks on a social media platform. “It was pretty cool to play the role of attacker and actually see how the attacks work, because that’s how you learn to defend against them,” Pellegrini says. “It’s one thing to learn the concept from a book, but when you can actually implement it, it sticks, and it’s there now, like a tool in your toolbox that you can pull out whenever you need it.”

The practical, hands-on learning continued with Assistant Professor Zheng Song, who tapped Pellegrini and her senior design teammates for a research project focusing on edge computing applications for unmanned aerial vehicles or UAVs. Their project, dubbed Sky Socket, involved working on a drone-vehicle communication system. The system allowed drones to conduct advanced reconnaissance and relay information back to ground vehicles, giving emergency or military personnel the ability to have eyes on the ground far beyond their actual lines of sight. The work was so successful that Song, Pellegrini and her teammates presented the results in a paper at the IEEE: MOST conference, an international gathering of experts focusing on advanced mobility technologies. After senior design, Pellegrini continued to work in Song’s lab, this time on a project focusing on API key leakage, an emerging cybersecurity threat in the app-based software space. Their analysis of GitHub software repositories revealed that some 40,000 API keys, a vital security feature, are revealed in plain text. They’ve submitted that work for publication as well.

Pellegrini (far right) with Song (far left) and the rest of the Sky Socket senior design team, from left to right, Demetrius Johnson, Ryan Sauer and Jonathan Schall. (Photo courtesy Olivia Pellegrini)

Two internships gave Pellegrini yet another avenue for hands-on learning. Most recently, she worked at Marathon Petroleum in Detroit, where she created visual dashboards that helped the company’s engineers monitor critical systems. And during COVID, Pellegrini scored a spot on the team that manages FordPass, the smartphone app for the automaker’s connected vehicle features like remote start. That opportunity gave her some valuable remote work experience, though it did come with one nice in-person perk: During the final week, all the interns got to test drive the electric Mustang Mach-E and the Ford F-150 Lightning.

On top of all this, Pellegrini even found time to play two years of volleyball, an experience she never imagined she’d have at the college level. In fact, as she looks back on her college career, she’s surprised herself in a lot of ways. “I definitely think that through doing all these extracurriculars, like research and internships, it’s really boosted my confidence,” she says. “I was actually kind of shy before. And especially through playing volleyball and hanging out with those girls, it made me a more social person, so then I wasn’t afraid to do something like contact a professor about a research opportunity or talk to an employer at a career fair. Now, because of the research I did with Professor Song, I see myself working in the automotive field, especially something involving computer vision or artificial intelligence. That’s not something I would have even dreamed about heading into college.”

With a resume like hers, it’s a dream that’s certainly within reach.

###

Story by Lou Blouin

Commencement

Technology

Computer and Information Science

Off

Mon, 12/11/2023 - 15:48

During her time at ��-Dearborn, the cybersecurity major has scored big internships, published research and even found time to play on the volleyball team. Now she’s eyeing a career in the artificial intelligence field.

Graphic by Violet Dashi

“I never thought I’d be doing research like this”

stuxbury — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 20:16:17 +0000

“I never thought I’d be doing research like this” stuxbury Wed, 09/13/2023 - 16:16

��-Dearborn’s Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) program provided opportunities for 32 Dearborn Wolverines, working with faculty mentors, to discover something new this summer — new information, places, experiences and skills.

For nearly three months, student work included documenting a music festival in the Appalachian Mountains, researching effective global digital marketing strategies and collecting oral histories of BIPOC food growers and farmers. You can see all projects at the SURE Showcase, which takes place from 4 to 6 p.m. today in the Mardigian Library.

Check out three of the projects below. Three others were featured in Reporter earlier this week.

Kathy Bibang, Wayne Fu and Kyungwon Lee: “Digital Marketing and Talent Management Strategies in the Entertainment Industry” (COB)

Korean pop supergroup BTS launched an animation-driven live stream on YouTube that showed a pat of melting butter, a 60-minute timer in the corner and background noises like eggs frying and coffee cups clinking. A #WhatsMelting hashtag followed. At the end of the hour, nearly a million curious people watched as the group announced its song “Butter,” which went on to top music charts worldwide. That’s just one example of how the Korean entertainment industry successfully uses digital marketing.

College of Business junior Kathy Bibang is a fan of both K-pop and marketing — and a SURE project this summer helped her learn more about both. Wanting to get insight on how digital marketing and talent management strategies can increase market presence through various platforms on a global level, Bibang conducted a comparative study on two major entertainment corporations: HYBE (BTS’ promotion company) and the Walt Disney Company.

“We analyzed the respective companies’ approaches when it comes to talent attraction and recruitment, performance review, growth and development, and rewarding artists/employees, as well as their search engine optimization, content management, and social media monitoring,” she says. “This research experience has helped me learn how to systematically and critically evaluate corporate strategies and make useful suggestions.”

Fu said Bibang’s dedication to the topic and work was impressive. She searched a wide spectrum of information, digested and synthesized data systematically, and practiced sharing the findings effectively. “The work she did on the project truly reflects how much she loves digital marketing, talent management, K-pop and the entertainment industry in general,” Fu says.

Courtney Hadrian and Jie Fan: “Study the Role of Cancer Cell Chirality During Detachment from the Primary Tumor” (CASL)

Like many, senior Courtney Hadrian has loved ones who have been diagnosed with cancer. But unlike most people, the biological sciences major is conducting research that may hold the key to slowing or stopping the progression of the disease.

Hadrian assists Biological Sciences Assistant Professor Jie Fan in his Natural Science Building laboratory. Earlier this year, Fan shared a new discovery with the medical research community: Fan noticed that healthy blood vessel cells, called endothelial cells, have chirality, which means they are mirror images of one another. This allows the cells to lock tightly together in a clockwise direction. But when tumor cells are introduced, the blood vessel’s cells start connecting in a random pattern, causing leaks and a way for cancer cells to travel through the bloodstream. Fan says this research will help scientists better understand the cells’ interactions, which holds promise for better controlling cancer metastasis or spread.

This summer, Hadrian’s research provided more evidence to support the role that chirality has in the spread and potential treatment of cancer. “We found that when breast cancer epithelial cells are introduced to healthy breast epithelial cells their differences in chirality allow metastasis to occur,” Hadrian says. “While this finding is still tentative due to a need for further research, we believe it to be one that could potentially help the medical community.” Hadrian’s research work with Fan is ongoing.

Hadrian, who plans to attend graduate school to become a physician assistant, says she was looking for research opportunities on campus, but didn’t expect to be conducting research at this level so early in her academic career. “I never thought I’d be doing research like this as an undergrad. It’s been such an amazing experience,” she says. “I’ve always loved science and want to do something that can have a positive impact in people’s lives. I’m forever grateful for the time I’ve had working with Professor Fan in his lab."

Photo credit/ Melvin Parson

Briana Hurt and Finn Bell: “Creating an Oral History Archive of Ypsilanti's BIPOC and Working-Class Food Growers” (CEHHS)

Health and Human Services senior Briana Hurt helped Human Services Assistant Professor Finn Bell with his ongoing research into the experiences of working class and BIPOC food growers and small farmers. Their project focused on the Ypsilanti community, where Hurt worked with folks like Melvin Parson, founder of We the People Opportunity Farm, a three-quarter acre farm that supports men and women returning from incarceration with paid internships.

Hurt says one of the research skills she really took to heart was the importance of people sharing their own stories, in their fullest, as they told them, not academic interpretations of them. “It was amazing to spend time on Melvin’s farm and see how much hard work goes into it, it’s a new world for me,” Hurt says. “And for Melvin, and many other growers, especially BIPOC folks, there is a sense of healing that comes from the land, because that history wasn’t always the most positive. When he’s out there, he says he can see his ancestors being out there with him. And when he takes a break, he honors them, because they couldn’t take breaks when they wanted. He takes time to appreciate the land and his autonomy.”

Bell says he and their community partners were consistently impressed with Hurt’s ability to earn people’s trust and build enthusiasm for the oral history project. “Bri is excellent at the academic part, but the people part, that can be hard to teach, which is why I know she’s going to make a great social worker or public health worker,” Bell says. “She really shined at that throughout the summer.”

College of Education, Health, and Human Services

College of Business

Off

Wed, 09/13/2023 - 20:15

The Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) program, now in its fifth year, elevates research opportunities for Dearborn Wolverines.

CASL senior Courtney Hadrian performs research for Assistant Professor Jie Fan.

Course demonstrates the importance of public cultural work

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov 2022 18:32:06 +0000

Course demonstrates the importance of public cultural work Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 11/30/2022 - 13:32

Since he was a child, Ahmad Alkaabi had the same barber cut his hair. The barber, Alaa Ridha, would ask Alkaabi about his day, school and family.

But it was through a College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters course that Alkaabi took the time to ask Ridha about his life, his Iraqi-American experience.

“I’ve known him for so long, but it was the first time I sat down and had a conversation with him about his life—like why did he come to the United States, when and how,” said Alkaabi, a sociology major. “This class gave me the opportunity to really know him.”

The class, Arab American Studies 315: Public Cultural Work in Arab Detroit, encourages students to explore the culture around them by asking people to share their stories. Nearly 20 students spent the winter semester reading Iraqi history and writings, and—most importantly—interviewing Iraqi-Americans, like Ridha, and gathering their stories as primary source research.

The course, led by History Professor Pam Pennock and History Associate Professor Sally Howell, explores the many ways in which Dearborn and Detroit have been shaped by their Arab and Muslim communities—and specifically Iraqi community—and how the area’s Arabs and Muslims are equally a product of the social, economic and cultural history of metropolitan Detroit.

“We want to introduce the value and excitement of doing public cultural work and the importance of doing it in your own community. We are fortunate to have such a rich history and culture right here with our Arab and Muslim communities,” said Howell, who notes that both Arab and Muslim communities have been in the area for more than 100 years and that their histories are deeply embedded within those of Detroit and the auto industry since the early 1900s.

Focusing on the Iraqi experience was a collaborative decision between the class and the educators.

“Students in the class felt like the story of the Iraqi migration here in Detroit is not really being told,” Howell said. “And when it is being told, it is being told from an outsider’s perspective that emphasizes the miskeen nature of the refugees instead of talking about their contributions and really diving into their experiences. So the class wanted to do their part to change that.”

The course was funded through a community-supported challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The grant was awarded to University of Michigan-Dearborn’s Center for Arab American Studies, where Howell is the director.

Howell said the course’s objectives remained the same throughout the term, but the project’s scope evolved. Students first presented their oral history projects to each other and then to an audience that included alumni, community members and Iraqi-Americans—including those who took part in the project—in attendance.

Howell and Pennock evaluated the presented research, along with Arab American National Museum Research and Content Manager and University of Michigan faculty Matthew Jaber Stiffler, and Lamees Al Ethari, a faculty member at University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, whose research area is Iraqi migration.

“Mass media stories are great and useful, but tend to miss the everyday. The story of community is in the details and these students are going out to do oral histories to get the details so future generations will have them,” Stiffler said. “The presentations were fantastic and I’m looking forward to seeing the exhibit.”

Howell said the students were so moved by the stories they heard that they wanted to make the research available to a larger audience.

“They saw these common themes—such as shifting cultural identity, wanting to provide a better life for their children and reinventing their career paths for economic success in America—and wanted to create an exhibit so others could also have the chance to hear these stories and see these themes,” she said.

A team of students from the course will continue to develop the exhibit over the summer. The final exhibit will be showcased this fall in the CASL Building and at the Destination Detroit conference Sept. 27-29 at the University of Michigan Detroit Center.

Freshman Nour Ali, who will work on finishing the exhibit over the summer by collecting additional recorded oral histories and taking photographs of the Iraqi-Americans involved, said taking this course has strengthened her pride in being Iraqi-American and has helped her better understand her family’s story. Ali’s father was exiled from the country after Hussein came to power.

“Talking with other Iraqi-Americans and hearing their stories, it made me realize that my family wasn’t alone in their experience; I wasn’t alone,” said Ali, who is majoring in international studies and, after the course, decided to minor in Arab American studies. “Growing up, I wouldn’t tell people that I was from Iraq; I was worried that people would see me negatively. But now I am proud of where my family came from, and I respect everything they have done to give us a better life. I want the Iraqi story to be heard.”

Center for Arab American Studies

Off

Mon, 05/14/2018 - 05:00

Through a new course, students learned how to interact with their community, gather personal stories and present those experiences to a broader audience.

Driverless shuttle project puts students on the front lines of the autonomous vehicle revolution

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov 2022 18:29:51 +0000

Driverless shuttle project puts students on the front lines of the autonomous vehicle revolution Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 11/30/2022 - 13:29

If you’ve heard the buzz about the possibility of ��-Dearborn soon having a driverless campus shuttle, we can confirm it’s not just a dream.

In fact, when we tracked down Electrical and Computer Engineering Associate Professor Sridhar Lakshmanan, who’s helping manage the student-led project, for a word about their progress, he was able to show just as much as tell.

The six-passenger transport van has already arrived at the IAVS high bay—where students are now busy suping it up with the systems it’ll need for its autonomous makeover. Among the bells and whistles: A series of optical cameras, plus several lidar and radar systems, which work together to form the basis of the vehicle’s “perception” system; and a shoebox-sized supercomputer “brain” that can process 300 teraflops of information per second (yes, that’s a real unit of measure). They even have a hologram system that can project an ad-hoc crosswalk onto the street when the shuttle encounters a pedestrian.

“Our industry sponsors are bringing all kinds of sensors and systems that aren’t even on the market yet,” Lakshmanan said. “Nobody but the big guys normally gets to see this stuff, and now it’s all right here in our labs.”

Little to any of this is simply plug-and-play technology (this is bleeding-edge innovation, after all), so the student team will spend a lot of the summer building and tweaking the algorithmic-based software that allows the various systems to play nice with each other. And that will take them team deep into one of the fundamental debates driving innovation in the autonomous vehicle world—namely, whether perception-based systems can ever be sophisticated enough to create cars with acceptable safety risks.

Lakshmanan explained that for autonomous vehicle technology to really become accepted, it’s assumed that cars will have to have safety records equal to—or ideally, better than—human drivers. And at present, we’re still crushing the machines when it comes to safety. “If you look at the number of miles driven between accidents by human drivers, it’s in the tens of thousands,” he said. “The number of miles driven between fatalities is in the millions. So far, the best anyone has been able to accomplish with autonomous vehicles is in the thousands of miles."

Some engineers suspect that we’re simply asking the perception systems to do too much; they’ll simply never (or at least for the foreseeable future) be able to see, understand and respond to every unpredictable thing that happens on real roads. (For instance, right now, weather is a big hurdle, as even a light snow can quickly cover the lane markers perception systems depend on.) The key to improving performance under all conditions will therefore involve complementing perception systems with a second set of communication technologies. Equipped with these, cars could talk with other cars and highway infrastructure like traffic lights.

“Our cars have surely evolved since the days of the Model T, but so has the original plank road,” says Paul Richardson, a professor of electrical and computer engineering who’s also working on the shuttle project. “If you look at the evolution in the past 90 years that’s responsible for bringing us to where we’re at today, it’s not just the car, it’s not just the road. It’s a whole bunch of things that have come together to enable people to routinely drive 70 m.p.h. on the highway relatively safely.”

Richardson points to a number of more traditionally engineered projects like the interstate highway system, road signage—even asphalt—as evidence. These things, as much as our cars, are responsible for us moving as quickly and safely as we do. Lesson being, making the autonomous vehicle age a reality can’t just be about the cars; we have to make the roads smarter too.

On this front, the shuttle team’s approach is notably more advanced than asphalt: They’re actually constructing a campus LTE communications network that will help guide the shuttle down its pre-programmed loop. It’s far more accurate than using standard GPS and will give them the speed they couldn’t get from existing private LTE networks.

As expected, there’s still a lot of work to do before the vehicle is moving students, faculty and staff around campus. Lakshmanan said the team is hoping to do some limited test runs before the end of the year. Even then, the shuttle will still have one important analogue safety feature: an actual driver, who can intervene at any moment just by grabbing the steering wheel or tapping the brakes.

For students, though, the shuttle may already be taking them places.

“For some of our industry partners who are sponsoring the project, the value proposition is all about talent,” Lakshmanan said. “They want and need people who have experience with this technology. And students, even with just the four months they’ve put into this project, are already getting job or internship offers. So the idea that this is a new talent pipeline, that’s not theoretical. It’s already happening.”

Technology

Institute for Advanced Vehicle Systems (IAVS)

Off

Mon, 05/14/2018 - 05:00

There’s a six-passenger vehicle in the Institute of Advanced Vehicle Systems’ hi-bay area to which students are applying systems —like optical cameras, perception systems and a super computer “brain”—to give it an autonomous makeover.

Office of Research update: September 2022

stuxbury — Mon, 05 Sep 2022 22:39:24 +0000

Office of Research update: September 2022 stuxbury Mon, 09/05/2022 - 18:39

The Office of Research is pleased to announce and would like to congratulate our Dearborn faculty members on receipt of the following external funding:

Aditya Viswanathan, assistant professor of Mathematics, was awarded a grant of $93,600 by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research in support of his collaborative project (with Dartmouth College) "Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Imaging with Phase Retrieval and Uncertainty Quantification". SAR imaging - which has been used in applications such as remote sensing, sea ice monitoring, disaster relief, defense and intelligence gathering, and archaeology - allows us to build detailed and accurate images of a scene of interest by transmitting pulses of radio waves from a moving platform (such as an aircraft or satellite) and processing their delayed and attenuated echos. The process of constructing these images, however, is challenging - with the acquired data often being highly incomplete, corrupted by high levels of measurement error, and subject to artifacts such as motion and out-of-focus blurs. This project seeks to utilize contemporary mathematical and statistical techniques to develop new state-of-the-art SAR image reconstruction algorithms which are computationally efficient, robust to errors and artifacts, and compatible with the next generation of enhanced, extreme-scale imaging hardware.

Shan Bao, associate professor of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering, received $65,794 from Toyota Motor Engineering & Manufacturing North America for her project “How to Improve the Safety of Children on the U.S. Road? Insights from a Crash Data Analysis.” Injuries caused by motor vehicle crashes are a leading cause of death in children and adolescents, and this problem has become an increasing concern for U.S. society with a growing trend. This project is designed to perform a comprehensive analysis on identifying typical children-involved crash scenarios and examining the relevant factors describing the context and potential causes of these crashes on the U.S. road when the involved child(ren) was either a passenger in a motor vehicle or a pedestrian/cyclist on the road. The results of this study will provide a systematic summary of the typical crash scenarios involving children and the relevant causation factors, as well as potential crash mitigation technology design recommendations.

Matthew Heinicke, associate professor of Biology, received $20,238 for his project Assessing the systematics and diversity of Haemosporida in African reptiles. The project, funded by the National Science Foundation and awarded through a collaboration with Villanova University, will study how host/parasite interactions affect the biodiversity of a particular type of parasitic organism and a major host organism it commonly affects. Haemosporidians are microscopic single-celled organisms that live as symbionts or parasites infecting a wide variety of vertebrates. A few types that cause diseases are well-known, including those causing malaria in humans. However, the group is otherwise poorly studied. This project will study interactions between haemosporidians and a major group of host organisms, reptiles in Angola. Angola is the focal region because it has a wide range of environments from desert to rainforest, and many species of reptile live there. Work at ��-Dearborn will focus on the reptile side of this relationship. DNA samples obtained from Angolan reptiles will be used to determine the evolutionary history, levels of genetic diversity, and number of unique species of Angolan reptiles. Colleagues at other universities will generate complementary data for the haemosporidians that infect these reptiles. With data from both groups the researchers can test whether unique haemosporidian strains infect each reptile species, and whether the two groups are co-evolving, meaning that closely related reptile species have closely related haemosporidian parasites.

Hugo Casquero, assistant professor of Mechanical Engineering, was awarded $70,000 by Honda Motor Co., Ltd for his study “Crashworthiness simulations using thin-walled solid BEXT meshes.” Dr. Casquero-Penelas will work to develop isogeometric analysis to achieve a seamless integration between computer-aided design and finite-element analysis. This fundamental research will be applied to the design and analysis of the structural skeleton of vehicles to maximize occupant safety.

Announcements

Competitive Campus Grants Fall Cycle Applications

The first cycle of the Competitive Campus Grants for fiscal year 2023 are available to apply to by ��-Dearborn tenured/tenure-track faculty. The following Competitive Campus Grant applications are due by 5 p.m., Oct. 17, 2022:

Research Initiation and Development (RID) Grants provide financial support of up to $25,000 for research projects. This program supports projects designed to lead to a proposal for external funding with a strong potential of being awarded.
- Budget floor: $10,000; Budget ceiling: $25,000.
��-Dearborn Scholars (SCH) Grants are intended to support research and scholarship, including creative activities in the arts. This program is primarily for projects with funding needs not addressed by other support programs within or outside the University.
- Budget floor: $8,000; Budget ceiling: $15,000.
Thematic Research Planning (TRP) Grants will support the development of collaborative cross-disciplinary research proposals that address the FY 23 priority research areas:
- - Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
  - Sustainability
  - Biomedical, Health and Healthcare
- Budget floor: $15,000; Budget ceiling: $30,000.

More information about the campus grants program and eligibility can be found on our Campus Grants webpage.

Research Events in September & October:

MICHR, “Conducting and Obtaining Valid Informed Consent” - Thursday, Sept. 15, 12 - 2 p.m., virtual
Teaching and Technology Collaborative, “Crafting Research Impact Statements” - Friday, Sept. 16, 12 - 1 p.m., virtual
RDSI, “Research Data Stewardship Initiative Informational Webinar” - Wednesday, Sept. 21, 1 p.m., virtual
Mardigian Library, “Using Library Materials in Your Classroom” - Thursday, September 22, 1PM and Monday, Sept. 26, 2 p.m., in-person located in Mardigian Library, ML 1211. Registration not required
Research Data Stewardship Initiative Fall 2022 Seminar Series, “RDSI October Seminar” - Friday, Oct. 7, 12 - 1 p.m., virtual
MICHR, “MICHR Mock Study Section” - Wednesday, Oct. 19, 3 - 5:30 p.m., virtual. Registration closes on Sept. 26.

Research Resource Highlight: The Office of Research

Every month, the Office of Research will feature a resource and/or tool that is available for researchers!

This month we are featuring our very own ��-Dearborn Office of Research website to remind you of the information and services available to ��-Dearborn faculty.

Over the past year, the Office of Research has reorganized and updated many of our webpages with updated information, services and new initiatives. We encourage all faculty to familiarize themselves with the different resources and sections of our website, including:

Research Development Services: The Research Development team and services aim to connect researchers to resources and increase the investigators’ competitiveness in obtaining extramural research funding. One-on-one consultation requests, Consultation and Writing Services, and resources for finding funding are just a few examples of the services available to ��-Dearborn faculty.
Campus Grants Program: The Campus Grants program is an important part of research development efforts at ��-Dearborn, and supports a wide range of research and scholarly activities for our faculty. Campus Grants funds also provide investments for interdisciplinary research. The Campus Grants webpage is frequently updated with our available grant programs, guidelines and due dates, as well as a Frequently Asked Questions section and examples of Previously Funded Projects.
Pre-Award Administration: The Pre-Award Administration team and services aim to provide the highest level of service possible in assisting faculty with assembling all the elements of their proposal package and ensuring there are no administrative errors. It is important for all faculty to submit a New Proposal Request Form at least 20 business days prior to a sponsor’s deadline. The webpage also provides an overview of the Proposal Routing & Submission process and Budget Preparation guidance.
Post-Award Support: The Post-Award Support (PAS) team is charged with supporting the ��-Dearborn campus by providing and continuously improving post-award research administration efforts for all units who have federal and non-federal externally sponsored projects (and related cost-share), internally funded research grants, and other project/grants that are classed as research (e.g. gifts).
More Help: This newly developed webpage is intended to provide basic information and guidance on common regulatory compliance requirements related to Human Subjects, Export Controls, and Disclosure of Outside Interests, and will continue to be developed to include other frequently asked about research topics such as animal care & use, indirect costs and intellectual property. We encourage faculty to check back in on this page as more topics are added.

Our website is also updated regularly with research-related events and announcements, so we encourage faculty to bookmark our landing page and subscribe to our Research News email list. The Office of Research looks forward to assisting you on your future research endeavors!

Upcoming Funding Opportunities

The Office of Research publishes a list of selected funding opportunities, organized by college, every month on our website under Announcements. In addition, yearly grant calendars organized by subject area provided by Hanover Research are available there as well. Contact the ��-Dearborn Office of Research if you would like more information about submitting a proposal to any of the programs.

Office of Research

Off

Mon, 09/05/2022 - 22:37

Check out whose work is getting funded, find new funding opportunities, and learn about ways ��-Dearborn can support your next project in the September update from the Office of Research.

How a research project on the Milky Way's center will help unlock the universe's secrets

Anonymous — Thu, 14 Jul 2022 18:53:05 +0000

How a research project on the Milky Way's center will help unlock the universe's secrets Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 07/14/2022 - 14:53

This article was originally published on October 26, 2020.

With everything happening in the world, sometimes it’s important to put your chin up — but not to look at the bright side; it’s more about finding peace while gazing at the night sky. At least, that’s how Astronomy Associate Professor Will Clarkson sees it.

“It’s profoundly beautiful and should be enjoyed,” he says. “The physical universe keeps going no matter what we do. It really is inspirational in a way.”

Associate Professor Will Clarkson

Clarkson knows a bit about the universe’s vastness. He has spent much of the last decade working as part of a group of leading researchers to assemble an extensive map of the inner regions of the Milky Way galaxy — the Galactic Bulge — comprising a quarter of a billion objects measured in six “filters” ranging from the near-infrared, through the visible part of the spectrum and even a little into the near-ultraviolet.

Led by R. Michael Rich of UCLA and Christian Johnson at the Space Telescope Science Institute, the work involves an evolving team of about 20 researchers from all over the globe, of which Clarkson is a core member.

Historically it's been hard to study the Milky Way’s Galactic Bulge due to vertically thick density of stars and dust and the sheer scale of the structure. A uniform dataset over such a large structure is challenging because high-quality, high-resolution images have tended to be difficult to achieve over large areas of the sky, particularly from the ground. But advances in technology have made it possible.

So the team of researchers set out to establish a legacy dataset of the Milky Way Galactic Bulge — a visual encyclopedia with space object images, spectra, location and more — for astronomers, educators and researchers around the world to use in their work. The team is currently working on quality control for this large dataset and anticipates releasing it to the community during 2021.

“Astronomy is increasingly dominated by large teams of researchers, but this work shows how much impact a relatively small team can have on the analysis of this huge dataset,” Rich says. “This dataset is a taste of things to come in two or three years, when the Vera Rubin Telescope in Chile starts its big surveys.” The observatory, expected to open next year, will specialize in astronomical surveys.

Clarkson says sharing data has become a vital component of astronomical research, with many discoveries now made by re-investigating previously collected datasets.

Public hosting of datasets for others to use for their own scientific purposes has led to an increase in access to scientific discovery by individuals and institutions everywhere. For example, in 2019 more than half the scientific publications resulting from Hubble data were based partly or entirely on archival datasets. “It is a big universe. There are simply too many interesting things for one person to find or solve,” he says. “There is a public spiritedness in this, but it’s also grounded in reality. Collaboration is needed to better understand the universe.”

This image was constructed from DECam exposures taken as part of the survey. It shows a 1.8x0.8 degree region towards the inner Galactic bulge — by comparison, the full Moon is half a degree across. Each point of light in this image is a star.

To gather the images needed to create the Milky Way’s Galactic Bulge dataset, team members — including Clarkson — traveled to South America to use the Dark Energy Survey Camera (DECam) at Chile’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory on multiple occasions. Attached to the Victor Blanco 4m telescope, the DECam is roughly the size of a Smart Car. “It combines exquisite image quality with a huge field of view, enabling millions of stars to be captured in a single image.” To get an idea of the scope, Clarkson shares that a single image will record data from an area of the sky over four times the diameter of the full moon as seen from Earth.

For this decade-long endeavor, Clarkson says ��-Dearborn students have played an active role too, gaining research experience and skills.

Some examples: Lizzy Clyne, ‘15, was the first ��-Dearborn undergraduate to assist with the images from this project — she later worked with NASA’s jet propulsion team and is now a Ph.D. candidate at Penn State. Brittany Howard, ‘17, worked on quality control of an earlier version of the catalog and traveled with Clarkson in 2015 for an observing run at CTIO for this project. After completing a Masters’ in Astrophysics at the University of Victoria, Howard is now a data scientist in the private sector. Currently, seniors Alexis Osmond and Nick Boyd work with Clarkson to examine the galactic objects in the DECam images and properly characterize and catalog them.

Osmond says her interest in astrophysics enticed her to apply for a research assistant position in Clarkson’s lab. But the importance of the work is what has kept her in that role for the majority of her time as an undergrad.

“My part of the work uses data from the Gaia spacecraft to check the camera distortion. I saw this Gaia data release mentioned in one of the astronomy textbooks, which is what put everything into perspective and helped me realize how the work I was doing would be applied in the real world,” says Osmond, a physics major. “I had the opportunity to present my astrometric calibration of the catalog using Gaia DR2 at the Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics, which was a great chance to meet other physicists and to get to know more about physics as a profession. I’m looking forward to applying this to Gaia DR3 when it’s released.”

And Boyd says working with never-seen-before images strengthens his interest in discovery. “I’ve always been interested in space. You can’t help but look up at the night sky and wonder what’s going on up there. I really like being able to find out something that wasn’t previously known,” says Boyd, who says his work in Clarkson’s lab, like calibrating an X-ray spectrum detector, gave him the experience needed for his summer internship at Stanford’s National Accelerator Laboratory. “There’s still more to learn, of course, but we are creating a map for researchers to use now and into the future.”

Clarkson says having the legacy dataset opens the door for significant discoveries.

“We are hopeful that the map will ultimately unlock some of the deepest mysteries about the formation of our own galaxy, and therefore help us understand galaxy formation throughout the universe.”

The research team involved with this project: R. Michael Rich (University of California, Los Angeles), Christian I. Johnson (Space Telescope Science Institute), Michael Young (Indiana University), Iulia T. Simion (Shanghai Astronomical Observatory), William I. Clarkson (University of Michigan-Dearborn), Catherine Pilachowski (Indiana University), Scott Michael (Indiana University), Andrea Kunder (St Martin’s University), A. Katherina Vivas (NSF’s NOIRLab), Andreas Koch (University of Heidelberg), Tommaso Marchetti (European Southern Observatory), Rodrigo Ibata (Strasbourg Observatory), Nicolas Martin (Strasbourg Observatory), Annie C. Robin (University of Bourgogne Franche-Comté), Nadége Lagarde (University of Bourgogne Franche-Comté), Michelle Collins (University of Surrey), Željko Ivezic (University of Washington), Roberto de Propris (Finnish Centre for Astronomy with ESO), and Juntai Shen (Shanghai Jiao Tong University).

Faculty Research