Victors for ������-Dearborn

Thu, 10/05/2017 - 05:00

New facility will advance engineering education

U-M President Mark Schlissel, Regent Ronald Weiser, CECS Dean Tony England and Chancellor Daniel Little announce the Weisers' gift in support of the new Engineering Lab Building.

An advocate and mentor for engineering students

clmeeks — Wed, 26 Oct 2022 20:27:33 +0000

An advocate and mentor for engineering students clmeeks Wed, 10/26/2022 - 16:27

Janet Hall knows she has a can-do attitude, but she doesn’t see herself as a trailblazer.

“I was a girl who loved physics and was lucky to have parents who encouraged my interests. I wouldn’t say I’ve done anything particularly special.”

But the 1968 graduate’s actions and accomplishments say otherwise.

Hall, ‘68 B.S.E.E.E., was the first ��-Dearborn female College of Engineering and Computer Science graduate — she left her family dairy farm in upstate New York and moved to Dearborn, Michigan, when a Ford Motor Company recruiter visited Hall’s school and told her about a new college co-op program at the then named Dearborn Center of the University of Michigan.

She was among the first female electrical engineers to work at Ford Motor Company. During the ‘Space Race” and around the time of the Apollo 11 moon landing, Hall wrote computer programs for the Ford Philco Mission Control Center.

And when opportunities presented themselves for multiple promotions, Hall earned her M.B.A. and pivoted into management where she lived in Germany and oversaw a team of Ford engineers working on three continents.

“In my early days, I was aware colleagues were watching me — a woman engineer — so I focused on my work and doing it well. The skeptics became supporters and I started climbing the ladder,” said Hall, who retired from Ford Motor Company in 2001 as Manager of Powertrain Global Prototype Operations.

“But I recognize there are people who don’t change with the times and make things difficult. I once had a boss who was old school as the day is long. He didn’t value me. So I created what I call ‘the work around.’ I’d stay later than my immediate boss so I could get to know the big boss. I wanted the big boss to see what I could contribute to Ford. I was later promoted. My advice is: You can’t go through people, but you can go around them.”

Most recently, Hall created the first endowment to support students who are members of ��-Dearborn’s Society of Women Engineers (SWE) student organization through a $25,000 gift — the Janet Hall Society of Women Engineers Endowed Fund.

Hall said the purpose of the gift is to provide support for engineering students involved in SWE through scholarships and support for professional development experiences like SWE conferences.

Hall said she became involved with a Detroit SWE chapter during her nearly 35-year career at Ford. The organization introduced her to engineering recruiters, gave an opportunity for travel, and increased the size of her network.

“I know how valuable the experience of working with other women engineers can be and it is important to continue the support of the student chapter of SWE at my alma mater,” said Hall, who has been a frequent guest speaker at the ��-Dearborn SWE chapter events.

Hall said today’s graduates have a different experience than she did 50 years ago — but there are still challenges to overcome.

“Their world is different from what mine was. The barriers aren’t the same, but there are still pockets of old-school thinking. There are things I can share — like the workaround — that may help them navigate difficult situations so they can succeed,” Hall said. “I didn’t have a female mentor, so I want to be that for someone else. I’m here to give these women support in any way I can.”

Student Success

Mon, 07/13/2020 - 18:06

��-Dearborn’s first female engineering graduate establishes an endowment for campus’ Society of Women Engineers student organization.

Alumna Janet Hall, center, attends a campus event in 2019. Hall speaks at Society of Women Engineers events and helped mentor ��-Dearborn students for decades.

��-Dearborn announces inaugural Chancellor's Inclusive Excellence Fellows

lblouin — Mon, 03 Oct 2022 18:32:30 +0000

��-Dearborn announces inaugural Chancellor's Inclusive Excellence Fellows lblouin Mon, 10/03/2022 - 14:32

As the campus community knows, our strategic planning effort has led to many new projects and initiatives relating to diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI. The DEI working group came up with 60 recommendations in all, many of which have already been implemented. Now, add to the list a new faculty fellowship from the Office of the Chancellor. In late September, a selection committee named Associate Professor of African and African American Studies Terri Laws and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Hafiz Malik as the first recipients of the new Chancellor’s Inclusive Excellence Fellowship.

Keisha Blevins, chief of staff in the chancellor’s office and ��-Dearborn’s chief diversity and inclusion officer, says one of the core goals of the new fellowship is to give faculty a more formal opportunity to use their expertise to improve and create DEI-focused campus initiatives. “We wanted to recognize the research or teaching that our faculty are already doing in this area,” Blevins says. “But we also wanted to provide them additional space and time to collaborate with administration in ways that they may not normally. Even though our faculty are engaged in a lot of this work already, I don’t think that, on an everyday basis, there was this kind of intentional, specific coordination between administration and faculty around DEI. We thought their individual expertise would be very helpful in carrying out our mission and making the university more inclusive for faculty, staff and students.”

Laws’ year-long fellowship zeroes in on the intersection of college preparedness, student retention and faculty satisfaction. As at many universities, students at ��-Dearborn come to campus with varying levels of classroom readiness. And we have a variety of support programs designed to help improve their skills so they can succeed in the classroom and persist in their programs. What Laws plans to investigate is whether we have a robust, evidence-based understanding of which supports are most effective at creating desired outcomes, like improved GPA, better retention rates or more desirable job opportunities. “I spent the longest part of my career in health care, and one of the things we rely on in health care is this idea of ‘critical pathways,’” Laws explains. “If someone is having a heart attack, there are dozens of possible treatments, but what you really want to know are the key interventions that create the best chance of the best outcome, so you can cut out the steps that aren’t necessary or don’t work so well.”

When it comes to academic interventions, Laws says faculty are often eager to help students who need extra support, but they don’t always have clarity about the “critical pathway” to deploy for a particular challenge, or whether the interventions they pursued ultimately had an impact. For example, Laws says the university’s Early Warning Program allows faculty to communicate with Academic Advising about students who are at risk so they can be connected to support services. “But it is often very complicated when a student is at risk of doing poorly in a class or leaving the university before degree completion,” Laws says. “After I submit an early warning request, I don’t know if that actually made a difference for the student, qualitatively, and across types of early warning interventions, collectively. I think that would help more faculty participate because they will see that reporting is easy — and that it is effective.” She’s hoping her work can help close loops like that, thereby boosting student outcomes and faculty satisfaction. Similarly, Laws will be working with ��-Dearborn Human Resources to evaluate new recruitment and hiring policies aimed at improving diversity in the faculty ranks. Blevins says Laws’ work will also dovetail with the university’s effort to establish Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, that measure the effectiveness of DEI initiatives relating to representation, inclusion and experiences at work.

Malik’s fellowship is focused on the Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) program. Piloted just a few years ago to expand opportunities for undergraduate research, the program has been viewed as a big success. But Malik noticed that SURE’s ranks have tended to leave out one large segment of the ��-Dearborn community: students who have sizable work commitments outside of their studies. “I see it all the time — as soon as class ends, students rush off to work with no time to spare,” Malik says. “For them, how they’re going to put food on the table is their biggest concern, and that doesn’t leave a lot of room for things like working in a lab or doing an internship.” In a competitive work environment, not having those kinds of experiences on your resume can be consequential, so Malik came up with a straightforward solution: Do more outreach to working students so they’re aware that an on-campus job in a lab can actually be their job (or at least one of them). “Why wait tables, which is totally unrelated to their field of study, when they could come work in my lab, earn a wage and get an experience that’s going to help them in their career?” Malik says.

Malik’s fellowship year will focus, in part, on helping faculty understand what it takes to recruit working students, which is something he’s been doing successfully for years in his own lab. “Sometimes, we can’t pay as much as their off-campus jobs, so you have to help them understand that the experience has the potential to pay off big for them down the road, once they start their careers.” For now, he’ll be focused specifically on the SURE program, but he says the approach is applicable to grant-supported research in general, which often has funds earmarked for undergraduate students.

��-Dearborn Chancellor Domenico Grasso, who helped launch a similar program when he was provost at the University of Delaware, says the close collaboration between administration and faculty can help ensure DEI initiatives are themselves rooted in diverse perspectives. “My view of this fellowship is that it’s a two-way enrichment,” Grasso says. “By teaming like-minded faculty and administration, they can see what we’re trying to do, help us see things differently, and maybe also understand what our limitations are. I’ve worked in administration now for a long time, and I understand that faculty evolve and often see things from a different perspective. So I want to learn from them, while they also learn from our perspectives.” Grasso has high hopes for both inaugural fellows and is looking forward to regular conversations with them in the months ahead. He says Laws’ data-driven approach and Malik’s focus on the unique circumstances of our students are both strong examples of how faculty perspectives can add rigor and creativity to our ongoing efforts to make the campus a more welcoming place.

###

Story by Lou Blouin

Faculty and Staff

Inclusion or Diversity

College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters

Social Sciences

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Off

Mon, 10/03/2022 - 18:31

Professor Hafiz Malik and Associate Professor Terri Laws will work on two projects designed to make campus a more inclusive place to learn, teach and do research.

Associate Professor of African and African American Studies Terri Laws (left) and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Hafiz Malik. Graphic by Violet Dashi

CASL Legacy Lecture Series gives today’s retiring faculty the opportunity to leave a reflective message for future learners

Anonymous — Thu, 29 Sep 2022 19:18:29 +0000

CASL Legacy Lecture Series gives today’s retiring faculty the opportunity to leave a reflective message for future learners Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 09/29/2022 - 15:18

This article was originally published on February 15, 2019.

Raehanna Ahmed has her sights set on medical school. And beyond that, a role in Doctors Without Borders. The biology senior attributes this chosen path to Associate Professor Emeritus Elias Baumgarten.

A ��-Dearborn philosophy professor for 46 years, Baumgarten — who retired in fall 2018 — was known for moderating lively debates in his bioethics courses, researching intercultural issues and their relationship to ethics, and working with underserved populations.

“Dr. Baumgarten exposed me to a variety of ethical conversations I hadn't considered before; he had no agenda other than conversation and exploration,” said Ahmed, who still keeps in contact with her former medical ethics professor. “Most importantly, he taught me about being a better human. At the time I took his course, he was planning a trip to India where he would teach Indian women of the lower caste system. I want to emulate his example and use my free time to help others.

“Anyone who hears him will understand why he’s the most influential professor I’ve ever had.”

And future ��-Dearborn students, faculty and staff will be able to do just that thanks to a new College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters initiative.

Baumgarten was the first participant for the CASL Legacy Lecture Series, which is an opportunity for retiring/recently retired faculty to deliver a valedictory talk reflecting on their time at ��-Dearborn.

The talk is recorded and will be placed on University of Michigan’s virtual research space Deep Blue, where anyone can access it. If faculty prefer, thoughts can be written rather than publicly spoken.

Baumgarten continues to connect with students like Raehanna Ahmed.

Political Science Professor Ron Stockton proposed the Legacy Lecture idea, which now is open to all retiring CASL faculty or CASL emeriti. Stockton, who has taught at ��-Dearborn since 1974, said it’s important to preserve the motivations and reflections of campus scholars. He thinks of former colleagues Larry Berkove, who retired in 2003, an internationally lauded Mark Twain expert; or Elaine Clark, who retired in 2011, a respected historian who excels in Latin and translates Medieval documents to gather insight from the Middle Ages.

“There are true scholars here, and Larry and Elaine were among them. These are the people who change the way you think about things after hearing what they have to say. Their students and colleagues know this, but memory can be short on a campus. People graduate, new people come in,” he said. “So instead of hearing about these top scholars in the fields from old timers like me, I wanted to have a way where the next generation could learn from — not just learn about — these faculty for years to come.”

CASL Dean Marty Hershock liked Stockton’s idea of an archive of retrospective lectures. In addition to preservation, he said the series is a way to recognize and honor the commitment and contributions of CASL faculty.

“When speaking to students and alumni — and when reflecting back on my own ��-Dearborn experience — the crucial importance of our faculty in the success of our mission is clear,” Hershock said. “When people talk about their CASL experience they don't talk about the CASL Building or our laboratory facilities. They talk about Professor X or Professor Y and about how important these people are to them.”

CASL Development Director Diane Gulyas said the lecture series is supported through a gift from an anonymous donor so the CASL Legacy Lecture Series can live in perpetuity. She said the CASL community is grateful for the donation, which funds the recording and information storage, as well as a light reception for the retiree to interact with past and current colleagues and students.

Baumgarten said he was honored to be the first speaker. With nearly five decades on campus, Baumgarten had many experiences to choose from. But he decided to leave a record of how his students, like Ahmed, helped shape him.

“I was recently asked if I’ve experienced meaning in life. Through my students and mentorships, I believe I have. Not because I helped them — although I hope that I did have a positive impact — but because of the experiences we’ve shared together and the various human perspectives I’ve gained from the class conversations and relationships built,” he said. “I’m grateful for 46 years in a career that I’ve loved and the opportunity to reflect on my time through the Legacy Lecture.”

Faculty and Staff

College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters

Fri, 02/15/2019 - 06:00

The new initiative, which began in the fall with Associate Professor Emeritus Elias Baumgarten, offers a reception and valedictory talk, which is recorded to serve as an oral history.

Associate Professor Emeritus Elia Baumgarten delivered the first CASL Legacy Lecture Series presentation on how his students helped shape him.

Northern exposure

clmeeks — Thu, 12 May 2022 23:53:37 +0000

Northern exposure clmeeks Thu, 05/12/2022 - 19:53

This story was originally published on May 7, 2019

At age 19, CASL student Jordan Wohl got a deep dive into how government works, jumping into ��-Dearborn’s Ottawa Internship Program, writing speeches and talking to constituents – and that was just his first day on the job.

Since its creation more than 30 years ago, the Ottawa Internship Program has had more than 600 American students from the University of Michigan and other universities participate in the leadership-training experience. It gives sophomores, juniors and seniors a first-hand look into the Canadian government through placement with a member of Parliament or Senior in the nation’s capital.

Eric Nemeth on campus, 1984

Last fall, Wohl joined other Ottawa Internship alumni at the home of Eric Nemeth (’85 B.A.), who participated in the program in 1984, and his wife, Paula (’85 B.A.), to share their experiences and highlight how others can support this internship program. Wohl is a recipient of a scholarship for the internship that the Nemeths established to help ��-Dearborn students be able to participate in the program.

The enthusiasm of that night inspired the Nemeths to want to do more for the program. To ensure the long-term future of the Ottawa Internship Program, they established a $50,000 endowment for operational and program support. And they are issuing a challenge to program alumni, university graduates, and the community to match their gift.

Nemeth, a tax attorney and former IRS Attorney and Special Assistant U.S. Attorney, called his Ottawa experience transformational, especially for him as a young man of 21 from Southwest Detroit.

“It was a like a bootcamp,” Nemeth said fondly. “It was a short time, but it offered big lessons… The Canadian government and my host completely embraced the concept and the students – we were Americans and Canadians, both interested in learning more about each other and embracing the opportunity.”

Two decades later, Wohl’s experience was the same. The five-week program was an intensive, once-in-a-lifetime experience, said Wohl, and it taught him how to engage in the political process. Back home, it got him more deeply involved in campus life. These days, it informs what he wanted to do with his career, pushing him to become a community leader.

“I figured if I could manage a Parliament office in a foreign country, I could do anything when I got back,” Wohl said.

Nemeth said he and Paula want to support the Ottawa Internship with a challenge gift to engage donors with the Dearborn campus and its students. Support of this unique program (one of the only university-run Ottawa Internship Programs in the United States) not only provides for meaningful experiences but also shows students the community is invested in them, Nemeth said.

“It was important for Paula and I do to what we could to create a window for people,” Nemeth said, giving students like himself who otherwise could not afford a summer internship a chance to see another part of the world and political life there.

Wohl agrees. "If it wasn't for the unwavering support of my family and the Nemeth scholarship, Ottawa would have never happened for me,” he said. “I think about that often: had I not experienced the real life challenges that I overcame during my internship, there is no way that I would have had the confidence in my professional skills that has propelled so much of my work here on campus."

Wohl works as a marketing coordinator for the Union at Dearborn as well as in positions such as the Jewish Student Organization’s president and Civic Leadership Board as a community organizer. Having a scholarship for the Ottawa internship was another reason he could fully invest his time and talents there. In fact, Wohl was recognized in April as a University of Michigan-Dearborn Distinguished Student Leader.

“Having an experience of being in such an intensive environment has been extremely helpful,” Wohl said. “I had to be ready for anything that came into the office… (As a result,) it is easier now to take on challenges, to talk to people and to lead groups on campus.”

College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters

Institutional Advancement

Tue, 05/07/2019 - 14:00

Alumni gift supports Ottawa Political Internship Program

CECS alumnae honored by Ford Motor Company

stuxbury — Tue, 07 Apr 2020 15:56:00 +0000

CECS alumnae honored by Ford Motor Company stuxbury Tue, 04/07/2020 - 11:56

Ford Motor Company employees and College of Engineering and Computer Science alumnae Alexandra Alioto '17 B.S. (right), Mariana Doughan '15 B.S.E. (left), and Chelsey Revita '14 B.S.E. (center)

Ford Motor Company employees and College of Engineering and Computer Science alumnae Alexandra Alioto '17 B.S., Mariana Doughan '15 B.S.E., and Chelsey Revita '14 B.S.E., were recently honored by Ford Motor Company.

The women were recognized at "Celebrating the Women Behind the Blue Oval," an exhibit supporting International Women’s Day that debuted on Monday, March 9, at the Ford World Headquarters.

Careers or Internships

Inclusion or Diversity

Alumni Engagement

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Tue, 04/07/2020 - 15:51

They were recognized at a Ford World Headquarters event.