Faculty and Staff

How can we make driver assist features play nice together?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Story by Lou Blouin

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering

Off

Mon, 01/27/2025 - 13:14

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

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

Planning for EV infrastructure is complicated. Here’s a better way to do it.

lblouin — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 13:45:53 +0000

Planning for EV infrastructure is complicated. Here’s a better way to do it. lblouin Wed, 01/22/2025 - 08:45

Electric vehicles still represent less than 1% of registered vehicles in the U.S. and comprised just over 8% of new U.S. vehicle sales in 2024. But government officials across the country are already planning for a future in which EVs are the go-to mode of private transportation — as evidenced by increasingly large public investments in EV charging infrastructure, like the $7.5 billion pledged under the Biden administration. When it comes to actually making a plan for building out that infrastructure, however, the devil is in a complex web of largely unknown details, says Associate Professor of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering Jian Hu. Ideally, Hu says, you’d want to build a charging system that serves people’s needs for the next 10 years. The tricky part is that involves correctly anticipating a host of trendlines which are basically impossible to predict. “There are so many uncertainties,” Hu says. “We don’t know how fast the EV market will grow, which means we don’t know what the charging demand will be. Will the public want fast or slow charging? Will people charge at home or at work? During peak hours, or non-peak hours? Will utilities adopt dynamic pricing so it’s cheaper to charge at certain times of day? And how will this affect charging behavior? And what if there are new technologies that emerge? There are so many things we don’t know.”

Typically, when government agencies are planning for things like this, Hu says they might use what statisticians call a deterministic model. When you’re making this kind of model, you take account of what data you have, plug it into a formula that defines the relationship between the variables, and then you typically get a single answer, which then guides your plan of action. A simple retirement calculator, which takes your current age, retirement age, anticipated rate of return, the rate of inflation, and monthly savings target and tells you how much money you’ll have when you retire is a simple kind of deterministic model. But Hu argues that these kinds of prediction models aren’t the best tools when you’re dealing with complex situations with lots of uncertainty. “What if your rate of return on your investments isn’t the 7% you’ve put into that calculator? What if it is less and then you don’t have the money you expect when you retire? If you only use this kind of model, you’ll have this single prediction and you base everything on that. But you’re not preparing for a possible worst-case scenario.”

Because of this, statisticians often use different tools for forecasting complex, highly uncertain phenomena, like investment performance. One of the most popular is called stochastic modeling, which, instead of giving you just one answer, provides a range of results represented by thousands of different simulated scenarios in which the values and probabilities of the underlying variables are allowed to change. A popular type of stochastic model is a Monte Carlo simulation, which is used in financial planning. Unlike a simple retirement calculator, which assumes fixed values for things like the rate of inflation or a rate of return, a Monte Carlo analysis will run thousands of simulations in which all the variables you have in your model have different values and assigned probabilities. As a result, you get a much wider representation of possible outcomes, including best-case, worst-case and most likely scenarios. A Monte Carlo simulation might tell you, say, that in 98 percent of its simulated scenarios, which account for a wide range of possible economic conditions, your savings plans are going to get you to the end of your life with money in the bank. That might give you much more confidence in your investment strategy. You might even decide to take a more aggressive approach. Or, as Hu frames it, stochastic modeling gives us a much more complete way to understand risk.

Because stochastic models are so much better at helping us understand risk of uncertain events, Hu says they could be an excellent approach for planning EV infrastructure, given that reliable data on important details, like consumer charging preferences and future electricity demand, are sparse or lacking altogether. As part of a National Science Foundation-funded project, and in collaboration with Argonne National Laboratory, which is itself partnering with the Chicago Transit Authority, Hu will be creating novel approaches to stochastic modeling that he hopes can profoundly improve this planning process. To get just a little bit technical for a moment: Hu says one of the big challenges of stochastic modeling is coping with “distributional ambiguity,” which is where you’re lacking a lot of reliable information about the probability of key phenomena. Currently, one of the ways statisticians deal with this is a method called distributionally robust optimization, but Hu says DRO has a few limitations. One, it’s computationally intensive, which means as models get more complex, it becomes increasingly cumbersome and time consuming to run them and adapt them to new data. Second, DRO tends to hedge against worst-case scenarios and can therefore lead to overly conservative outcomes. Third, it's a machine learning-based process that is a “black box,” meaning it does not show how it arrives at its answers. It therefore might not be a great option for publicly funded agencies, who, in spending large sums of taxpayer dollars, could certainly benefit from transparent or interpretable models. Hu says his novel stochastic modeling strategy aims not only to improve on these limitations, but also provide more overall usability for public agencies, including models that can be more easily updated as better data emerge.

After developing the model, Hu is looking forward to a big field test toward the end of the project: helping the Chicago Transit Authority as it embarks on electrifying their massive fleet of public buses. Current electric bus battery technology generally provides a range of around 60 miles. But many of CTA’s current scheduled vehicle route blocks are much longer; nearly a third of weekday blocks are longer than 100 miles. CTA therefore envisions building out a bus-charging infrastructure that’s integrated with their garages and bus routes, which will also require enhancements to the local electric grid to accommodate the new electricity load. Figuring out where these grid modifications need to be made and the ideal placement for the charging stations in a way that harmonizes with the complex bus routes — which are likely to change in the future — is exactly the kind of complicated, ambiguous planning task Hu says his model can help with. Most importantly, it gives a government agency its best chance of spending limited public resources for EV charging as effectively as possible.

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Story by Lou Blouin

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering

Off

Wed, 01/22/2025 - 13:40

Given a web of uncertainties, like future electricity price, consumer charging behavior and EV market growth, Associate Professor Jian Hu says a novel type of stochastic modeling can minimize the risks of public investments in EV infrastructure.

Associate Professor of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering Jian Hu is testing a new approach to planning charging infrastructure with the Chicago Transit Authority. Photo by Annie Barker

Vitalis Im’s winding, unexpected path to academia

lblouin — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 15:49:08 +0000

Vitalis Im’s winding, unexpected path to academia lblouin Mon, 01/20/2025 - 10:49

Violinist. Opera singer. Therapist. Professor and researcher. Vitalis Im, the Health and Human Services Department’s newest assistant professor, has collected a list of life experiences that makes you think a career in academia wasn’t always his life goal. Indeed, Im says that is entirely true, and, in fact, it was far from a sure thing he'd even attend college. Growing up in a low-income family in rural upstate New York, the only Asian American student in a town of about 2,000 people whose high school was colloquially referred to as a “dropout factory,” Im describes his younger self as someone who “didn’t have any purpose in life and definitely wasn’t thinking about what I wanted to do with my future.” Then, sort of out of nowhere, at age 16, he developed an intense interest in classical music. He says it was kind of weird, actually, because listening to music of any genre wasn’t part of his childhood or adolescence. But browsing YouTube one day, he ran across a recording of the Second Movement of Bach’s Violin Concerto in D Minor and couldn’t stop listening to it. Things snowballed from there, and he immersed himself in classical music the way other kids his age consumed pop or hip hop. One day, he confided in his school librarian that he was interested in learning to play the violin. As it happened, she was also taking violin lessons, and she offered to give Im her spare instrument if he promised to practice every day.

The librarian also gave him the phone number of the woman she was taking lessons from — Anastasia Solberg — who owned a small music school in town. Im knew he couldn’t afford the lessons, but he called Solberg anyway, and after meeting with her, she offered to give him lessons for free. He took his practice seriously, and after discovering he actually had a talent for it, he started thinking about music as something he could do with his life. He knew, having started lessons so late, he probably couldn’t get into a decent music school. So he enrolled at the nearby community college, where he ended up studying music for three years. Then, in what he calls a “Hail Mary application,” he applied to Bard College, a private liberal arts school in upstate New York, and got in. Im says Bard was a big turning point in his life. His plans going in were to major in music, which he did, though he later switched from violin to voice after discovering a latent talent as an opera singer. But Bard’s educational philosophy was also to foster well-rounded people and interdisciplinary thinking. “At Bard, it was, like, ‘You’re studying music, but what else?’” Im says. For him, that other thing, and second major, turned out to be anthropology. Early on, he remembers taking a class called “Race and Nature in Africa,” which he says was the first time he was introduced to the idea of race as a “concept.” “It was super mind blowing for me, and really put so much of my own life experience in perspective,” Im says. “And this was also a time when Black Lives Matter was gaining steam, so it was also connecting me to politics and so much of what was going on in the world. I had attended community college for three years, but this was the first time I really felt intellectually stimulated — that my brain got moving in that way.”

Im’s experience at Bard was so meaningful that it left him, maybe for the first time in his life, with a fairly clear picture of what he wanted to do. “I loved academia. I love the idea of sitting around and talking about ideas,” Im says. “It seemed like a luxury to think that’s even something you can do.” Still, it sort of remained a dream, and, at first, he didn’t see the path he’d follow to get there — other than knowing it would require a PhD. After graduating from Bard, he made ends meet for a couple years by teaching music lessons and working as a personal care aide for people with traumatic brain injuries. The latter he characterizes succinctly as “very hard work,” something he says he’d never want to do again. But it did open an unfiltered line of sight into the social services system and how inefficient it can be for people. Social work wasn’t something he’d really considered for a career before. But after that experience, he began thinking about it as a real possibility, even if he didn’t see how his background in music and anthropology would get him there. Then, in another twist of good luck, it turned out his undergraduate anthropology mentor at Bard had studied at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. During a chat with her one day, she tipped him off that the university had a joint social work-anthropology program. It felt fortuitous, and he decided to apply.

In Ann Arbor, Im flourished. He says he’s always seen value in knowing how to do a lot of things, and grad school enabled him to explore a whole new set of interests. In the same way that race emerged as a theme during his undergraduate years, masculinity became the framework for much of his graduate studies — inspired, in part, by the reckoning with male identities that was triggered by the #MeToo movement. During one of his field placements, he worked with men in a program called Alternatives to Domestic Aggression, which was run by a local Catholic social services organization. The heart of the program was a regular group meeting, where men who had committed acts of violence against their domestic partners would, with the help of a facilitator, sort through the messy business of accountability, self-reflection and, in many cases, their own experiences as victims of violence. Im says it was a life-changing experience. He remembers, in particular, being totally floored by the skills of the group facilitator, Jeffrie Cape. “She was incredibly kind and generous, but she also wouldn’t hesitate to lay you flat when you needed it,” Im says. “And you had to be like that. Eighty-five percent of these men were court mandated and they did not want to be there. They would push back and do all kinds of things to obfuscate their responsibility. So she was never just kind or never just super blunt. She was able to see that contradiction and just kind of hold it. That’s what the situation demanded. That was the kind of intimacy you needed to do the work.”

Im says working with the men was a profoundly challenging experience. But it also taught him something important about himself — namely, that he was made of stuff that could weather that kind of emotional intensity and therefore help people. “One of the things I learned is that there are very few spaces in the world where people can be ugly, and therapy is a space for that,” Im says. “But to have spaces for that, you need people who can tolerate that.” As Im began thinking more deeply about his own approach as a therapist, he found himself returning to an important part of his past. The idea that he might combine arts and music with therapy was, he says, motivated in small part by some of the literature he was reading; but mostly because he missed doing music and wanted to figure out some way to bring his passions together. “I mean, music was life changing for me,” he says. “Without it, I don’t know where I would be. So that was sort of on my mind. Prison, violence, men, art — just sort of thinking through all of it.”

Around that time, in another instance of serendipity, he met a woman named Mary Heinen McPherson. Heinen McPherson began serving a life sentence in 1976, and while in prison, became a leading advocate for the rights of incarcerated people. Among the many things she accomplished before she was even released after a sentence commutation in 2002 was co-founding U-M’s Prison Creative Arts Project, which brings various people impacted by the justice system together around the arts. Heinen McPherson was looking for someone to go to a prison and lead a music-based workshop and asked Im if he was interested. He couldn’t say ‘yes’ fast enough. Arts-based workshops in prisons have basically been a major theme of his life, teaching and research ever since. As someone who is an artist himself, you might expect Im to be an unabashed evangelist for the power of the arts to profoundly impact people in prisons. But his own view is that we should be careful about romanticizing the arts. Im says it is absolutely true that the arts have many practical benefits for people in prisons. Often, the value of a workshop is simply breaking up the intense monotony of prison life. Sometimes, the value lies in giving people space to do something human that’s generally not allowed in prison, like laughing or “being able to complain about sh*t.” Sometimes it’s deeper, like when a person experiences poetry as a powerful medium for self-reflection or discovers a latent talent for writing. (Im says you’d be amazed how many guys are naturals at improv theater.) But he says the same vulnerability that the arts inspire can also be “weaponized.” He tells the story of a man who attended one of his poetry workshops and would write “stacks of pages” of poetry every week, often exploring deep topics, like what it’s like to be a gay man living in a prison. Then, one day, during a lockdown event, Im says this man’s cell was searched and the guards discovered his writing. They took turns reading it aloud to each other, laughing, and then tore it up. “So, you know, one of the goals is to give people a chance to exercise parts of their humanity that have been taken away,” Im says. “But their humanity can be turned against them. Vulnerability is not always rewarded in prison. The arts aren’t some kind of magic shield against the violence of prison.”

More recently, Im has become deeply interested in the arts as a communication vehicle between people in prisons and people who live in the free world. Particularly, he’s interested in exploring what power the arts have to help the latter understand the former. After all, unless you have been impacted by the justice system yourself, or have a close loved one who has, you likely have never been to a prison and don’t have any reason or occasion to interact with someone who has been in one. But “art travels,” Im says. Art, writing and poetry can be exhibited and shared outside prison walls, and people who run prisons, surprisingly, often have few objections to doing so. People in prisons can make podcasts. And it all has the potential to help those living in the free world understand — in a nonabstract way — the humanity of people in prisons, and how our lives on the outside depend, in some ways, on us being explicitly or implicitly OK with more than a million Americans living behind bars.

Right now, Im is pondering creative new ways to probe that space, including one project focused on homemade greeting cards, a popular medium that many people in prisons use to communicate with people on the outside. (Im says making greeting cards is also one of the few “honest ways to make a living” in prison.) And he’s also working on a pilot program that would provide free therapeutic services for formerly incarcerated people in Michigan, which he’s hoping can launch this fall. That’s on top of his heavy teaching duties, which new assistant professors are, of course, expected to shoulder. Thankfully, Im says classroom life has been a pleasure so far, in no small part because he feels an affinity with many of his students. “I think, in general, students at ��-Dearborn are very pragmatic,” Im says. “Part of it is a class difference. Many of them are getting a degree so they can start working, which I’m really sympathetic to, actually. I mean, when I was at community college, it was ‘get me out of here so I can do what I need to do,’ which was to make money.” On the other hand, Im loves that he can also give his students a kind of experience that he had at Bard. He knows his “Death, Dying and Bereavement” course, which he taught last semester, may not be as essential to their life goals as organic chemistry. But there’s no missing seeing their eyes — and perspectives — widen when they discuss, for example, how some cultures see cannibalism as a perfectly normal way of mourning loved ones. “To dive into those cross-cultural perspectives with them, to think generously and relatively — that’s kind of the whole point of college,” Im says. “To engage in this intellectual curiosity kind of for its own sake, not the sake of something else — that still feels like such a luxury to me. And when you have other more practical things in your life you have to worry about, like paying your bills or taking care of a family, you don’t always have space for that. So it’s a real joy to be able to share that kind of experience with them.”

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Story by Lou Blouin

Arts

Faculty and Staff

Faculty Research

College of Education, Health, and Human Services

Health and Human Services

Off

Mon, 01/20/2025 - 15:48

The new Health and Human Services assistant professor talks about his prior experience as a musician and therapist, his life’s serendipitous turning points, and his current research on the impact of the arts on people in prisons.

Assistant Professor of Health and Human Services Vitalis Im started at ��-Dearborn in Fall 2024.

The challenges with younger drivers and autonomous vehicles

lblouin — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 15:28:25 +0000

The challenges with younger drivers and autonomous vehicles lblouin Mon, 01/13/2025 - 10:28

Autonomous vehicles promise a future of almost unimaginable driver convenience. After all, who wouldn't want to be able to watch a movie during a tedious stop-and-go rush hour commute? But proponents of AVs think the technology’s even more meaningful impact will be in the realm of safety, given that more than 90% of traffic accidents are thought to be the result of human error. Indeed, we’re already seeing some of the safety benefits as semi-autonomous driver assist features, like lane keep assist, blind spot monitoring and emergency braking, become commonplace on newer vehicles. Even so, the next big developmental leap to so-called Level 3 vehicles, which are capable of doing all the driving for us in certain situations and are now starting to enter American and European markets, could introduce a whole new set of safety and driver behavior challenges, says Associate Professor of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering Bochen Jia. That’s because Level 3 AVs still require full driver intervention when conditions are beyond the system’s capability — like when lane markers aren’t clearly marked or are obscured by weather; or in the event of system malfunction. That introduces a whole new type of driver experience, which the AV research community calls “takeover.” That’s the tricky liminal moment when a driver has to abruptly shift their focus from, say, watching their favorite Netflix series, to dealing with a potential road emergency.

Intuitively, takeover is a fraught, psychologically complex space, which is why Jia says a lot of research has been devoted to studying how drivers respond to this type of demand. For example, early research has indicated, somewhat counterintuitively, that the risk of driver fatigue actually increases when operating a Level 3 vehicle. It seems the mental task of constantly monitoring a vehicle doing the driving for us can actually be more draining than doing the driving ourselves. And in Jia’s lab, he’s been focusing on a neglected area of takeover research: younger, inexperienced drivers. From a research perspective, he says it’s a fascinating population. First, young people’s brains are still developing, particularly when it comes to attention resources and situational awareness, which can influence things like fatigue development and how well they respond to potentially hazardous situations, like takeover. In addition, younger people tend to, in general, be more trusting of technology, which could lead to less intense monitoring of the vehicle and undesirable takeover outcomes. Moreover, Jia says we might not be too far away from an era where young drivers’ only driving experience is on Level 3 vehicles. “That would mean they actually aren’t getting much experience doing actual driving, which could influence how well they respond to situations when the vehicle asks them to take over,” Jia says.

In focusing on younger drivers, Associate Professor of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering Bochen Jia has been exploring a neglected area of AV research. Photo by Annie Barker

For one of his latest projects, Jia has been digging into the particular issue of fatigue onset in younger, novice drivers. For this study, he recruited both drivers under the age of 19 who had limited driving experience and middle-aged drivers who had years of experience. Using a high-fidelity driving simulator, both sets of participants engaged in extended periods of autonomous driving and were instructed to take control of the vehicle when the autonomous mode was not safe or had failed. During their driving experience, Jia then introduced several types of takeover events to see how drivers would react. By combining physiological measures and self-reported assessments collected periodically during their driving task, Jia then monitored each set of participants for fatigue onset. The results were pretty interesting: Novice young adult drivers developed both physical and mental fatigue earlier than their middle-aged counterparts during extended periods of autonomous driving. "This is somewhat surprising to people because they think young people naturally have more energy," Jia explains. "However, it appears that the mental demands of autonomous driving, or the tendency of younger drivers to be more engaged in non-driving tasks during autonomous operation, may accelerate the onset of fatigue in younger drivers." Moreover, the takeover outcomes for fatigued drivers were often far from desirable. “Essentially, we were looking at how often participants would fail to prevent a collision,” Jia says. “And it happened more frequently than we had hoped.”

Jia says the results point to a need for highly effective fatigue warning systems for Level 3 AVs that have special considerations for younger, inexperienced drivers. Interestingly, Jia envisions this system would be most effective if it wasn’t just part of the vehicle, but integrated with other readily available wellness monitoring technologies, like wearable fitness trackers that monitor heart rates and sleep quality. “I don't think you can have a system that’s confined to the car — that’s not enough,” Jia says. “It should be part of your life monitoring — an overall system — because they don’t suddenly become a different person when they get in the car. With all the personal data monitoring technologies we have nowadays, we could easily identify younger drivers, and we likely have a lot of the data we would need.”

Next up, Jia says he plans to continue his research on fatigue onset with a study that puts participants in real automated vehicles within a closed testbed, such as the Mcity test facility. In addition, he has a similar project that is studying differences in distraction levels between younger, novice drivers and middle-aged experienced drivers. He hopes both studies will provide critical insights into improving the safety and usability of autonomous vehicle systems for drivers of all experience levels.

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Story by Lou Blouin. Want to learn more about Jia's work on driver fatigue? You can read the full-text of his recent article on the subject in the “Journal of Safety Research,” which was co-authored by Jia's student Yourui Tong, ��-Dearborn Associate Professor of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering Shan Bao, Tsinghua University Professor of Industrial Engineering Changxu Wu and ��-Dearborn Associate Professor of Psychology Nitya Sethuraman.

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering

Off

Mon, 01/13/2025 - 15:22

Associate Professor Bochen Jia’s latest research is revealing some surprising things about how fatigue can impact younger, inexperienced drivers when they're operating semi-autonomous vehicles.

Associate Professor of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering Bochen Jia (right) and graduate student Darlington Egeonu check out the driving simulator Jia used for his most recent project on driver fatigue. Photo by Annie Barker

Office of Research update for January 2025

lblouin — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 14:35:21 +0000

Office of Research update for January 2025 lblouin Mon, 01/06/2025 - 09:35

External Awards Received

U-M Principal Investigator: Birhanu Eshete
Project Title: DeResistor: Detection Resilient Probing of Censorship Middleboxes
Sponsor: U.S. Department of State (through SRI International)
Award Amount: $299,002

Under the Internet Freedom Annual Program, Eshete will collaborate with SRI International in support of research and development activities that will enhance DeResistor prototyping, existing system performance evaluation, and system integration and software distribution. This research will support the U.S. International Strategy for Cyberspace goals to protect the open, interoperable, secure and reliable Internet.

U-M Principal Investigator: Weidong Xiang
Project Title: Revitalize Auto Industry: Elevating Automotive Workforce Excellence through Cybersecurity and AI Innovation
Sponsor: National Security Agency (through Oakland University)
Award Amount: $249,130

Xiang’s team will collaborate with researchers at Oakland University to develop a tutorial on Cybersecurity in C-V2X in 5G/6G systems and present workshops on Physical and Network Layer Security in CAN and Security in Autonomous Driving and Navigation.

U-M Principal Investigator: Adam Sekuler
Project Title: Peace Through the Lens: Arab and Jewish American Film Initiative
Direct Sponsor: The Ravitz Foundation
Award Amount: $18,000

"Peace Through the Lens: Arab and Jewish American Film Initiative" is a transformative educational program set for Fall 2025. The goal of the program is to empower students through collaborative filmmaking with Arab American and Jewish American filmmakers, fostering mutual understanding, empathy and dialogue, while challenging stereotypes and contributing to peacebuilding efforts amidst historical and contemporary conflicts. Funding from this project will support filmmaker residencies and community events, aiming to enrich both students' educational experiences and community cohesion.

U-M Principal Investigator: Junaid Farooq
Project Title: 5G Hardware Encryption Cybersecurity Integration Evaluation
Direct Sponsor: Opex Systems, LLC
Total Sponsor Authorized Amount: $45,000.00

This project aims to assess the impact of hardware security module (HSM)-based encryption on the performance of real-time over-the-air communication in private 5G networks. With the perception that hardware encryption provides significantly enhanced security compared to software-based methods, this project seeks to evaluate the validity of this claim through a dual-pronged approach: theoretical analysis and practical implementation. By integrating HSMs into the encryption process, the project will measure the trade-offs between the increased security assurances and the potential performance implications, such as latency and throughput, in ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) scenarios. The outcomes will provide a comprehensive understanding of the feasibility and effectiveness of deploying HSM-based encryption in next-generation wireless networks, informing best practices for secure and efficient 5G communication systems.

Announcements

Call for Nominations: OVPR Research Faculty & Staff Awards

The Dearborn community is strongly encouraged to consider nominating ��-Dearborn staff and faculty for the annual OVPR Research Faculty & Staff Awards.

Research staff and faculty play a critical role in supporting and advancing university operations. OVPR is seeking nominations for its series of awards to recognize members of the U-M research community whose work helps advance knowledge, solve challenging problems, create new products and enhance quality of life.

Research Staff awards are open to all regular non-faculty staff members employed by any unit of the University of Michigan’s three campuses. Students, tenured/tenure track, clinical track and research track faculty are not eligible for these awards.

Learn more here and submit your nominations by Feb. 12.

To honor the scholarly work of research faculty, OVPR also encourages nominations for its Collegiate Research Professorship Award, Research Faculty Achievement Award and Research Faculty Recognition Award. The newly established Research Faculty Mentor Award has been created to recognize the outstanding research faculty who have demonstrated excellence in mentoring and celebrate the crucial role that mentorship plays in the professional and personal development of emerging researchers.

Learn more here and submit your nominations by Feb. 19.

NSF Regional Resilience Innovation Incubator Seeking Experts

The NSF Regional Resilience Innovation Incubator (R2I2) program is seeking experts from diverse sectors and disciplines to cover the wide range of scientific topics and partnerships represented in the R2I2 proposals. The R2I2 program supports collaborative, community-engaged initiatives to develop and implement scalable solutions to climate-related resilience challenges by translating recent research advancements in Earth system science into practical applications.

The program supports translation of existing earth systems science to practical solutions that address regional resilience challenges. Serving as a reviewer is a great way to help your community, better understand how NSF reviews proposals and get insight into NSF's new investments in translational research.

You can fill out the potential reviewer survey.

Research Events in January

IRB-HSBS, IRB On-the-Road Drop-In Session
- Elizabeth Molina, the ��-Dearborn Health and Services and Behavioral Sciences Institutional Review Board (IRB-HSBS) liaison will be resuming the virtual “IRB On-the-Road” sessions once a month for any study team members who would like to have a one-on-one discussion about any questions they may have about the IRB process.
- Wednesday, Jan. 15, 2-3:30 p.m., virtual
- Wednesday, Feb. 19, 2-3:30 p.m., virtual
- Wednesday, March 19, 2-3:30 p.m., virtual
- Wednesday, April 16, 2-3:30 p.m., virtual
Responsible Conduct of Research for K Scholars, MICHR
- MICHR will offer the popular Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) for K Awardees this winter/spring. RCR4K is a seminar that is designed to meet the requirements of the NIH K-23, or any federal or non-federal career development grant. To ensure compliance with NIH regulations, these sessions will be held in-person at NCRC.
- The five-session (10-hour) seminar is mostly interactive, practice-based, and focused on addressing RCR issues (ethics, integrity, and regulatory matters) that have arisen in the course of your own funded research. It’s relevant, interactive, and includes mentoring from experienced faculty. Registration Required.
  - Session 1: History of research ethics & Human subjects research regulations; Wednesday, Jan. 15, 3-5 p.m.
  - Session 2: Research integrity: falsification, fabrication, and plagiarism; Wednesday, Feb. 19, 3-5 p.m.
  - Session 3: Authorship & Plagiarism; Wednesday, March 19, 3-5 p.m.
  - Session 4: Clinical Trial Design: The Support Trial; Wednesday, April 16, 3-5 p.m.
  - Session 5: Public Health Research & Research with data and specimens: Henrietta Lacks and the Common Rule debate; Wednesday, May 14, 3-5 p.m.
NSF Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Seminars
- The Ann Arbor Office of the Associate Dean for Research, College of Engineering is hosting an NSF CAREER seminar series and has extended an invitation to interested Dearborn faculty to join. Registration is required; register for individual events using the links below.
- NSF CAREER: Broader Impacts with Impact - Thursday, Jan. 23, 11:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m. - Johnson Rooms 3rd Floor LEC
- Resources for Education, Outreach, Diversity, and Evaluation - Thursday, Feb. 13, 11:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m. - Johnson Rooms 3rd Floor LEC
- NSF CAREER: Structuring your CAREER for Reviewers - Thursday, March 13, 11:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m. - Johnson Rooms 3rd Floor LEC
- NSF CAREER: How to Address Reviewer Feedback - Thursday, April 4, 11:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m. - Location TBD
- NSF CAREER: Project Description: The Research Plan - Thursday, April 10, 11:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m. - Johnson Rooms 3rd Floor LEC
- NSF Panel TBD - Thursday, May 8, 11:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m. - Location TBD

Research Resource Highlight: AI Letter of Support Writer

Every month, the Office of Research features a resource and/or tool that is available for researchers. This month we are featuring the �� Medical School’s AI Letter of Support Writer, an innovative tool that can quickly generate multiple versions of tailored letters, saving time and overcoming the challenge of starting from a blank page.

How it works: users begin by tailoring the suggested prompt template. Next, copy/paste the prompt into the platform to generate a draft letter of support. Users can submit the same prompt multiple times for different letter variations. The AI Letter of Support Writer uses U-M Maizey, which is part of the U-M generative AI toolset. Level-1 access and login are required.

Assistance or questions about the platform can be directed to ummsresearch@umich.edu.

Upcoming Funding Opportunities

The Office of Research publishes a list of selected funding opportunities, organized by college, every month on our website under Announcements. Yearly grant calendars organized by subject area provided by Hanover Research are available there as well.

Use the updated U-M Research Commons to look up internal (to U-M) funding opportunities and Limited Submission opportunities open to Dearborn researchers.

Contact the ��-Dearborn Office of Research if you would like more information about submitting a proposal to any of the programs.

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Mon, 01/06/2025 - 14:35

See which of your colleagues' work is getting funded, browse upcoming research events and find resources to support your work.

Career Services is trying new ways to connect with students

lblouin — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 13:55:58 +0000

Career Services is trying new ways to connect with students lblouin Mon, 01/06/2025 - 08:55

Laurel Draudt says it wasn’t that long ago that college career services offices were known for resume review services and not a whole lot else. At some institutions, this “model from the 1990s” is still the norm. But when Draudt started as ��-Dearborn’s Career Services director in 2022, she was excited to experiment with a broader vision for their five-person office. Borrowing from her background in higher education professional development, Draudt saw an opportunity to recast Career Services as something students used throughout their academic careers — not just in the final few months before graduation when the pressure of a job search suddenly becomes real. “We’re really trying to get students to think about what they can be doing now to be more competitive later,” Draudt says. “We want to be having conversations with first- and second-year students about the benefits of an on-campus job or doing research or studying abroad, because if we can reach them early enough, they actually have time to make changes and do these things.”

So far, that new approach is manifesting itself in a few different ways. Draudt says the office recently added two new career coaches to bolster the office’s core service of by-appointment and walk-in career counseling sessions. And what career coaches are focusing on in those sessions with students is expanding a lot. They still give their fair share of feedback on resumes and cover letters when that’s what students need help with. But coaches are just as likely to be talking with students about programs and careers that might match their interests, how to find a not-for-credit internship (and how to sound professional when you send your inquiries), figuring out how to talk effectively about past job experiences even if they’re unrelated to a career field, or how to develop a tailored job search strategy so they’re not simply applying to hundreds of jobs and hoping for the best.

Draudt says they’ve also been investing a lot of energy into expanding their lineup of in-person and virtual workshops. Looking to go beyond the staples, like sessions on effective job interviewing, they’ve added workshops on other equally practical topics, like understanding benefits packages (which involved a collaboration with ��-Dearborn’s Human Resources office), confident communication, and how to manage stress and anxiety during a job search. The latter two workshop ideas came from the office’s newest member — Career Coach Zainab Radi, a former career peer in the office who recently graduated from ��-Dearborn and took a staff position in the office in October 2023. Radi says being so fresh out of college and having just been through her own job search have turned out to be big assets when coming up with workshop ideas that students might actually find useful. For the confident communication session, she hit up one of her former instructors, COB Lecturer Christine Fischer, who covered everything from strategies for emailing to pitching your ideas to a supervisor to making presentations. The workshop on stress and anxiety grew directly out of conversations she was having with students. “I noticed that with the current job market, and even everything going on politically, students were experiencing a lot of uncertainty and there was a lot of stress and negative energy around that,” Radi says. “Some students who were struggling in their job searches were even having panic attacks. Not being trained in mental health or counseling, I wanted to find a way to provide meaningful support.” So she reached out to her contacts at Counseling and Psychological Services, who put together a workshop on how to manage anxiety during a job search. Radi says it was really eye opening for the attendees, many of whom had never experienced anxiety until this stage of their lives. “I remember they were really surprised by the idea of taking a walk or just getting outside and enjoying nature,” Radi says. “But that can really help you destress. You have to do other things than be on your computer all day applying for jobs, hitting refresh to check and see if you got an email back from an employer. That can just make things worse.”

Career Coach Zainab Radi, a '23 alum and the newest member of the Career Services team, has been responsible for several new workshop ideas.

Both Draudt and Radi say they’re excited to try out more new ideas in 2025, including some new workshops. Radi says a session on financial literacy and how to manage your income boost post-graduation is one topic she’s been thinking about. And Draudt says they’re going to be making more of an effort to collaborate with people and offices that are already regularly interfacing with students. “There’s so much competition for student attention these days, we think it’s a good idea to reach students where they are, because the reality is many of them still might not be thinking they need career services until it’s time for their job search.” Draudt says linking up with faculty, many of whom are already providing a lot of informal career advice, and tailoring more programs and events to specific communities, like international students, are two big priorities for the new year.

Of course, one of the biggest changes for 2025 is that Career Services will be getting a new home. Right now, the office is tucked over in Fairlane Center, but around Spring Break, the staff will be packing up and moving to their new digs on the first floor of the Renick University Center. Draudt is hopeful the convenient location at the heart of campus will help students see that Career Services is something they can be taking advantage of at any point in their college journeys.

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Want to keep an eye on upcoming Career Services workshops? Check out the office’s VictorsLink page. Story by Lou Blouin. Photos by Annie Barker.

Careers or Internships

Experiential Learning

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Mon, 01/06/2025 - 13:45

New workshops on topics like managing anxiety during a job search, understanding benefits packages and confident speaking are part of an effort to impact students long before their senior-year job searches.

The Career Services team, from left: Career Coach and Professional Development Manager Devin Johannis, Assistant Director Mai Qazzaz, Career Coach Zainab Radi, Director Laurel Draudt and Senior Professional Development Program Jennifer Macleod.

Campus Colleagues: Vessela Vassileva-Clarke

lblouin — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 13:34:17 +0000

Campus Colleagues: Vessela Vassileva-Clarke lblouin Wed, 12/18/2024 - 08:34

Chat with ��-Dearborn’s Director of Research Development Vessela Vassileva-Clarke about her life growing up in Bulgaria, and it’s not surprising to learn that she once dreamed of becoming a diplomat. Her parents were both staff in the Bulgarian military. She attended an English-language high school, where she learned not only English but French and exercised her deep interest in history any chance she got. Her childhood, adolescence and young adulthood overlapped a transformative period in Eastern Europe — a time when the Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union and Iron Curtain collapsed, and Bulgaria strengthened relations with Western Europe and the U.S., events that would ultimately culminate in both EU and NATO membership. Above all, Vassileva-Clarke loved to travel and experience other cultures. Working as a foreign officer at a dynamic time in Bulgaria's history seemed like an exciting way to build a life around seeing the world.

In this month’s Campus Colleagues, we talk with Vassileva-Clarke about her initial career path, some unexpected life turns and how her work now helps drive the university’s growing research culture.

Speaking up landed her an embassy gig.

In college, Vassileva-Clarke dug into subjects that would put her on a diplomatic career track. As an undergraduate, she majored in economics with a concentration in military studies. For her master’s, she focused on international political relations and security issues. She excelled as a student, and toward the end of her master’s program, her no-nonsense style landed her an internship in the U.S. Embassy in Bulgaria. “Some students from political science were invited to participate in a meeting with the American ambassador in Bulgaria,” she recalls. “This was during NATO's intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and I guess I was the only one in the room who questioned some of the actions. I dared to tell the ambassador that what he was telling us was whitewashed. We knew there were bombs falling in Bulgaria by mistake.” Shortly after, the embassy's head of public relations reached out to Vassileva-Clarke to see if she wanted to intern at the U.S. Embassy in Bulgaria. “Sometimes, I guess putting a person on the spot pays off. They wanted people who could think for themselves and not take a story at face value,” she says.

Vassileva-Clarke flat out loved the internship. For one, she was amazed by just how much of the inner workings of the embassy she got to observe, and it taught her a lot about the nuances of diplomatic work. For example, one of her jobs was to compile summaries of important issues in the Bulgarian press for the U.S. ambassador. She said it was eye opening to see how her interpretations of events, which were informed by her perspective as a Bulgarian citizen and someone who had a global mindset, often differed dramatically from the interpretations of the U.S. Embassy staff. “Something the majority of Bulgarians considered super positive could be seen as something super negative,” she says. “It showed me how misunderstood a nation could be, or how wrongly a nation could interpret international events, if you only have the insights from within the nation, without understanding the rest of the world.”

In the U.S., life took an unexpected turn.

Another part of Vassileva-Clarke’s internship focused on strengthening economic ties between Bulgaria and the U.S., which encompassed both looking for business opportunities for American investors and taking Bulgarian businesspeople to the U.S. In the second phase of that project, she got a couldn’t-refuse offer to continue the internship in the Bulgarian Embassy in Washington, D.C., where her life took an unexpected turn. She met her future husband, an American businessman, and as the two contemplated whether to build their life together in Bulgaria or in the U.S., they ultimately decided on the latter. She did initially try to help him learn Bulgarian, “but the reality was, since I already spoke English, I had many more opportunities to work in the U.S. than he would have had in Bulgaria,” she says.

Now rooted in the U.S. for the foreseeable future, Vassileva-Clarke briefly explored working at the U.S. State Department. But when she learned only citizens could work as foreign officers, she took a job as a project coordinator in engineering at Johns Hopkins University, where she quickly learned she had a strong interest in working with faculty on research projects. Within two years, she pivoted to a different position at Hopkins as a project manager at the cross-disciplinary Systems Institute, where she worked with engineers, data scientists, medical researchers, urban planners and international relations experts on major interdisciplinary research projects. “Hopkins was a dream come true,” she says. “I learned a lot. I was constantly working with smart people doing cool things. And we had so many international students and research scientists coming from other countries that, in some ways, it was bringing the world to me. I wasn’t a representative of a country, but I was helping countries work together.” Plus, she says, when you’re bringing together experts (and egos) from so many different disciplines, it pays to have a trained diplomat in the room. She jokes that her internship at the embassy in public relations “definitely paid off.”

The next twist: a move to Michigan.

While at Hopkins, Vassileva-Clarke dug deeper into her newfound passion for working with research teams by completing the university’s master’s in research administration program. The new degree turned out to be great preparation for her family’s next big life pivot. Her son was a talented hockey player, and the family decided to move from Maryland to Michigan so he could attend the Rolston Hockey Academy in Oak Park. She says it was pure luck that ��-Dearborn was looking to recruit for a new position in research development, a field that focuses on the intricacies of helping researchers secure resources for their work. Vassileva-Clarke says it was an exciting challenge. When it comes to research, Hopkins is basically the elite of the elite; research is something everyone “lives and breathes,” she says. ��-Dearborn had deep roots as an education-focused institution but had a more sporadic history of faculty research. The new leadership was trying to change that, and it would be Vassileva-Clarke’s role to help support the growing ranks of ambitious, talented, young faculty who had big research goals but who weren’t always experienced in securing funding. Vassileva-Clarke’s is a behind-the-scenes role, encompassing some really tangible things like networking events and grant writing workshops for faculty. But it’s also about building relationships with people in key positions in funding institutions, keeping up to date on their priorities, knowing all the little “back doors and peculiarities” of the different federal agencies, and nurturing mentor-mentee relationships between faculty, including with very experienced researchers on the Ann Arbor campus. “A lot of researchers have great ideas and they think funders will give them money just because their idea is great,” Vassileva-Clarke explains. “But the reality is they’ll only give you money if you help them do something they already want to do. So the trick is presenting your idea in a way that actually helps them. Grant writing is not academic writing. It’s a sales pitch.”

The work is clearly paying off. Just a few years ago, about 60% of ��-Dearborn’s research funding came from industry, with the remainder coming from federal and state agencies, as well as foundations. In the nearly five years that Vassileva-Clarke’s been here, that ratio has basically flipped, with the total dollar amount for research funding growing by approximately 50% compared to FY21. And beyond the numbers, she sees other promising signs that ��-Dearborn’s research culture is growing in all the right ways. There’s support from the leadership. There is an emphasis on hiring ambitious young faculty who have a strong interest in research. Faculty are strengthening ties to Ann Arbor — the largest public research institution in the U.S. The university is launching more graduate programs, which are essential to attracting students to power research labs. We’re even starting to recruit more post-docs. “The other thing I find very encouraging is I’m hearing more stories of senior faculty helping junior faculty,” she says. “I’ll be telling someone they should do this and this and this, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, yes, professor so-and-so already told me that.’ That’s a very good sign. That means building this research culture is happening already.”

She’s enjoying the path she chose.

Vassileva-Clarke loves her career. But she says she does occasionally think back to the thrills of working in an embassy and what it would have meant for her life had she followed that path. After she became a naturalized citizen, she did consider returning to that line of work. But she says it’s a hard life for families, and since she sincerely enjoyed what she was doing with researchers, she decided against it. “Of course, sometimes, I still think about how different my life could have been, but this is human nature, right?” she says. “When presented with two choices, no matter what we choose, one day we will wonder if the option we did not pick might have been better, more exciting, easier, more enjoyable — you name it. So, occasionally, I have nostalgic musings. But no regrets.”

###

Story by Lou Blouin

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Wed, 12/18/2024 - 13:33

��-Dearborn’s director of research development talks about what’s driving the university’s burgeoning research culture and why she almost became a diplomat.

Director of Research Development Vessela Vassileva-Clarke started at ��-Dearborn in 2020 and has been vital to growing the research enterprise at the university. Photo by Julianne Lindsey

Faculty Fulbrights bring international partnerships to Dearborn Wolverines

stuxbury — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 16:55:56 +0000

Faculty Fulbrights bring international partnerships to Dearborn Wolverines stuxbury Mon, 12/16/2024 - 11:55

Three ��-Dearborn faculty from three different colleges were awarded grants to teach or conduct research in three different areas of the world — Indonesia, Egypt and Ethiopia — through the Fulbright awards program.

The U.S. Fulbright Scholar exchange program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, awarded grants to ��-Dearborn faculty. Composition and Rhetoric Teaching Professor Kristian Stewart received an award for the 2023-24 cycle. Business Economics and Finance Lecturer Mercedes Miranda and Computer and Information Science Associate Professor Birhanu Eshete earned grants for the 2024-25 cycle.

“A Fulbright Award is a way we can bring other parts of the world back to our students,” says Stewart, who did her most recent Fulbright in Indonesia over the summer. “We have diversity on our campus. There are times when I have students with five different first languages in my classroom. But we can still get isolated in our own groups, in our own enclaves. So it’s important to connect our students with people in different areas of the world that they may be unfamiliar with. And it’s important for them to learn how to tell — and listen — to the stories of others. Fulbright awards open doors to connect our students to people in different areas of the world.”

Reporter spoke with Stewart and Miranda about their recent awards. Eshete, who is currently in Ethiopia, will be highlighted in a future story.

Mercedes Miranda, Egypt

Miranda says an exchange opportunity changed her life when she was a college undergraduate. As a part of a pilot program at her university in her home country of Ecuador, Miranda — an economics student — was chosen to join a cohort that would study at the University of New Orleans in the United States.

“That opened a world of opportunities for me to create new networks to climb the career ladder and to experience a different culture,” says Miranda, who notes that, as cultural immersion, she watched “Saturday Night Live” until she was able to pick up the references and laugh at the jokes. “Many of our students at ��-Dearborn may be of Arabic descent, but they are born here and do not have the financial means to travel outside of the U.S. I see this Fulbright as a way to help me better understand life in a MENA (Middle Eastern and North African) country, while also creating ways to help my ��-Dearborn students connect with people across the world.”

Starting in February, Miranda will be teaching four-month business economics courses in Egypt, contributing her expertise to global academic exchanges and fostering international collaboration. Miranda has previously done non-Fulbright teaching in China for MBA students and in Italy for undergraduates.

Miranda’s Fulbright university will be in Cairo, but the name of the institution will not be shared with her until 10 days prior to the beginning of the Fulbright due to their protocol. She will teach both undergraduate and graduate courses that have an interdisciplinary, hands-on approach and merge concepts from finance, business economics and international business.

“I am going to teach through using business case studies through the Egyptian economic perspective, while also having the students reach out to Egyptian businesses to create a collaborative project that will help the businesses and give students the applicable knowledge they need,” she says. “I do something similar at ��-Dearborn, except from an American perspective and we work with Dearborn- and Detroit-based small businesses.”

Miranda enjoys seeing other areas of the world, but this will be the first time she’s traveled to Egypt. She chose to apply to the country specifically because it was the largest country in the MENA region with an institution where she could apply her international business economics expertise and 20% of the population are in the age range of 15 to 24.

“Many of our students are fluent in Arabic and I wanted an Arabic-speaking country that had a younger demographic. I see my Fulbright as the first step to a partnership of some type. Maybe it’s a project or a class. Maybe it’s having ��-Dearborn students go there or for Egyptian students to study here,” says Miranda, who notes COB Dean Frédéric Brunel will visit Egypt while she is there to meet faculty and university officials. “No matter what it will look like, I do know that this is only the beginning of something very wonderful.”

Kristian Stewart, Indonesia

When Stewart returned from Greece in fall 2023, after her first Fulbright Scholar Award, Stewart looked for additional international collaboration opportunities through Fulbright. She found a Fulbright Specialist opportunity to create a Center for Academic Writing at the Universitas Negeri Medan in Medan, Indonesia, in the summer 2024.

In addition to developing a Centre for Academic Writing on the Medan campus, running workshops and giving talks, Stewart provides one-on-one instruction and critiques for faculty academic papers. “After the six weeks, I left them the curriculum that I developed as a foundation for their Centre for Academic Writing,” she says. “To continue our relationship, I'm still working with their faculty. On Tuesday mornings our time, I'm theirs for the morning. They can put questions or their scholarly work in WhatsApp or a Google drive and I can edit and give feedback.”

Before Stewart left Indonesia, she and university employees discussed how they would like to come to ��-Dearborn and co-teach with her or how they can bring ��-Dearborn students there.

“The Fulbright Specialist award might be for a relatively short period of time, but the effects of the work being done through the program will be long lasting for me, their faculty and our students,” Stewart says.

Working with the University of Peloponnese in Greece during her first Fulbright Award, Stewart tailored her ��-Dearborn digital storytelling course to fit the needs of the Greek school’s curriculum, available technologies and student population. One such example project comes from Stewart’s ��-Dearborn course, “Being Human Today.” Stewart’s Dearborn Wolverines collaborate with students from universities around the world to create short videos that present life through individual lenses. “You combat stereotypes by having experiences outside of your own. You find solutions to world issues by learning from other people and seeing how they solve problems. Exposure is key,” says Stewart, who has previously taught in multiple countries, including South Africa, China, Germany and Italy.

A highlight of her first Fulbright Award was an invitation to provide a plenary address at Jefferson House, the residence of the United States Ambassador to Greece, where she was proud to provide remarks and represent ��-Dearborn to an international audience that included United States Ambassador to Greece, George J. Tsunis.

Stewart says as a result of her Fulbrights, her goals are to foster additional international connections and projects to benefit ��-Dearborn students. And it’s working.

��-Dearborn and the University of the Peloponnese recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding. Students and faculty from the two schools plan to work together for the next five years on writing-related research endeavors, including students virtually working together and sharing stories.

Stewart has additionally established a Collaborative Online International Learning partnership with biotechnology students in South Africa, and they just finished an eight-week project. Together, in WhatsApp groups, students investigated one of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals students then co-authored StoryMaps reflective of their research. Stewart also plans to connect Dearborn students to the Indonesian students, stemming from her work in Medan, in the near future.

Story by Sarah Tuxbury

Faculty and Staff

University-wide

College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters

College of Business

Accounting and Finance

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Computer and Information Science

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Mon, 12/16/2024 - 16:55

Three faculty members from three ��-Dearborn colleges — COB, CECS and CASL — earned awards to work in Egypt, Ethiopia and Indonesia.

��-Dearborn faculty members, from left, Mercedes Miranda, Kristian Stewart and Birhanu Eshete

Regents roundup for December 2024

lblouin — Mon, 09 Dec 2024 18:00:43 +0000

Regents roundup for December 2024 lblouin Mon, 12/09/2024 - 13:00

Chancellor's update

Chancellor Domenico Grasso provided the following university updates:

Began with well wishes and appreciation for outgoing Regent Ron Wesier’s contributions to our England Engineering Lab Building
Shared news of our annual staff awards and 50-year employee John Kaszewski
Thanked President Ono for his visit to the campus’ Natural Sciences Department in November
Provided a fall commencement update
Remarked about faculty media engagement regarding the 2024 presidential election, including 13 current/retired faculty members speaking to 56 media outlets
Recently awarded $1.65 million grant from the Department of Defense to a multidisciplinary team of faculty from our CECS Sustainability Center
News regarding Regent-elect and ��-Dearborn alum Carl Meyers' oath ceremony that will be held on campus later this week

The following personnel appointments were approved:

New appointments of regular instructional staff

Taner Onsay, PhD, Clinical Professor of Mechanical Engineering, CECS, Sept. 1, 2024–April 30, 2025

Xin Xia, PhD, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering, CECS, Sept. 1, 2024–April 30, 2027

New appointments of instructional staff represented by the Lecturers’ Employee Organization

Samuel E. Enajero, PhD, Lecturer I in Social Sciences, CASL, Jan. 1–April 30, 2025

The following retirement memoir was approved

Kiumi Akingbehin, PhD, professor of Computer and Information Science in CECS, will retire from active faculty status on Dec. 31, 2024.

FY25 capital outlay request

Finally, the Computer and Information Science Building renovation project was submitted to the State of Michigan for capital outlay consideration. The renovation would address infrastructure and provide updates to the existing building with a small addition to accommodate the program. The estimated cost of this project is $40 million. This project was submitted last year to the state, however, at this time, no projects have been funded for the state’s current fiscal year.

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View the Board of Regents meeting agenda.

Administration & Governance

Faculty and Staff

Off

Mon, 12/09/2024 - 18:00

Get details from the December U-M Board of Regents meeting, including the chancellor’s update, new faculty appointments and the FY25 state capital outlay request for the Computer and Information Science Building renovation.

Is pH the GPS of our cells?

lblouin — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 14:35:53 +0000

Is pH the GPS of our cells? lblouin Wed, 12/04/2024 - 09:35

Acids, which, technically speaking, are molecules that give off positively charged hydrogen ions when dissolved in water, play a role in some of the most important functions in our bodies. Your stomach contains something very close to hydrochloric acid — a highly acidic substance that helps your body dissolve food and nearly bottoms out the pH scale, scientists’ measure of acidity. Amino acids and fatty acids are, respectively, the building blocks of proteins and lipids, two of your body’s most essential complex molecules. The A in DNA? That stands for acid. But even with all that acids do for us, Associate Professor of Biology Kalyan Kondapalli thinks we may still be underestimating their power. With a new National Institutes of Health-funded project, he’s investigating whether pH may be functioning like a cellular GPS, helping our cells route important cargo within their borders to perform functions that are fundamental to our health.

Kondapalli’s latest work focuses on immune cells called macrophages, which he says are sort of the paramedics of the immune system. When a bacteria or virus enters your body, the macrophage is often the first to arrive. It engulfs the invader, enveloping the bacteria or virus inside the borders of its cell membrane, where it is packaged into a transport vesicle called a phagosome. This transport vesicle then begins a journey away from the outer edge of the cell toward the interior of the cell, where it eventually merges with a lysosome — an acidic organelle that dissolves the bacteria or virus into its component parts. After this process is complete, the bits and pieces are attached to the outside of the macrophage's membrane. Here, more specialized immune cells interpret these components of the virus or bacteria and start the process of manufacturing antibodies — kicking off a counterattack by the immune system that’s tailored to the specific disease.

This process is a classic showcase of the body’s use of acids to break things down. But Kondapalli says that when you start looking at the finer details of the phagosome’s journey within the cell, it’s not the only role that acids appear to be playing. One of the most peculiar things is that as the phagosome begins its journey of ferrying the bacteria or virus from the cell membrane to the interior part of the cell, the environment inside the phagosome gradually gets more acidic. What’s especially weird, Kondapalli says, is that the change in acidity doesn’t appear to be strictly associated with breaking things down. So what exactly is going on?

Kondapalli had encountered similar phenomena when he was doing his postdoc work at Johns Hopkins, where he studied a type of specialized protein that are found on endosomes — the class of subcellular transport vesicles of which phagosomes are one type. He says the proteins function sort of like a fine-tuning knob for controlling the pH within endosomes by constantly allowing more or less acid to leave the vesicle. Changes in how this protein behaves, or having too much or too little of the protein, is consequential across an array of organisms. In some plants, for example, fiddling with this knob, and hence fiddling with the acidity of the transport vesicles, can change the color of flowers. One of Kondapalli’s studies found that some people with autism didn’t have enough of these knobs, which meant that a transport vesicle responsible for disposing of excess neurotransmitters was failing to do so, leaving the brain flooded with chemicals. A significant number of people with glioblastoma, one of the most lethal forms of brain cancer, appeared to have too much of this knob. “With this cancer, one of the proteins that is supposed to be transported to the lysosome to be degraded instead gets delivered to the surface of the cell. And that cargo is a receptor that signals the cell to grow and divide. That can be a big factor in developing cancer,” Kondapalli says.

Kondapalli knew that this knob was associated with the regulation of pH within endosomes. And he also knew that irregularities with this knob often meant transport vesicles were struggling to deliver their cargo to the proper places. So he began formulating a bold hypothesis: What if pH was somehow regulating the directional movement of the transport vesicles? What if acid was functioning not just as a fundamental building block of something else or something that dissolves other things, but as a sort of GPS within the cell?

To test his hypothesis, Kondapalli first formulated a way to fiddle with the knob so he could manipulate the acidity of the endosomes and see what happened to their behavior under different conditions. Using a genetically engineered virus that triggered the endosomes to make more or less of these proteins, he could make the environment inside the endosome either more acidic or more alkaline. But then he needed some way to precisely measure how this influenced the endosomes’ directional movement. Assistant Professor of Physics Suvranta Tripathy, who specializes in experimental biophysics, still remembers Kondapalli’s very specific line of questioning on the day Tripathy was interviewing for his position at ��-Dearborn in 2020. “I was doing my presentation on my research, and I remember Kalyan said, basically, ‘Do you think you can solve this problem?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I think we can definitely do that,’” Tripathy recalls. “Then, of course, after formally joining ��-Dearborn, I sent him an email reminding him that he asked me this question and that’s how we started working on it.”

Kondapalli (second from left) and Tripathy (far left) have been collaborating on their phagosome transport research since 2020. Photo by Annie Barker

Tripathy, it turned out, was also very interested in how phagosomes move through the cell. He was particularly focused on two types of proteins located on the outside of the phagosome that function like motors, propelling the phagosome either toward or away from the center of the cell, depending on which type of motor protein was more abundant. He had been studying exactly how these motor proteins know where to go, and he found Kondapalli’s hypothesis that pH was potentially driving their directional movement to be surprising and exciting. On their first project, Tripathy used a 2018 Nobel-prize-winning technique called optical tweezers to track the movement of phagosomes within the macrophage, while Kondapalli manipulated the phagosomes’ pH using his genetic engineering process. To do this, Tripathy attached a tiny plastic bead to a bacteria, which was then engulfed by the macrophage and packaged, along with the bead, inside a phagosome. Using a tightly focused laser, Tripathy was then able to measure the mechanical parameters related to the movement of the bead inside the phagosome under different pH conditions as it traveled throughout the cell. The results confirmed Kondapalli’s general hypothesis. If the maturing phagosome never got acidic enough, it wouldn’t reach its intended meet-up point with the lysosome, the invader would not be dissolved and the rest of the immune system would never be alerted. pH, it seemed, was indeed linked to the directional movement of phagosome transport — and, fundamentally, to our health.

The results were exciting, but Kondapalli and Tripathy say they’re hoping their new NIH-funded project will reveal many more details of how exactly pH is regulating phagosome transport. Their general working hypothesis is that changes in acidity inside the phagosome drive changes in the kind of lipids that make up the phagosome’s membrane. These lipids then “recruit” corresponding motor proteins, which, again, come in two varieties — one that drives movement away from the center of the cell and one that drives movement toward it. So, stitching it all together: An increasingly acidic environment inside the phagosome means the phagosome’s membrane will contain more of a kind of lipid that attracts motor proteins that move the phagosome to the center of the cell. A more alkaline phagosome creates a cell membrane full of different kinds of lipids, which attract the other kind of motor protein and propel it in the other direction. And Tripathy says the process may be more complicated than that. For example, it appears that motor proteins may require a binding protein to attach to the lipid, and that binding protein can be pH-sensitive.

Kondapalli says if they can more thoroughly document this connection between pH and directional movement in phagosomes, it could have a variety of implications. On the practical side, it could provide a path to new types of therapeutics. He says the bacteria that cause tuberculosis and Legionnaires' disease, for example, have defenses that specifically disrupt the phagosome’s acidification process in an effort to keep from being destroyed. So if scientists could discover chemical pharmaceuticals that do what Kondapalli currently does with genetic engineering, we could also control acidity — countering the effects of the bacteria’s defenses and steering phagosomes to their proper destinations.

Bigger picture: Establishing this new role for pH would be a pretty big-deal revelation in the world of cell biology, given that acidity is generally thought to only perform certain kinds of functions in the body. Moreover, what would make this finding so interesting is macrophages aren’t the only type of cells that have transport systems. Many types of cells depend on similar endosomes to ferry cargo, so it’s entirely possible that pH is functioning as a GPS all over the body, though that would take more research to fully establish. Indeed, Kondapalli thinks there may still be other roles for pH that scientists have yet to explore. “If you think of the different organelles in the cell as rooms within the house, what’s really fascinating is that each room has a unique pH,” he explains. “You take mitochondria, where the cell’s energy is made, the pH is slightly alkaline. The lysosome is acidic, around 4.5 or 5. The nucleus is neutral, it’s around 7. The cytosol, the media in the cell, is also close to neutral. Why is this? We still don’t have the answer. So we may really just be scratching the surface with this new work. Acidification may be doing a lot more in the body than we ever thought.”

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Story by Lou Blouin

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Wed, 12/04/2024 - 14:35

Scientists used to think acids in our bodies were mostly for building things up or breaking things down. But new research from ��-Dearborn faculty Kalyan Kondapalli and Suvranta Tripathy is pointing to a new fundamental role for pH in our cells.

Associate Professor of Biology Kalyan Kondapalli (far right) and Assistant Professor of Physics Suvranta Tripathy (far left) in the lab with undergraduate researcher Mariam Duhaini (second from left) and graduate student Lanqin Cao. Photo by Annie Barker