Faculty Research

Office of Research update for March 2025

lblouin — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 12:22:01 +0000

Office of Research update for March 2025 lblouin Wed, 03/12/2025 - 08:22

External Awards Received

U-M Principal Investigator: Pravansu Mohanty
Project Title: Digital Enterprise Technology for the Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle Phase II
Sponsor: Department of Defense - Army (via National Center for Manufacturing Sciences)
Award Amount: $1,645,200

This project supports the Army’s Digital Transformation Strategy by creating a collaborative digital engineering environment where industry partners can improve the design, manufacturing, and maintenance of military systems. By using digital tools and models, teams can manage engineering changes more efficiently, optimize supply chains, and reduce costs. The project also includes workforce development efforts, offering training in systems engineering and digital technologies to better prepare professionals for the future of defense manufacturing.

U-M Principal Investigator: Suvranta Tripathy
Project Title: Elucidating the Impact of Early Endosomal pH on SARS-CoV-2 Transport in Cardiomyocytes
Sponsor: American Heart Association
Awarded Amount: $199,327

Cardiac injury is the most frequent complication of COVID-19. We aim to understand how the virus gets into heart cells, hoping to find ways to stop it. The virus is taken into the heart cell within a membrane-bound compartment known as an endosome. The acidity in the endosomes typically increases as the compartment moves from the cell periphery towards the inside. Intriguingly, genetic studies of COVID-19 patients have highlighted the importance of the protein NHE9 in controlling this acidity. Higher levels of NHE9 make the endosome less acidic, which we observed disrupts the virus's journey within the cell and makes it harder for it to infect. This disruption involves how tiny "motor proteins" move the endosomes along pathways within the cell. We will study how changes in NHE9 manipulate the acidity to affect the movement of the virus-containing endosomes, including the role of these motor proteins. The goal is to see if targeting NHE9 could be a new way to stop viral entry and prevent COVID-19 related heart damage.

U-M Principal Investigator: Finn Bell
Project Title: The Least of These: Violence, freedom, and the promise of a new world
Direct Sponsor: American Bar Foundation
Awarded Amount: $36,000

The Least of These traces the legacy of black freedom making in former slave societies. It attends to the ways that emergent collectives imagined and enacted forms of freedom, for themselves and for others, and worked toward a future without bondage. The project does so to better inform how we might design a more just world. The project is led by Reuben Jonathan Miller at the University of Chicago. Bell lends methodological expertise on oral history and research coordination.

U-M Principal Investigator: Zhen Hu
Project Title: Surrogate Modeling for Dynamic Systems Based on Reduced-Order Modeling
Direct Sponsor: Sandia National Laboratories
Awarded Amount: $80,000

Hu will work with researchers from Sandia National Laboratories to develop reduced-order modeling techniques for fast surrogate modeling of computational expensive nonlinear dynamic systems. The surrogate model will accelerate the analysis, monitoring and control of complex nonlinear dynamics systems.

U-M Principal Investigator: Christos Constantinides
Project Title: Leveraging Radical Dynamics to Generate Nuclear Spin Hyperpolarization
Direct Sponsor: Department of Energy
Award Amount: $600,000

This project aims to improve Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, a technique used to analyze molecular structures, by developing new materials that enhance signal strength. By designing and testing special molecules called radicals, this project aims to make NMR imaging more sensitive and efficient. This could lead to better tools for studying chemistry, materials and even medical imaging.

Announcements

��-Dearborn Earns the R2 Carnegie Classification

Earlier this month, ��-Dearborn was reclassified as an R2 institution–a designation for universities with high research activity and one of three classifications for doctoral universities, along with R1 (very high research activity) and D/PU (doctoral/professional universities).

This designation comes from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the American Council on Education for universities that award at least 20 research doctorates and have $5 million average annual research spending. It is the first time the university has received this designation. See the Reporter article here!

��OR Continues to Monitor Updates to Federal Funding

The U-M Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR) continues to update their webpage for researchers and administrators to track information related to federal directives that may impact research and federally sponsored projects. Everyone is encouraged to visit this page periodically to view the most recent updates and recommendations from OVPR: https://research.umich.edu/fed-research-blog/

Virtual Gift Card Option for Human Subjects Payments

The Human Subjects Incentives Program (HSIP) has added an option for virtual gift cards that can be e-mailed to subjects. Researchers who have IRB approval to provide gift cards to research participants can submit their requests through our HSIP Request form to obtain such payments, including electronic gift cards.

Research Events in March

M-PACT Career Development Series: Early-Career Faculty as Change Agents
- In this webinar, you will discover strategies to navigate tenure while remaining a committed change agent. Experience insightful discussions with both early-career and seasoned faculty who will share their experiences and lessons learned. The webinar will provide valuable resources to enhance leadership skills and foster advocacy for emerging academic leaders. Designed to both inspire and equip, this session will prepare early-career faculty to excel as both scholars and transformational leaders.
- Registration required
- Wednesday, March 10 @ 12 p.m., virtual
IRWG; Sustaining Feminist Research in an Era of Change
- Join the ��-Ann Arbor Institute for Research on Women & Gender (IRWG) for an engaging town hall focused on navigating the changing research landscape with confidence and innovation. This conversation will highlight the experiences of scholars who have successfully adapted to shifts in politics, policy, funding, and institutional priorities — offering actionable insights for the future. Panelists will share their experiences, discuss strategies and take questions from attendees.
- Thursday, March 13 @ 4-5:30 p.m.
  - In-person (location TBD) and virtual option
  - Registration required
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: 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 - Friday, April 4, 11:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m. - 3336 Duderstadt or Robotics
- 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. - Ford Library
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, March 19, 2-3:30 p.m., virtual
- Wednesday, April 16, 2-3:30 p.m., virtual
PERI Winter 2025 Focused Intensive: Strategically Navigating Projects for Public Impact
- The Office of Public Engagement and Research Impacts is hosting a Winter 2025 Focused Intensive, composed of four virtual learning experience sessions between Feb. 21 and March 21 on planning and managing projects for public impact, including designing, implementing, evaluating, and closing projects and partnerships. Participants will explore and apply frameworks, resources and best practices in equitable, collaborative project planning and management to an initiative of the participant's choosing. All U-M faculty, research trainees and research support staff are welcome to apply. Faculty are eligible for $500 in research discretionary funds after completing the final session.
  - Session 3: Keeping Your Project on Track (or Changing Course if Necessary); Friday, March 14 - 10-11:30 a.m., virtual
  - Session 4: Transitioning and Wrapping up for Impact; Friday, March 21, 10-11:30 a.m., virtual
- Registration required
��-Ann Arbor Office of Research Development Grant Prix Seminar Series
- ��-Ann Arbor Office of Research Development (ORD) has launched a seminar series on research proposal development, featuring a range of topics designed to boost grant writing expertise. View previous sessions on the ORD YouTube. Grant Prix will continue every third Friday of the month at 12 p.m. starting in February:
  - March 28: Budgeting for large-scale proposals, virtual
  - April 25: NIH Updates to the Biosketch (and using SciENcv, virtual)
  - May 23: Broadening participation and inclusive excellence in grant proposals, virtual
- Register now for an opportunity to elevate your grant writing skills!
MICHR, Communicating the Value of Your Research to a Broad Audience: How to Tailor Communications to Specific People or Groups
- This two-hour workshop will teach the importance of value propositions and tailoring research communication in a way that makes it compelling for every audience. Often referred to as the “elevator pitch,” you will have the opportunity to create a short, professional introduction for your research that can be used at any social gathering, departmental meeting, or professional conference. You will learn how to tailor your elevator pitch to fit the different audiences and situations you may face in the future.
- This workshop is sponsored by FastForward, Office of Faculty Development, and MICHR.
- Faculty can register here. If you are a U-M staff member or student, please contact Faculty Development at ��MS-Faculty-Development@med.umich.edu to request registration.
- Thursday, March 13 @ 12-2:00 p.m., virtual

Research Resource Highlight: Protocols.io

Every month, the Office of Research features a resource and/or tool that is available for researchers. This month we are featuring Protocols.io.

Protocols.io is a free and open-access repository and workflow tool for researchers to collaboratively create step-by-step, interactive, and dynamic protocols that can be read and run on mobile or the web. With protocols.io, you can share protocols with colleagues, collaborators, or specific research communities while maintaining control over who sees your work. Alternatively, you can make your protocols publicly discoverable, ensuring you receive credit and enabling other researchers to build on your work. The platform's versioning, Q&A, and troubleshooting features foster real-time communication. To learn more, please visit the protocols.io website.

Upcoming Funding Opportunities

The Office of Research maintains a list of selected funding opportunities, organized by college on our website under Announcements. In addition, yearly grant calendars organized by subject area provided by Hanover Research are available there as well.

Please refer to the Research Resource Highlight section above for more information and updates related to the Trump administration's changes to federal research funding.

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.

Faculty Research

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Office of Research

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Wed, 03/12/2025 - 12:21

See which of your colleagues' work is getting funded, browse the calendar of upcoming research events and learn about ways to support your work.

��-Dearborn earns R2 research designation

lblouin — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 12:34:13 +0000

��-Dearborn earns R2 research designation lblouin Wed, 02/26/2025 - 07:34

By every big metric that Vice Provost for Research and Dean of Graduate Studies Armen Zakarian tracks, ��-Dearborn’s research enterprise is on a tear. The big top line stat: Since 2018, externally funded research expenditures have nearly tripled, increasing from $4.8 million to a projected $13.2 million for FY25. Earlier this month, that growth led to a reclassification of ��-Dearborn as an R2 institution, a designation from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the American Council on Education for universities that award at least 20 research doctorates and have $5 million average annual research spending. It’s the first time the university has received this designation. ��-Dearborn Chancellor Domenico Grasso says the honorific is, without a doubt, an important new feather in the cap for the university. But, for him, the real achievement is all the work that it’s a reflection of. “This recognizes something which we already accomplished — and that is great and I’m very proud of that — but we were going to do it anyway. And honestly, we’re not even satisfied with where we are. There remains enormous untapped potential, so this is really just the start for us,” Grasso says.

So how did we get here? Zakarian and Grasso point to a number of contributing factors. Flash back to 2018 and Zakarian says you’d see an institution where research was “recognized but not prioritized.” The tone changed when Grasso came in and made growing the university’s research and scholarly output one of his top priorities. “In my view, distinguished universities are defined by a faculty comprising scholar-teachers. To my mind, the definition of a professor is someone who is a scholar at the forefront of their field, sharing their passion, knowledge and discoveries with their students,” Grasso says. “Even in the elite small liberal arts schools in New England, where they are known for their focus on educating undergraduate students, the faculty are active scholars.” Zakarian says the administration endorsed that model and supported faculty with larger investments in research development and pre- and post-award support, so researchers could get assistance securing and administering grants.

Aside from the messaging and support from leadership, Zakarian thinks three other things helped set the stage for the explosive research growth the university has seen over the past few years. First, he says faculty consistently cite a shortage of time as their biggest impediment to building their research careers. So some departments decided to lighten the teaching load from three to two courses per semester. The second big factor: the sanctioning of the College of Engineering and Computer Science doctoral programs by U-M’s Rackham Graduate School in 2019. That affiliation meant the programs had to meet the same rigorous standards as doctoral programs on the Ann Arbor campus, which boosted ��-Dearborn’s prestige and ability to recruit top PhD students. This helped faculty recruit valuable talent to power their labs, which further eased their time/labor burden. Finally, Zakarian says when filling faculty vacancies, colleges prioritized hiring ambitious, early-career, research-focused scholars who had the potential to become leaders in their fields.

Then, of course, there’s something to be said for momentum. As some of the above changes started to take root, a few faculty started landing bigger grants, and a larger share of the awards were coming from federal funders, like the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy and Department of Defense. “We used to get very few million dollar grants. But it just took a few teams to do that and then we started getting more,” Zakarian says. “You basically reach a point where I think people are looking at what each other are doing, and the mood shifts. Now, we are approaching $85 million in submitted proposals, which I think is just incredible. And the number of proposals hasn’t gone up by a whole lot. That means faculty are more confident going for bigger and bigger grants. Frankly, that’s what it’s going to take. It would be difficult for us to reach the next level, $200,000 at a time.”

Zakarian says the university has also reached a point where the research enterprise has a fairly broad base. “When I think about how sustainable this is, I’m basically looking at whether this is just a handful of people bringing in the big dollar amounts. But it’s much broader than that,” he says. Moreover, while engineering disciplines are responsible for the largest share of the research growth, Zakarian says other disciplines, particularly in the natural sciences, are starting to develop the same momentum. Last year, with engineering in a good spot, the Office of Research made it a priority to assist faculty in the natural sciences. That resulted in several big research grants in biology and chemistry from national funders, including the National Institutes of Health and Department of Energy. Looking ahead, Zakarian and Grasso say the most untapped potential lies in those disciplines, along with computer science, artificial intelligence, and health and human services — the latter of which could also be targeting NIH grants, one of the national funders with the biggest budget.

Grasso notes, however, that realizing that potential now faces some new political hurdles. The Trump administration has pursued several measures that directly disrupt university research, including attempting to severely cut the amount of indirect costs covered by NIH grants, layoffs at the National Science Foundation and pauses by grant review committees. “This is a significant threat,” Grasso says. “I understand the desire to be cost conscious and efficient. But research has been the fuel in the engine that has powered this country, whether you’re talking about revolutionary medications, transistors, AI or practically everything that has changed the world — it all has roots in research — and many of those roots found a home in American soil. To hamper this is incredibly reckless and foolhardy.”

Even within the climate, Zakarian says the R2 designation and what it represents should help keep the momentum going. “Obviously, a lot of this goes back to our ability to recruit and retain top faculty, and I think this designation really does help us communicate that if you are really ambitious and you want to build a strong research program, you can do it here. It says, ‘We’re open for business. We have the resources and the vision. Others have done it, you can do it too.’”

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Story by Lou Blouin

College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters

College of Business

College of Education, Health, and Human Services

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Off

Wed, 02/26/2025 - 12:33

The recognition follows six years of rapid growth in which externally funded research spending at ��-Dearborn has nearly tripled. So how did we get here? And what’s next?

Associate Professor Dr. Zhi Zhang (not pictured) and Assistant Professor Jie Fan (pictured, middle) recently landed a $465,000 grant from the NIH. Large federal grants helped power ��-Dearborn to an R2 designation in 2025. Photo by Julianne Lindsay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Story by Lou Blouin

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Off

Mon, 02/24/2025 - 12:56

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

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

Helping nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy go hi-res

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Story by Lou Blouin

Faculty Research

Research

Technology

College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters

Natural Sciences

Off

Wed, 02/19/2025 - 13:48

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

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

Researchers prep for landmark field test of ‘second-life’ EV batteries

lblouin — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 15:30:35 +0000

Researchers prep for landmark field test of ‘second-life’ EV batteries lblouin Mon, 02/10/2025 - 10:30

Connecting large batteries to the electric grid is an idea that has multiple benefits. Most fundamentally, an electricity system powered by an increasingly large share of solar and wind will almost surely require storing energy in some fashion, given the variability of the wind and sunshine at any particular moment in the day coupled with our expectation that power will always be available. Indeed, large battery storage systems are already being deployed across the world in sophisticated ways. For example, a Massachusetts town of about 27,000 people is building a 15 MWh, grid-connected battery storage system that can help power the town during power outages, stock up on less-expensive energy during off-peak hours and feed electricity back to the grid during times of peak demand, when utilities generally have to fire up their most carbon-intensive diesel-powered backup systems. Grid-tied battery storage systems, however, come with a few caveats. For one, it takes a lot of batteries to store enough energy to actually make a significant difference, which means battery storage systems are expensive. Moreover, if you consider the climate emissions involved in manufacturing the batteries and the mining for the lithium and cobalt needed to make them, battery storage systems are far from being climate neutral.

Throw at this predicament a seemingly too-good-to-be-true solution: Right now, electric vehicles represent the largest use of large batteries, and EVs are steadily gaining market share across the globe. However, manufacturers estimate that batteries in new EVs will likely need to be replaced after eight to 12 years, or when they can hold about three quarters of their original charge. These slightly diminished batteries, however, could still be useful for other things, like — you guessed it — grid-tied storage. Now add into the mix the fact that EV sales have been strong for the past few years and we could be a decade or so away from having millions of used batteries ready for a “second life” in the electric grid. Importantly, this approach could reduce the costs and climate impacts of building large storage systems compared to those that use new batteries.

Undoubtedly, it’s an idea with tons of promise. The catch, at least for now, is that we don’t really know how well it will work, according to Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Xuan Zhou. Zhou says our understanding of the performance of new EV batteries is pretty solid and getting better all the time. However, we simply don’t have the same level of data about what’s really going on inside used EV batteries to say for sure they’ll be as reliable an option for grid storage as we hope they’ll be. The reason is that charging and discharging a battery hundreds of times — and subjecting it to thousands of hours of road vibrations — changes its underlying chemical and physical properties. That’s ultimately why it loses capacity over time. And many details about a battery’s potential second life inside a grid storage system — like how many years it would last, how safe it would be and how cost-effective it would be — are still largely unknown.

Zhou, along with his Electrical and Computer Engineering Department collaborators Associate Professor Mengqi Wang and Professor Wencong Su, hope they’re about to provide the world with some of the best data-backed answers to date. With a new $1.48 million grant from the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy, the largest state grant in the university's history, the team of researchers is set to build a 500 kW grid-tied storage system that will use actual used EV batteries.

Su and Wang say some of the best work in this field is currently being done at Stanford University. But those experiments involve taking new EV batteries and subjecting them to hundreds of charging and discharging cycles in order to intentionally deplete them in a way that mimics what happens in an EV under certain driving conditions. “For the emulation, however, they might not be able to emulate the true environment the batteries would be operating in,” Wang says. “We can imagine, in an EV, there will be vibrations. There will be accelerations and decelerations. The devices around the pack might also generate heat. And there will be variations in the temperature and all these environmental conditions for the battery pack — they will not be constant at all. This all impacts the battery. So by using real used EV batteries, we hope our data will end up being more practical.”

From left, Associate Professor Xuan Zhou, Associate Professor Mengqi Wang and Professor Wencong Su.

Zhou says they are still working out many details for the design and build of the project. One of the unexpected challenges was simply locating used EV batteries. “Initially, it looked like we were going to have to get them from Europe, where EVs have been more popular,” Zhou says. “But now it looks likely that we will be able to get about eight to 20 battery packs from used GM vehicles.” After they secure the batteries, Zhou says they’ll perform extensive tests to get a sense of their chemical and physical properties. Meanwhile, Wang and Su will work out how the batteries can be connected and tied to the grid. Because the team is planning to test several types of use cases, this will require a carefully planned system of custom power converters, controllers and control algorithms. For example, they want to see how well the batteries perform in a “peak shaving” role. That’s when the batteries would feed electricity back to the grid during times of peak demand, which helps utilities avoid using their expensive, carbon-intensive backup systems. They also want to test “load shifting,” which is where the batteries would charge during non-peak hours and then release that energy during peak hours, when electricity is more expensive. Another variable: the partner site that will host the storage system has a solar array. Wang says connecting all those components and systems in a way that doesn’t produce harmonics on the grid, damage equipment or compromise power quality takes careful planning. Many of the components will have to be custom built, too, since this kind of system is not an off-the-shelf technology.

Another big hurdle the team might encounter is testing the system. At 500 kWh, this project is so big that the current testing facilities at ��-Dearborn — or any other university the team knows of — isn’t equipped to handle a test of the full system. Zhou says the new battery lab in Ann Arbor may be able to provide single pack-level testing, and they may need an industry partner for tests beyond that. Wang says the size and testing requirements also make it more challenging to design other aspects of the system. “I think the piece of equipment that has the highest power rating is our battery simulator in our IAVS lab, which has 100 kW testing capacity. So we’ll start with a smaller system as a proof-of-concept design. And then we’ll scale up to the real-world test. But this makes it much more challenging. The components, like the semiconductors or power converters, can’t just be scaled up. They’ll have to be swapped out with new hardware with higher power ratings. So we’re going to be busy!”

One other noteworthy feature of the project: After the study of the storage system is complete, the research team’s Genesee County-based industry partner on the project, ReCharge ReCycling, which is helping design and build the storage system, will help prepare the battery pack for a third life. “That’s why we’re calling this project ‘Closing the loop,’” Zhou says. “They’ll be dismantling the battery down to the cell level and then trying to recover the precious metals so they can be used to make a new battery. So we’ll really get a full picture of what it’s going to take to take a battery through this full cycle.”

###

Story by Lou Blouin. Photos by Annie Barker.

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Off

Mon, 02/10/2025 - 15:30

Connecting millions of used electric vehicle batteries to the grid is an idea that holds tons of promise. But how well will this strategy work in the real world?

Associate Professor Xuan Zhou (right), Associate Professor Mengqi Wang (left) and Professor Wencong Su are heading up a new project that will tie used EV batteries to the electric grid.

Office of Research update: February 2025

stuxbury — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 16:26:35 +0000

Office of Research update: February 2025 stuxbury Fri, 01/31/2025 - 11:26

External Awards Received

U-M Principal Investigator: Finn Bell
Project Title: Ypsi Farmers & Gardeners Oral History Project
Direct Sponsor: National Endowment for the Humanities (via Michigan Humanities Council)
Awarded Amount: $20,000
The Ypsi Farmers Gardeners Oral History Project is a community-driven, public digital humanities archive that is housed at the Ypsilanti District Library. The project provides a platform for Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) and/or working-class farmers and gardeners in Ypsilanti to tell their own stories in their own words, thereby connecting the public to often ignored cultural heritage. The stories illuminate cultural resilience, land justice and the importance of growing food in this time of climate crisis. Michigan Humanities funding will allow us to continue the project by: a) convening a community advisory board to guide the project; b) recording 10 more oral histories; c) exhibiting the project to reach audiences beyond Ypsilanti, and d) conducting a participatory evaluation.

U-M Principal Investigator: Doohyun Kim
Project Title: Experimental Characterization of T-GDI Engine for Development of CFD model
Direct Sponsor: Aramco Services Company
Awarded Amount: $53,532.00
Optimization of various engine-operating parameters, such as spark timing and valve timing, is required to fully realize the potential for emission reductions while maintaining fuel economy. 3D Computational Fluid Dynamics modeling of the engine is an effective predictive tool to guide the optimization process. This project aims to experimentally characterize a modern gasoline engine with variable valve duration system, generating a dataset necessary for development of a CFD model. Measurements include temperatures and pressures along the air path, high-speed dynamic in-cylinder pressure for combustion analysis, and emissions.

U-M Principal Investigator: Joan Remski
Project Title: Accelerating STEM Success at the University of Michigan-Dearborn
Direct Sponsor: U.S. Dept of Treasury (via State of Michigan Dept of Lifelong Education, Advancement, and Potential)
Awarded Amount: $319,746.00
This project proposes to intentionally transform the experience for first-time college students majoring in STEM by improving teaching and learning in several highly enrolled gateway courses. In addition to the redesign of curriculum, the project plans to provide these students with a personalized and scalable digital coaching platform that has been proven to enhance both academic performance and persistence. These outcomes will be achieved by engaging STEM faculty with course redesign programming through the Gardner Institute and by working with the Center for Academic Innovation at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor to implement the learning tool ECoach on the ��-Dearborn campus. Coordinated by the Office of the Provost, the campus has a dedicated, diverse and engaged group of faculty and staff members, with a strong track record of student-centered innovative practices, who are eager to complete this transformational work.

U-M Principal Investigator: Mathumai Kanapathipillai
Project Title: Novel bioinspired nanoformulation to treat oxidative stress associated NETosis
Direct Sponsor: American Heart Association
Awarded Amount: $200,000
Neutrophils are a vital part of the body’s immune system. During immune defense they release web-like structures that are termed as neutrophil extracellular matrix (NETs). Under stress, neutrophil extracellular matrix formation has been shown to play a major role in pathogenesis of organ injury. Among the diseases associated with oxidative stress and NETosis, we focus on pulmonary hypertension (PH) as a disease model. PH is a life-threatening pulmonary vascular disease. Recent therapeutic approaches for PH only partially improve symptoms and survival. Targeting NETosis with novel PH drugs could help PH patients. In this proposal, we propose a novel approach to treat PH. We will use novel drug molecules inspired by nature, and nanotechnology to package the identified drugs. First, we will test the drug molecules in healthy and PH patient cells. Next, we will form nanoparticles with effective drugs and test the efficacy and safety in a mouse PH model at our collaborators lab at Wisconsin Medical College. Students will visit our collaborator’s lab to learn and participate in the PH model studies. The project could have a positive impact on the treatment of PH.

Announcements

Tracking Federal Funding Updates
The U-M Office of the Vice President for Research has created a webpage where researchers and administrators can track updates related to new federal directives that may impact research and federally sponsored projects. Everyone is encouraged to visit this page periodically to view the most recent updates and recommendations from OVPR.

The National Science Foundation has also created a webpage dedicated to the NSF Implementation of Recent Executive Orders.

Virtual Gift Card Option for Human Subjects Payments
The Human Subjects Incentives Program has added an option for virtual gift cards that can be e-mailed to subjects. Researchers who have IRB approval to provide gift cards to research participants can submit their requests through our HSIP Request form to obtain such payments, including electronic gift cards.

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 its the �� 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. 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 Research Faculty Awards and submit your nominations by Feb. 19.

Campus Grants Updates
Open Invitation: The Open Invitation Campus Grants are now closed because funding for the FY25 cycle has been exhausted. Funding for the next fiscal year is anticipated to be announced in July 2025.

Competitive: The winter cycle of the Office of Research Competitive Campus Grants is now open for applications, with a submission deadline Monday, Feb. 17 at 5 p.m.

The Competitive Campus Grants below are available to all ��-Dearborn tenured/tenure-track faculty. We regret to inform you that due to budgetary constraints, we will not be able to reopen the Thematic Research Planning Grants during the FY2025 Winter Cycle.

Research Initiation and Development (RID) Grants aim to assist faculty and research staff with the development of innovative, collaborative research proposals that will advance the ��-Dearborn mission. The program supports proposals which will help place the principal investigator (PI) and the research team in a strong position to receive additional, external funding from federal agencies, foundations, and/or industry.

Budget floor: $10,000; Budget ceiling: $20,000

Apply for a RID grant here.

Scholars (SCH) Grants support research, scholarship, and creative activities in the arts. This program is intended for projects with funding needs not usually addressed by other support programs within or outside the University.

Budget floor: $6,000; Budget ceiling: $10,000.

Apply for a SCH grant here.

More information about the campus grants programs including eligibility, previously funded projects and frequently asked questions can be found on our Campus Grants webpage. For additional questions, please email Dbn-CampusGrants@umich.edu.

Research Events in January

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.
- Resources for Education, Outreach, Diversity, and Evaluation - Thursday (2/13) 11:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m. - Johnson Rooms 3rd Floor LEC
- NSF CAREER: Structuring your CAREER for Reviewers - Thursday (3/13) 11:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m. - Johnson Rooms 3rd Floor LEC
- NSF CAREER: How to Address Reviewer Feedback - Friday (4/4) 11:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m. - 3336 Duderstadt or Robotics
- NSF CAREER: Project Description: The Research Plan - Thursday (4/10) 11:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m. - Johnson Rooms 3rd Floor LEC
- NSF Panel TBD - Thursday (5/8) 11:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m. - Ford Library
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, 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
PERI Winter 2025 Focused Intensive: Strategically Navigating Projects for Public Impact
- The Office of Public Engagement and Research Impacts is hosting a Winter 2025 Focused Intensive, composed of four virtual learning experience sessions between Feb. 21 and Mar. 21 on planning and managing projects for public impact, including designing, implementing, evaluating, and closing projects and partnerships. Participants will explore and apply frameworks, resources and best practices in equitable, collaborative project planning and management to an initiative of the participant's choosing. All U-M faculty, research trainees and research support staff are welcome to apply. Faculty are eligible for $500 in research discretionary funds after completing the final session. Applications are due Feb. 7.
  - Session 1: Developing a Collaborative Guiding Vision & Strategy; Friday, Feb. 21, 2025 - 10 a.m.-11:30 a.m., virtual
  - Session 2: Elements of an Effective and Equitable Project Plan; Friday, Feb. 28, 2025 - 10 a.m.-11:30 a.m., virtual
  - Session 3: Keeping Your Project on Track (or Changing Course if Necessary); Friday, March 14, 2025-10 a.m. -11:30 a.m., virtual
  - Session 4: Transitioning and Wrapping up for Impact; Friday, March 21, 2025 - 10 a.m.-11:30 a.m., virtual
- Registration required
��-Ann Arbor Office of Research Development Grant Prix Seminar Series
- ��-Ann Arbor Office of Research Development (ORD) has launched a seminar series on research proposal development, featuring a range of topics designed to boost grant writing expertise. View previous sessions on the ORD YouTube. Grant Prix will continue every third Friday of the month at 12:00 p.m. starting in February:
  - Feb. 28: NIH 101, virtual
  - March 28: Budgeting for large-scale proposals, virtual
  - April 25: NIH Updates to the Biosketch (and using SciENcv, virtual
  - May 23: Broadening participation and inclusive excellence in grant proposals, virtual
- Register now for an opportunity to elevate your grant writing skills!
MICHR, Collaborative Research: A Virtual Training
- Collaborative Research, which includes Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) and Community Engaged Research (CEnR), is a process to address community priorities and issues such as health disparities. After participating in this session, attendees will be able to discuss:
  - the rationale for this type of research
  - the continuum for community engagement
  - phases for partnership formation, maintenance, and sustainability
  - the benefits and challenges of conducting collaborative research
- Thursday, Feb. 6, 2-5 p.m., virtual
- Register here

Research Resource Highlight: Tracking Federal Changes 2025

Every month, the Office of Research features a resource and/or tool for �� researchers. This month we are featuring the OVPR update webpage Tracking Federal Changes 2025.

On the Tracking Federal Changes page, the OVPR will convey new information about changes that affect research funding at federal agencies. This page includes links to relevant executive orders and communications from individual agencies, e.g.OMB Memo M-25-13: Temporary Pause of Agency Grant, Loan, and Other Financial Assistance. See the Tracking Federal Changes 2025 webpage for all updates.

The OVPR has also set up a new email address to improve information sharing. It is <research-questions@umich.edu>. All �� researchers and staff can use it to send questions about agency changes. If you have information about federal funding changes from which other members of our community can benefit, please consider sending this information to the email address so that OVPR can share it effectively.

Upcoming Funding Opportunities

Please refer to the Research Resource Highlight section above for more information and updates related to the Trump administration's changes to federal research funding.

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.

Faculty Research

Office of Research

Off

Fri, 01/31/2025 - 16:25

See which of your colleagues' work is getting funded, browse the calendar of upcoming research events and learn about ways to support your work.

How can we support young people with cancer?

stuxbury — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 16:48:34 +0000

How can we support young people with cancer? stuxbury Wed, 01/29/2025 - 11:48

Young people are often asked about college plans, careers and relationships. But what happens when a teen or young adult is in a situation where they need to focus on one day at a time?

Associate Professor of Health Communication Nick Iannarino — who’s researched health communication challenges for young adults with cancer diagnoses for 15 years — went right to the source and asked teens and 20-somethings about the support they need and the advice they’d give to peers.

“This is an important area of research because there is an overall lack of understanding about what quality of life means for a young adult and what their needs are,” Iannarino said. ““This population isn’t largely being addressed when it comes to their needs following a cancer diagnosis. Depending on where people fall in age range, they are typically grouped into older-aged individuals or pediatric. But adolescents and young adults are in a very different stage of life than these other groups.”

Iannarino — along with a team of researchers from Michigan Medicine’s Rogel Cancer Care Center, Mott Children’s Hospital and ��-Ann Arbor — conducted a study in which they talked with 27 Rogel and Mott patients, ages 12 to 25. The young people had diagnoses including ovarian cancer, leukemia, lymphoma, osteosarcoma and testicular cancer. Their findings were recently published in a Journal of Communication in Healthcare article.

Through open, honest conversations, Iannarino says the study participants highlighted the need for similar-age cancer support groups and advocacy opportunities, as well as having trusted doctors, family and friends.

Advice from participants included:

Take it one day at a time. “Sometimes you have to accept that you don’t have full control over every day of your life or every move that you make. If you could just try to live optimistically and happily each day and find something in each day that makes you happy, that’s what you need to do because tomorrow is not guaranteed.”
Reframe the situation. “Stay strong and keep your head up. No matter how much hair you lose, you’ll always grow it back.”
Trust the medical team. “You just gotta trust the plan. I mean, you gotta have trust in the doctors and . . . that everything’s gonna work out.”
Ask for support. “Don’t feel like you’re really making it hard on people when you ask for help. Even for little things. ’Cause, for me, I feel bad when I’m like, ‘Hey, Mom. Could I get some water? I don’t really feel like walking downstairs.’ She’s like, ‘For sure.’ At the start of it, I was like, ‘I really feel bad for doing this,’ but she tells me every day, ‘If you need to wake me up, just wake me up.’ Just hearing that makes me feel like more people should know that people are out to help you.”
Think about a fertility backup plan before beginning chemotherapy. “For a lot of people, it’s not something that they’ve really thought about when they’re 21, 22 . . . if you have the resources, always freeze your eggs because you don’t know what you’ll want to do five, 10, 15 years from now.”
Advocate for yourself. “(Doctors are) super-nice people. Ask ’em questions. But sometimes they’re not as good at handling the emotional side of things as someone else could be. If you want to talk to a therapist, you can tell your oncologist that and they’ll help point you in the right direction or they’ll bring in the person that you want to talk to for you because they’re full of resources and you can utilize all of them.There’s always gonna be someone there for you, even if you feel alone and you don’t have family support. Your doctors will help you find the person you need to talk to.”

Family support is also crucial, but sometimes family and friends don’t know how to best provide it, Iannarino said. Even as an expert, he’s struggled with this. “It’s human nature to not know if your actions are too much or not enough,” he said. “But it’s better to do your best and be present than it is to stop showing up because you aren’t sure what to do.” The nonprofit organization, b-present, where Iannarino serves on the board, is a comprehensive resource for families. They offer a support roadmap for each stage of the cancer journey.

Iannarino has friends who have fought cancer. One of his best friends since high school was diagnosed with testicular cancer at age 23. “I saw how it really affected his relationships and his identity. He didn’t want to rely on anyone else and didn’t want to ask for help, even though he needed to,” said Iannarino. “It made me very aware of the barriers young people have when speaking up.” His friend is doing well and is now married with a family, he added.

Iannarino said this advice-focused research work is one part of a larger study the group conducted surrounding cancer and developing adolescent and young adult identities.

Iannarino continues to explore doctor-patient cancer communication with adolescents and young adults, along with the ways health systems can best provide families with support and information, even when cancer centers have limited resources. “Asking adolescents and young adults the question, ‘What advice do you have for another person who is going through this situation?’ opens a door for communication that can build trust and lead to clinicians and patients talking more openly about needs,” he said. “And when those needs are identified, patients and their families can be better connected to the right resources.”

Story by Sarah Tuxbury

Faculty Research

College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters

Off

Wed, 01/29/2025 - 16:47

Health Communication Associate Professor Nick Iannarino’s research looks at creating advocacy and support avenues for teens and young adults with a cancer diagnosis.

Health Communication Associate Professor Nick Iannarino has researched communication around cancer diagnoses and young adults for more than 15 years. Photo by Annie Barker

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.

###

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

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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

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College of Education, Health, and Human Services

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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.

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Vitalis Im’s winding, unexpected path to academia

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