Faculty Research

What does an Institutional Review Board do?

lblouin — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 17:41:36 +0000

What does an Institutional Review Board do? lblouin Mon, 06/30/2025 - 13:41

Faculty research is a time-consuming endeavor — even in the planning stages. Researchers have to invest hundreds of hours in finding good ideas, vetting them for originality, researching funding programs, writing proposals and hiring research assistants. And for any study that involves human subjects, researchers have one more to-do: Submitting their project to be reviewed by someone from one of two main Institutional Review Boards at U-M — or possibly the entire board if the work involves tricky ethical issues. Elizabeth Molina, the U-M research compliance specialist with the IRB Health Sciences and Behavioral Sciences who handles all initial IRB review applications coming from faculty, postdocs and student researchers at ��-Dearborn, says IRB reviews involve carefully evaluating all aspects of a proposed research project. The goal is to make sure the methodology complies with federal and state regulations, ethical principles and U-M specific policies designed to protect the rights and welfare of human participants involved in research conducted by faculty, staff and students on U-M’s three campuses. An IRB will then give the researcher a green light or a rejection, or request changes to their project to bring it into compliance. Notably, an IRB always has a diverse mix of people, including non-scientists and community members, so that complicated issues can be evaluated from a variety of perspectives. Sometimes, if a study is reviewed by the full board, researchers and study teams are invited to the review sessions so they can work through tricky issues as a group.

In practice, Molina says her work with the IRB involves navigating a lot of nuances with consent and privacy issues. Sometimes, a review might be super quick. “The first thing we actually look for is if the work involves something that the IRB needs to review,” Molina says. “For example, if a faculty member wants to survey students in their class solely to inform their own teaching practice and not to generalize or disseminate the findings beyond their classroom, then IRB approval is not required,” Molina says. But if the faculty member envisions they might use the results down the road in a research project, then Molina would work with them to make sure they’re, say, obtaining consent in a way that complies with regulations. Depending on what a research survey is about, a review could get more or less involved. A survey asking people about what method they use to heat their homes would require a lower level of review. But if a researcher is asking people about a more sensitive subject, like their personal participation in illegal activity, then the methodology for collecting responses and how the researchers manage and present the data would have to be more carefully thought out. The goal is to ensure that nothing compromises a participant’s anonymity or inadvertently creates adverse consequences for the person.

Nuance is baked into Molina’s work. After all, it’s the nature of research to investigate novel territory, and tricky test cases are essentially how the boundaries of ethical systems get defined and refined. Moreover, while some IRB rules, like those regarding children in medical studies, are more specific, Molina says many regulations are intentionally broad and open to interpretation so they can be inclusive of a wide variety of cases. For straightforward projects, Molina can conduct a regulatory and administrative review of the application herself and communicate with the researcher or study team if she needs any additional information. If the research is “exempt,” meaning it’s research that presents minimal risk to participants and falls under specific exemption categories defined by regulations, then she can issue the approval once any issues are resolved. If a study does not meet any of the exemption categories, she refers it to another reviewer, typically an expert in the subject matter, who assesses the risk and can issue an approval. However, if the study presents more than minimal risk or there is a complicated ethical question, Molina will bring it to the IRB staff for discussion to confirm that it should go to the full board for review. The full board typically discusses three to five studies a month. Only the full board can issue a disapproval, which Molina says is rare.

There are all kinds of tricky situations, especially regarding consent. For example, Molina says if researchers want to observe people without their knowledge, or not tell a participant everything up front, the IRB would review the proposal carefully. In some cases, the IRB can approve a waiver or alteration of informed consent, but only if the study poses no more than minimal risk, doesn’t affect participants’ rights or welfare, and couldn’t be done otherwise. When possible, participants are debriefed afterward and given the option to withdraw their data once they know the full details of the study. However, Molina says there are rare cases where debriefing might actually cause more harm than good. “For example, if someone was included in a study for an embarrassing reason, or finds out they were part of a study without knowing, it could cause distress, lead to mistrust in the research process or the researchers, and discourage future participation,” she says. Moreover, if the research involves children or teenagers, the study team has to obtain consent from both the parents and the kid (referred to in the later case as “assent”). “But there may be circumstances where it would be risky to obtain parental consent,” Molina says. “Let’s say you wanted to talk with teenagers about their sexual orientation. Asking the parents if the child could participate in the research might be risky for that teenager. In situations like that, the researcher could request a waiver of parental permission, because the benefits of doing so could outweigh the risks.”

The gray areas and subtleties are essentially limitless. If a study involves observing people in a public space, that might not require consent, because people don’t have the same expectations of privacy. But if the setting were a semi-public space, like a workplace, that’s going to require a higher level of IRB review. “Or let’s say you’re recruiting participants in a public space, but you’re recruiting for an HPV study. Are participants going to feel comfortable coming to you, and are you taking steps to protect their privacy?” Molina says. Because there are so many nuances, Molina encourages researchers to reach out to talk through any questions they have before submitting their projects to the IRB for an official review. She also conducts monthly IRB “On-the-Road” sessions, where researchers can connect with her on Zoom to talk through issues, or even ask questions about the admittedly not-the-most-user-friendly eResearch software researchers use to submit their projects for review. “People often don’t know what they need to provide us, or what a particular question is asking, or the level of detail we need to provide an evaluation of risk,” she says. “Or, for approved standard studies, they might not know that if they change something on their flyer or their consent form, even something that seems small, like changing your phone number or adding a QR code, that requires an amendment. So a conversation clarifies that. That’s one reason I do the On-the-Road sessions. That way, people can meet me and see that I’m not intimidating. I’m not the police. You can tell me about your challenges and we can try to figure them out together.”

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Want to learn more about what the IRB does and its review process? Check out the IRB Health Sciences and Behavioral Sciences website. Have questions for Molina about an upcoming project? Faculty and students can reach out directly at molinael@umich.edu or attend an upcoming IRB On-the-Road session.

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Mon, 06/30/2025 - 17:40

If a research study involves human subjects, it has to go through an Institutional Review Board evaluation. But ��-Dearborn’s IRB liaison, Elizabeth Molina, wants faculty, staff and students to see her as a partner, not the ethics police.

Elizabeth Molina, a U-M research compliance specialist with the IRB Health Sciences and Behavioral Sciences, handles all initial IRB application reviews coming from faculty, postdocs and student researchers on the ��-Dearborn campus.

Office of Research update for July 2025

lblouin — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 12:46:18 +0000

Office of Research update for July 2025 lblouin Mon, 06/30/2025 - 08:46

External Awards Received

Principal Investigator: Joe Lo, Mechanical Engineering
Project Title: Influence of hypoxia on the antiviral functions of human intestinal epithelial cells
Sponsor: National Institutes of Health subaward (via University of Florida)
Amount: $283,010

The low oxygen environment (hypoxia) in the gastro-intestinal tract is fundamental for the preservation of the commensal microbiota and the maintenance of gut homeostasis. How hypoxia impacts the ability of intestinal epithelial cells to respond to enteric viruses is unknown and this constitutes the core question of this project. In collaboration with the University of Florida, Lo’s team at ��-Dearborn will develop a radial microfluidic gradient platform for modeling gut villi hypoxia. The device will be verified using a conventional fiberoptic oxygen probe for the initial design. The results of this study will inform the development of novel therapeutics targeting cellular responses to hypoxia to treat enteric pathogens, as well as for the treatment of inflammatory bowel diseases which is accompanied by oxygen-dysregulation in the gut.

Announcements

New Research Security Training Requirement for Certain Proposals

Effective May 1, 2025, certain sponsors (e.g., Department of Defense, Department of Energy) require research security training to be completed within 12 months prior to submitting a funding proposal (check the terms and conditions of the proposal for any such training requirements.) Follow this link to complete the Research Security Training course requirement (��ICH login and password required.)

Research security training is listed as one of four elements of a Research Security Program required by National Security Presidential Memorandum 33, issued on Jan. 14, 2021, to safeguard our research ecosystem. The "CHIPS and Science Act of 2022," Section 10634, codifies the requirement for research security training for federal research award personnel in public law. See more at the Department of Energy’s website.

Research Events in July

IRBMED - Waivers, Alterations, and Alternative Forms of Informed Consent
- Presented by IRBMED, a unit of the Medical School Office of Research, this course offers an overview of some special situations relating to informed consent. Specifically, waivers and alterations of informed consent, waivers of documentation of informed consent, and obtaining consent from non-English speakers
- Wednesday, July 9, 2025, 2:30-3:30 p.m., virtual
- Register here
Community-Engaged Research with the FAST PACE Toolkit: A Three-Part Virtual Training Series
- The FAST PACE Toolkit is a proven resource for fostering equitable and effective community-academic partnerships, particularly in crisis situations. This three-part virtual training series will equip researchers, community members, and practitioners with the skills and knowledge to:
  - Build strong, trusting relationships with community partners
  - Develop community-driven research protocols
  - Navigate ethical considerations in community-engaged research
  - Translate research findings into actionable solutions
- Session 3: Wednesday, July 9, 2025, 3-5 p.m., virtual
- Register here
MICHR - Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR4K) Summer 2025
- RCR4K is a seminar that is designed to meet the requirements of the NIH K-23, or any federal or non-federal career development grant. The 5-session (10 hour) seminar is mostly interactive, practice-based, and focused on addressing RCR issues (ethics, integrity, and regulatory matters) that have arisen in the course of your own funded research. It’s relevant, interactive, and includes mentoring from experienced faculty.
  - Session 2: Thursday, July 17, 2025, 9-11 a.m. - Research integrity: falsification, fabrication, and plagiarism
  - Session 3: Thursday, Aug. 14, 2025, 9-11 a.m. - Authorship & Plagiarism
  - Session 4: Thursday, Sept. 18, 2025, 9-11 a.m. - Clinical Trial Design: The Support Trial
  - Session 5: Thursday, Oct. 16, 2025, 9-11 a.m. - Public Health Research, and Research with data and specimens: Henrietta Lacks and the Common Rule debate
- ��-Ann Arbor North Campus Research Complex, Bldg. 300, Room 376
- Register here
Webinar: Research Impact Metrics and Visualizations Using SciVal Database
- Looking for an efficient way to analyze a large group of publications? SciVal allows researchers to explore topic analysis, co-authorship networks and citation-based metrics to track trends and learn more about groups of papers that interest you.
- This introduction to SciVal will demonstrate how to create a group of papers (e.g., by authors, topics, or other characteristics) and help researchers select metrics appropriate for determining impact. SciVal can help answer questions such as: How are researchers collaborating? What attention are my articles receiving as compared to similar articles worldwide? Researchers can also refer to the Library Research Impact Assessment guide, which includes the importance of using both qualitative and quantitative input when considering the impact of research articles.
- Register here for a SciVal webinar, presented July 21, from noon to 1 p.m.

Research Resource Highlight: iThenticate

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

To help the U-M research community foster and uphold the highest ethical standards in research and creative practice, the Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR) secured an institutional license for iThenticate. ��-Dearborn researchers can use the plagiarism detection software to help ensure that, in the process of advancing their research and creative practice, they do not inadvertently source others’ work without appropriate reference or repurpose their previously published work in a way that violates publication license.

iThenticate compares submissions against a comprehensive database of web and scholarly content, including 190 million subscription sources and 81,000 journal articles. OVPR is pleased to provide free access to this tool to the Ann Arbor, Dearborn, and Flint campuses. Information about accessing iThenticate can be found on the research compliance 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, we encourage you to check out the Hanover Research subject area calendars with funding opportunities which we upload on a regular basis to our website.

Please refer to OVPR’s Tracking Federal Changes 2025 page 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 and Staff

Faculty Research

Office of Research

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Mon, 06/30/2025 - 12:44

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

President Trump's first 100 days extreme, but not surprising

stuxbury — Mon, 19 May 2025 12:55:27 +0000

President Trump's first 100 days extreme, but not surprising stuxbury Mon, 05/19/2025 - 08:55

President Donald Trump used executive power expansively during his first 100 days in office, but there is little he has done that wasn’t foreshadowed during his first term, observed ��-Dearborn Professor of Political Science Mitchel Sollenberger.

In the below Q&A, conducted on April 30, 2025, Sollenberger discusses what has been predictable — and what has actually defied expectation — in the president’s nascent second term.

Sollenberger is the author of four books examining the reach and limits of executive powers: The Unitary Executive Theory: A Danger to Constitutional Government (with Jeffrey Crouch and Mark J. Rozell), The President’s Czars: Undermining Congress and the Constitution (with Mark J. Rozell), Judicial Appointments and Democratic Controls and The President Shall Nominate: How Congress Trumps Executive Power.

Because you have studied the expansion of executive powers so extensively, you are probably less surprised than many at some of President Trump’s actions in his first 100 days in office. So let’s start with what hasn’t surprised you.

What has not surprised me is the use of unilateral executive action. I think Trump's experience during his first term has pushed him even more in this direction. His instincts, I think, have always leaned toward acting alone, and he did that with the travel ban early in his first term. That move drew significant pushback from the federal courts, which helps shed some light on the Trump administration’s hostility to the courts currently.

I think, especially during the last two years of his first term — when he faced a Democratic Congress — Trump saw enemies in all corners of government. That perception helped drive his doubling down on unilateral action, particularly in his efforts to root out what his administration calls the “deep state.” Whether it’s acting through the Department of Government Efficiency, or the removal and firing of officials, these moves seem designed to clear obstacles and smooth the way for implementing the policies he believes that he was elected to achieve.

Whether you like it or not, there's truth to “small d” democracy when it comes to “elections have consequences” and what Trump is currently doing are the consequences. I can't think of anything that he's done that wasn't necessarily hinted at or explicitly stated during his campaign. For example, he was clear where he was going to go with immigration, and while he took aggressive action on it during his first term, it was understood that he would double down, if given the chance.

So, has there been anything that has surprised you?

If there’s one surprise, it's how much more strategic and deliberate the Trump administration has been to achieving policy aims. I assign an article in my presidency class titled “The Random Walk Presidency,” which characterizes Trump’s first term as chaotic and incoherent — a shoot from the hip administration with no plan. That description nicely captures Trump 1.0.

This time, though, there seems to be a more structured approach. You might not like it, but certainly putting forward a border czar, the executive orders framing immigration as an “invasion,” and invoking the Alien Enemies Act — all point to a coordinated effort. Notably, this is the first time a president has used that law in a non-war setting. These moves appear calculated to lay the legal and rhetorical groundwork for the use of more aggressive and controversial forms of executive actions with the full anticipation of challenges in federal courts. And I think that's to me a level of sophistication that you didn't quite see with Trump 1.0.”

Is there anything else that surprised you?

What surprises me is the sheer scale of Trump’s actions, particularly his use of tariffs. While he deployed tariffs during his first term, what we are seeing now is more like “shock and awe,” to borrow a phrase from the Bush era. Previously, tariffs were aimed primarily at our economic rivals like China. Now, Trump is imposing them unilaterally and broadly against our allies. That’s nearly unprecedented in modern U.S. history. You have to go back to Richard Nixon for a president to blanket unilaterally impose a tariff, and Nixon did it for about a year, and then he rescinded it because, as a policy measure, it was ineffective and ultimately harmed the U.S. economy.

I have always understood Trump to be a protectionist president, but I'm surprised by just how far he's taken it. This area of policy, more than any other, could have far-reaching consequences. Since World War II, the United States has led the global economic order on trade. And now we are experiencing this dramatic shift — a U.S. president imposing tariffs on virtually everyone which is forcing allies to rethink their economic strategies. If our allies readjust to a world without the U.S. leading and they decide to come together themselves in different ways, it could have profound implications for not only the U.S. when it comes to trade policy, economic policy, but in international affairs more broadly.

To be fair, there is a valid policy debate about whether our allies have become too reliant on the United States. But Trump’s approach — using confrontation and unilateralism — marks a sharp departure from the post-WWII consensus of diplomacy and engagement. It’s more a “shoot first and ask questions later” approach and seems to signal a fundamental shift in how America engages with the rest of the world.

Many observers have been talking about the risk of a constitutional crisis. Are we on the verge of tipping that far?

Republicans seemed to have largely closed ranks around Trump, effectively shielding his left flank from any sort of legislative-type challenge. So what about his right flank? I think there you have the judiciary as the key point of resistance and a possible place where a constitutional crisis occurs. In Trump’s first term, the legal flashpoint was the travel ban order – this time it’s shaping up to be the deportation cases. We have already seen several rulings and remands from the Supreme Court to the district courts which have pushed back against some of the Trump administration’s actions. This has given the lower courts additional support to not only question the Trump administration’s actions but stop deportations from proceeding. The real crisis would come if the Supreme Court issues a definitive ruling and the president defies it. We are not there yet but we are edging closer to that moment.

Interestingly, the federal courts — including the Supreme Court — have been more willing to push back against presidential power than I expected. One major development has been that the Supreme Court has agreed to hear an emergency appeal on the legality of nationwide injunctions. At least three justices appear skeptical of nationwide injunctions.

This is not some esoteric matter. If the Supreme Court rules that federal judges can only issue injunctions within their own jurisdictions, it could severely limit the ability of the courts to halt executive actions nationwide. That would have major implications, even if Trump’s actions are later found to have been unlawful, because the administration will be able to continue implementing them for weeks or months before a final ruling takes effect. Such a decision would significantly tip the balance of power toward the executive branch by greatly limiting what has become an effective tool of the judiciary to challenge presidential power assertions.

Interview by Kristin Palm

Faculty Research

College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters

Social Sciences

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Mon, 05/19/2025 - 12:54

Professor of Political Science Mitchel Sollenberger, an expert in executive privilege, weighs in on what he's seen so far with the new administration.

��-Dearborn Professor of Political Science Mitchel Sollenberger. Photo by Annie Barker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

###

Story by Lou Blouin. Photos by Annie Barker.

Awards

Experiential Learning

Undergraduate Research

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Mechanical Engineering

Off

Mon, 05/19/2025 - 12:07

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

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

Office of Research update for May 2025

lblouin — Mon, 12 May 2025 17:21:02 +0000

Office of Research update for May 2025 lblouin Mon, 05/12/2025 - 13:21

External Awards Received

U-M Principal Investigator: Zhi Zhang, Natural Sciences, CASL
Project Title: Non-invasive Targeted Nanotherapy for the Treatment of Traumatic Brain Injury
Sponsor: M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust via Washington State University
Award Amount: $20,000

A traumatic brain injury (TBI) refers to a brain injury that is caused by an outside force, which often has long-lasting effects. However, most of the drugs cannot pass the blood brain barrier (BBB), a highly selective membrane that separates the blood from the brain, thus the treatment options for TBI are limited. In this project, Dr. Zhang, in collaboration with Washington State University, has created a non-invasive drug delivery system that can efficiently transport drugs across the BBB. This drug delivery system not only delivers the drugs to the injured brain region but also targets specific cells that are affected by TBI. The main objective of this proposed project is to evaluate the short-term and long-term effectiveness of this novel nanoplatform in TBI. This project holds immense promise for TBI research, offering innovative approaches to drug delivery, diagnosis, and treatment, potentially leading to more effective therapies and improved patient outcomes.

Principal Investigator: Shan Bao, Industrial & Manufacturing Systems Engineering, CECS
Project Title: Evaluating the Applicability of Global AEB Testing Scenarios in the U.S. Context – Toward Global Harmonization
Sponsor: Toyota Motor North America, Inc.
Awarded Amount: $443,086

Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) represents a critical advancement in vehicle safety technology, designed to prevent collisions by automatically engaging the brakes when potential impacts are detected. These systems employ an array of sensors, cameras, and radar technology to continuously monitor the vehicle's surroundings, capable of responding faster than human reflexes in critical moments. Particularly effective in common accident scenarios - such as sudden traffic slowdowns, pedestrian crossings, or instances of driver inattention - AEB has become a cornerstone of modern automotive safety systems. Dr. Bao will focus on conducting a comprehensive evaluation of international AEB testing procedures to assess their real-world applicability in order to bridge the gap between laboratory testing conditions and real-world driving demands, thereby enhancing AEB system effectiveness. This work will contribute directly to the development of more robust safety features, helping to create a transportation ecosystem where preventable accidents are significantly reduced. The insights gained may also inform the evolution of complementary advanced driver assistance systems, further advancing vehicle safety standards worldwide.

Principal Investigator: Xuan Zhou, Electrical & Computer Engineering, CECS
Project Title: Closing the Loop: Secondary Life Battery Energy Storage Systems for Grid Applications and Recycling
Sponsor: Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy
Awarded Amount: $1,485,037

This project focuses on giving old electric vehicle (EV) batteries a second life by turning them into energy storage systems that can help power homes, businesses, and microgrids. Instead of throwing away used batteries, the team will carefully test, combine, and reuse them to create new, reliable energy systems. Later, when these reused batteries reach the end of their life, valuable materials like nickel, cobalt, and magnesium will be recovered and recycled to make new batteries. This helps reduce waste, saves important natural resources, and supports cleaner, more affordable energy for communities.

Announcements

ORSP Updates and Guidance for Federally Sponsored Projects

The U-M Office of Research & Sponsored Projects has provided the following guidance for faculty and staff questions about the approach to proposals or new and existing awards:

Proposal Submissions: All federal proposals will be submitted in accordance with the appropriate negotiated indirect (F&A) cost rate agreement. Funding opportunities that prohibit the application of institutional negotiated F&A rates should be brought to the ORSP Pre-Award Team
New Awards: We expect all new federal awards should be received with the appropriate rate, based on our rate agreement or program specific policy. ORSP will contact sponsors for corrections if new awards are received with rates other than proposed.
Existing Awards: PIs should continue project activities and incurring associated expenses for their active awards. If you receive notices for actions (e.g., stop work, stop activities, terminations) on active awards, you should provide them to your research administrator (RA) for submission to ORSP for review and appropriate action.
Certifications/Attestations: PIs should not make or provide attestations on behalf of the institution (recipient, awardee, grantee). If you receive written requests for attestations or certifications regarding an active or pending award, provide the documentation to your RA to be submitted to ORSP for review and determination of the appropriate action.

New Federal Policy in Effect for Research Involving Certain Biological Agents and Toxins

A new policy on research with certain pathogens and biological toxins went into effect as of May 6, 2025, that may require additional information for new proposals being submitted.

The United States Government Policy for Dual Use Research of Concern and Pathogens with Enhanced Pandemic Potential (“USG DURC-PEPP policy”) requires assessment of life sciences research at the proposal submission stage to ensure that risk assessments and mitigation plans are completed and approved prior to funding for any work deemed subject to the policy.

All U-M Principal Investigators proposing work with or generating any replication-competent infectious agent or proposing to work with a toxin of any amount from the Federal Select Agents and Toxins list must assess whether their research is reasonably anticipated to be within the scope of research categorized under the USG DURC-PEPP Policy. The ��-Dearborn Office of Research proposal staff will assist PIs with determining whether this assessment will be necessary for their proposals.

More information on the USG DURC-PEPP policy and the U-M implementation process is on the IBC DURC-PEPP webpage, and in the IBC Fast Facts: DURC-PEPP Edition. Contact ibcstaff@umich.edu with any questions.

Updates from the �� Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR)

As a reminder, OVPR continues to provide information, updates, and tracking of federal changes related to the university’s research enterprise on their Federal Research Blog page. This includes information about U-M’s internal program to support units in managing uncertainty related to funding stoppages, mitigate impacts to staff, and reduce risk to health and safety with respect to critical research already underway. Bookmark and check back often!

Abstract/SOW Now Required for All Proposals

Due to a change in the Proposal Approval Form (PAF) in eResearch, an abstract or statement of work is now a requirement for all proposals. For ��-Dearborn’s process, this will replace the three key terms we normally request for the PAF.

Research Events in May

IRWG Faculty Writing Retreat
- Join IRWG for a four-day writing retreat designed to foster productivity, connection, and support for feminist scholars. Enjoy structured writing time, goal setting, and reflections in a scenic setting at U-M Recreational Sports.
- IRWG’s Savannah Hall will be available for grant proposal consultations. Space is limited, and full attendance is expected. The venue is wheelchair accessible and near the Matthaei Botanical Gardens, perfect for breaks to enjoy nature. Light breakfast, lunch, and snacks will be provided. This event is only open to faculty.
- May 12-15, 9 a.m.-3 p.m.
- Register here
��-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:
  - May 23: Broadening participation and inclusive excellence in grant proposals, virtual
- Register now for an opportunity to elevate your grant writing skills!
Michigan Medicine - Storage and Retention of Data
- Presented by IRBMED, a unit of the Medical School Office of Research, this course will review the fundamentals of maintaining confidentiality of subject data, including data encryption and protection, using secure environments and external websites, and distinguishing among anonymized, coded, and de- identified datasets.
- Tuesday, May 20, 1-2 p.m., virtual
- Register here
MICHR - Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR4K) Summer 2025
- RCR4K is a seminar that is designed to meet the requirements of the NIH K-23, or any federal or non-federal career development grant. The 5-session (10 hour) seminar is mostly interactive, practice-based, and focused on addressing RCR issues (ethics, integrity, and regulatory matters) that have arisen in the course of your own funded research. It is relevant, interactive, and includes mentoring from experienced faculty.
  - Session 1: Thursday, June 26, 9-11 a.m. - History of research ethics, Human subjects research regulations
  - Session 2: Thursday, July 17, 9-11 a.m. - Research integrity: falsification, fabrication, and plagiarism
  - Session 3: Thursday, Aug. 14, 9-11 a.m. - Authorship & Plagiarism
  - Session 4: Thursday, Sept. 18, 9-11 a.m. - Clinical Trial Design: The Support Trial
  - Session 5: Thursday, Oct. 16, 9-11 a.m. - Public Health Research, and Research with data and specimens: Henrietta Lacks and the Common Rule debate
- ��-Ann Arbor North Campus Research Complex, Bldg. 300, Room 376
- Register here

Research Resource Highlight: Reference Finder

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

Reference Finder is a research tool provided by the National Academies Press (NAP) and can be used to help identify community reports supporting the need for proposed research. Copy and paste brief content from an article or your rough draft, then click "Find Relevant Reports". Reference Finder analyzes the text you provide and identifies the reports that are most likely to have content that might apply to your needs.

Upcoming Funding Opportunities

Please refer to OVPR’s Tracking Federal Changes 2025 page 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

Research

Office of Research

Off

Mon, 05/12/2025 - 17:20

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

Natalie Sampson named Distinguished Professor of the Year

lblouin — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 12:32:16 +0000

Natalie Sampson named Distinguished Professor of the Year lblouin Wed, 04/16/2025 - 08:32

Anyone who knows Natalie Sampson knows one of her more endearing (and perhaps Midwestern) traits is her reluctance to be in the spotlight — even when the attention is obviously due. Whenever we interview her about her work, which often has some connection to grassroots community organizations, she is quick to play up others’ hard work and contributions and lower the volume on her own. So it’s unsurprising that it's been a little uncomfortable for Sampson since the Michigan Association of State Universities shared that she had been selected as one of three Distinguished Professors of the Year for 2025. The news wasn't even public yet and Sampson was already sweating whether the invitations for her allotted guest list of seven for the Lansing awards ceremony should include her colleagues. "I didn’t want to bug them — ask them to drive to Lansing. They’re busy!” Sampson says, laughing. Luckily, her longtime friend and collaborator, the straight-talking Associate Professor of Sociology Carmel Price, told her to get over it. "She was, like, ‘They’re going to be upset if you don’t ask them.’”

Sampson’s aversion to attention is perhaps amplified a bit by the fact that, for much of her life, she’s not always been exactly comfortable in the world of academia. She says she definitely did not grow up with an eye on becoming an academic. Her father, who was an airline mechanic, and her mother, who was a customer service representative, grew up in an era where college degrees weren’t necessarily seen as prerequisites for solid, well-paying jobs. But both she and her older sister excelled in school, and their parents were huge cheerleaders when their daughters landed at the University of Michigan. In retrospect, Sampson sees it as a moment of generational transition in her own family — and one that also says something about the region. “My parents grew up at a time when it was Papa Ford and Papa Chevrolet, and people did quite well for a very long time without going to college,” Sampson says. “So for my family, this college thing was a different trajectory — especially because my sister studied sociology and I did environmental studies. I was lucky because my family was always very supportive. But I think there was this curiosity about what this would translate to.”

It took a little exploration during her undergraduate years at U-M to find her niche. Sampson says she gravitated to her major because she liked the outdoors, but not all of the coursework clicked: “I remember taking the woody plants class and memorizing all the different Latin names and the different kinds of acorns and thought, ‘Well, I’m definitely not going to be a conservationist,’” she says. However, through U-M’s Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program, which is akin to ��-Dearborn’s Summer Undergraduate Research Experience, she found something that was a little more her speed. She got paired with a faculty member who was doing research around the health impacts of truck traffic on people living in neighborhoods near Detroit’s Ambassador Bridge. During her assignment, she got to talk with dozens of people in the neighborhood and witness some of the inner workings of grassroots community organizations. “I remember thinking, ‘This is research? If this is research, then I like research,’” she says.

It was indeed research — or a particular brand of research that was coming of age in the public health discipline at that time. Sampson says beginning in the late 1980s, some academics in the field were going through a bit of a what-is-it-all-for moment. There was an impulse to not simply use research to document, say, epidemiological trends, but to try to more deliberately use the data to actually improve, well, the public’s health. This sometimes meant interacting more directly with community organizations who were taking on big corporations or government agencies, or interrogating long-held assumptions about academic research, like the value or validity of “objectivity.” During her master’s program at Portland State University, Sampson got exposed to more examples of this kind of “action-oriented research.” During one of her internships, she collaborated closely with a small nonprofit that was working with residents on issues related to asthma. “I saw faculty listening to residents, and their experiences were shaping the research. I started to see, ‘Oh, this is how it works,’” she says.

Today, it’s easy to see the imprint of this approach on Sampson’s work. Along with Price and several partners, she co-created Environmental Health Research-to-Action, the flagship program of which is a summer academy that teaches high school students to do things like air and water quality monitoring, and to understand how environmental health science can support policy work. She’s also been working with community organizations and other academics on a plain language initiative, which is pushing government agencies like the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy to use language that is understandable to everyday people, so they don’t feel alienated from decision making processes. And a few years back, during the planning stages of the Gordie Howe International Bridge — a project that promised to bring a vast amount of truck traffic to a neighborhood already burdened by poor air quality — her team’s community health survey of residents in Southwest Detroit helped push the city and state to agree to a landmark $45 million community benefits package. That agreement included an unprecedented relocation program that provided some residents of Detroit’s Delray neighborhood with the option of moving to a renovated Detroit Land Bank home. In typical Sampson fashion, she’s quick to point out that, in her opinion, her work made an impact because the timing was right. “This result is 100% due to the fact that this group had been organizing for 10 or 20 years, but they took that data and used that to support their argument for this community benefits agreement,” she says. “At that moment, the data just fit into that story.” Now, she says, another group, which is trying to get the city to design truck routes that don’t go through residential neighborhoods is using similar data that their community-academic teams are continuing to collect. The organizers’ work recently prompted the city to propose a new truck route ordinance.

Several years ago, Valeria Cossyleon, right, and Janine Hussein, left, were among the students who helped Sampson collect door-to-door health surveys in Detroit's Delray neighborhood. Photo by Lou Blouin

That community organizations, who are good at community organizing, and academics, who are good at collecting and presenting data, could collaborate in practical ways to improve the public’s health is something that makes intuitive sense. But in practice, Sampson says it doesn’t always work smoothly. As she sees it, the key ingredient is trust: University researchers who aren’t from the community, and who might speak in technical jargon, are often greeted with a healthy degree of skepticism by local residents, who don’t know how durable or broad their allyship is. Sampson says there were plenty of times early in her career where her status as an academic made her feel out of place in community meetings. But that has changed over time — and because of time. Trust, she says, is built through relationships, and relationships don’t arise out of thin air. Nowadays, she rarely feels that kind of awkwardness, namely because she’s been working with the same communities for years, sometimes decades. “That’s one reason I feel like it’s been a blessing for me to come to ��-Dearborn. I got to come back and work with people that I worked with as an undergrad when I was 20 years old,” she says. “Simone Sagovac, who now runs the Southwest Detroit Community Benefits Coalition, I know I have a picture of us somewhere at some meeting and I’m 20 years old, and I have an eyebrow pierced, and I’m not dressed professionally. And now here we are, a couple decades later, and we’re older ladies, some of us with gray hair, still working together, still trying to collect the data, because there’s so much frickin’ work to do.”

In the classroom, Sampson is always nudging her students to think about the practical applications of environmental health science too. She says she’s benefited greatly from teaching the same two courses — Community Organizing and Introduction to Environmental Health — for years now, which has enabled her to continually refine the curriculum. One of her go-to assignments in her environmental health class is to ask each student to bring in their municipal drinking water quality report, which local utilities are required to provide to residents. It’s a simple but powerful prompt. For one, many students discover for the first time things about their drinking water that aren’t great. And even the sheer challenge of deciphering these technical reports reveals that government documents aren’t always presenting important scientific data in ways that are easily understood — which in turns, stunts residents’ abilities to push their public officials when there is a problem. And for many semesters in her community organizing course, it’s been a staple assignment for students to partner with community groups on practical projects, like a collaboration a few years ago where students helped a group in south Dearborn write a grant proposal to support their work around air quality. She also recently did something she thought she’d never do: create a textbook. It has a benign sounding name: “Environmental Health: Foundations for Public Health.” But the content, featuring contributions from a diverse range of leading voices in the field, is far edgier, emphasizing the broad scope of the discipline, including the community-based approaches that originally inspired her.

Now a couple decades into her own public health journey, Sampson senses she might be entering a moment of transition. She says it’s a little weird to look around and see that she’s now one of three senior faculty members in the Health and Human Services Department. One of her colleagues, who’s just a little younger than her, recently recoiled when she casually referred to them both as “middle age.” And she’s also increasingly interested in exploring other approaches in her quest to make environmental health science universally accessible, including ones that utilize the arts. She’s also feeling more of a generational divide in the classroom, especially the past few years. In particular, she’s observing an increasing reluctance of students to talk — “like, at all” — in class, something she attributes a little bit to COVID, but mostly to the fact that young people’s lives are increasingly lived online. It’s something she can sort of relate to. “I never talked in class as an undergrad,” she says. “And I’m definitely sympathetic to students who are feeling anxiety about that. But many of them are going to be clinicians. A huge part of their jobs is going to be talking to people. So you have to practice. Definitely, one of my biggest priorities as an instructor is just creating any opportunity to make them talk.”

She also tries to keep their spirits up. Public health can, frankly, be a depressing subject much of the time, and she does feel like younger generations are living with a different kind of weight on their shoulders as they realize most of their lives will be lived in the climate change era. During her periodic efforts to bring them up to speed on current events, she makes sure to find at least some good news from the world. And it’s now one of her standard assignments to challenge them to do something for their mental health. (This semester, they are listening to a playlist of songs, crowd-sourced from the class, that get them pumped up.) She concedes that this kind of positivity can sometimes be a “performance.” But it’s also something that keeps her own motor going. “It’s funny: Sometimes I feel like I’m just getting started. And some days I feel like I’m ready to retire!” she says. “But there are always opportunities to reinvent.”

###

Story by Lou Blouin

College of Education, Health, and Human Services

Health and Human Services

Off

Wed, 04/16/2025 - 12:30

The associate professor of public health talks about her sometimes uncomfortable relationship with academia, the politics of community-centered research and the challenge of getting today’s students to talk in class.

Associate Professor of Public Health Natalie Sampson, far right, says she loves that she's been able to teach the same two courses for much of her career, which has allowed her to both experiment with and refine the curriculum. Photo by Annie Barker

Meeting future business needs today

stuxbury — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 12:43:25 +0000

Meeting future business needs today stuxbury Mon, 04/07/2025 - 08:43

Over the next three years, 92% of companies plan to increase their artificial intelligence investments, according to a 2025 global report. Assistant Professor of Marketing Mainak Sarkar — an expert in AI marketing — is preparing the next generation of professionals for this paradigm shift in ��-Dearborn’s College of Business classrooms.

Sarkar, who started at COB in Fall 2024, recently worked as an assistant professor at University of Stavanger in Norway and was a visiting scholar at ��-Ann Arbor’s Ross School of Business after earning his doctorate in marketing in 2022 from ESSEC Business School in France. His AI-focused dissertation led to Sarkar having one of the most downloaded papers on SSRN’s e-library in the areas of customer relationship management, managerial marketing and marketing science.

Drawing from his research, Sarkar is currently developing a new marketing analytics course — which will be offered during the 2025-26 academic year — to get ��-Dearborn students familiar with a variety of marketing models. "The course is for students to be knowledgeable about the existing traditional approaches of doing marketing analytics and know how to leverage the latest AI methods,” he says. “It's important to be prepared for today and for the future."

As focused as Sarkar is on teaching business and optimizing AI technologies for business use, he didn’t start there. As a young adult in India, where Sarkar grew up, he originally went into a field where he’d quickly land a job. “Information technology in India is quite big and I was focused on where I could get a job once I graduated,” says Sarkar, who earned a bachelor of technology degree from West Bengal University of Technology in Kolkata in 2011.

After a couple years working as an IT professional, Sarkar realized that he needed to follow his passion for the business field. “When you are doing something purely engineering-oriented, you see how the technical side of things work. That’s very good, but you are missing that understanding of your work’s larger purpose, the business side. I had a lot of curiosity,” he says. “I’d read business books about finance and marketing — I’d try to read everything I could when it came to business topics. My interest and curiosity was so strong that I decided it’s a world I wanted to explore.” Sarkar earned his MBA from the Management Development Institute in Gurgaon in 2015.

Sarkar blended his IT background with business strategy when he took a marketing role with a financial services company shortly after earning his MBA. “I was devising all these strategies that would be pitched to the customer as they moved along their relationship with the company. For example, if someone takes a certain loan for a two-year period — I’d use programming and data to look into what would be the best next product to sell to that customer,” he says. “I found those projects really interesting, and that made me want to delve even deeper into marketing.”

Then a major event dominated the conversation in Sarkar’s professional social circles: the DeepMind Challenge Match. In 2016, the AI bot AlphaGo beat the world’s best player of Go, a board game that’s considered more complex than chess. “Not only that, it was able to come up with completely new moves which humans had never thought about previously,” Sarkar says. “That got my attention and made me realize that AI is going to be something very important in the coming years.”

Thinking about his marketing work with the bank, Sarkar realized that AI could optimize managing customer relationships. “From a business side, AI customer relationship models can help you target customers better, which can lead to more profits. From the customer side, you can better personalize the experience and quickly connect them with what they may want or need,” he says. “So I would say AI can create a win-win for both the customer and the business.” And that led Sarkar to return to school — this time for a doctorate in marketing — to research AI in marketing.

Sarkar’s dissertation research led to a publication that was the first of its kind. He showed how deep-learning sequence models in customer relationship management systems can be more effective and efficient than traditional marketing methods. “Natural language models are trained to predict the next word in a sentence. If you repeat that for enough number of times, it develops an understanding of an overall topic, which can lead to it answering different questions that you can ask it,” says Sarkar, noting a chatbot can be an example of a natural language model. “My research was on using these kinds of language models and not just using them to develop chatbots — but to develop customer relationship models that can predict and analyze customer behavior. My research showed that it can predict, with high accuracy, how customer behavior will unfold.”

Seeing the power of AI, Sarkar — just as the 2025 report points out — expects to see it used more and more in business. He wants to teach the next generation of professionals how to effectively implement it when it comes to marketing strategies. And ��-Dearborn is the right place for him to do that.

“��-Dearborn is special because it has smaller class sizes and this allows me to provide more individualized attention to our students,” he says. “The University of Michigan brand has a reputation for developing leaders and it is an honor to teach here.”

Story by Sarah Tuxbury

Faculty Research

College of Business

Off

Mon, 04/07/2025 - 12:42

New College of Business Assistant Professor Mainak Sarkar, a former visiting scholar with ��-Ann Arbor’s Ross School of Business, brings his artificial intelligence expertise to ��-Dearborn.

Assistant Professor of Marketing Mainak Sarkar brings his AI expertise into the classroom. Photo courtesy of Mainak Sarkar

How postdocs help faculty take research to another level

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Assistant Professor of Organic Chemistry Christos Constantinides
Photo by Annie Barker

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

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

###

Story by Lou Blouin

College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters

Natural Sciences

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Office of Research

Off

Mon, 03/31/2025 - 16:31

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

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

Office of Research update for April 2025

lblouin — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 14:23:26 +0000

Office of Research update for April 2025 lblouin Mon, 03/31/2025 - 10:23

External Awards Received

U-M Principal Investigator: Tian An Wong
Project Title: Assessing Surveillance Efficacy and Fostering Visions for Community Safety for Social Justice in Detroit, MI
Sponsor: American Council of Learned Societies (via University of Cincinnati)
Awarded Amount: $23,500

The Safety Ain’t Surveillance Coalition is a citywide organization seeking to build non-punitive ways to build safety across our city, without continued reliance on surveillance technologies that strip Detroiters of their privacy while criminalizing Black neighborhoods and people. The research work will involve collaborating with community members to address the current divide between digital justice, racial injustice and public safety. We are carrying out this work by building critical perspectives that inform the protection of rights to privacy in the nation's largest majority-Black city through collaborative analysis, the development of a layered interactive digital map, and corresponding oral histories of Detroiters addressing digital justice, racial injustice and public safety.

U-M Principal Investigator: Jacob Napieralski
Project Title: Building and Enhancing Environmental Education and Stewardship in SE Michigan
Sponsor: DTE Energy Foundation
Awarded Amount: $18,000

The goal of this project is to increase access to and diversity of educational programming at the ��-Dearborn Environmental Interpretive Center for homeschool groups, K-12 classes, community members and our campus community in 2025. Engaging with as many residents (young and old) as possible will generate informed citizens that can tackle tough issues and help shift communities toward sustainability and equity. The project will also support stewardship opportunities to manage the natural area, both in terms of improving the safety and quality of the habitats.

Announcements

Tracking Federal Changes: ��OR Research Blog

The U-M Office of Research has continued to monitor and update their research blog Tracking Federal Changes related to ongoing changes in the federal administration. There you will find useful information such as the process for appealing terminated federal awards, as well as eligibility for the new research funding program that was developed in response to federal stop-work orders.

Resources for Faculty Preparing Proposals to NSF

The Office of Research Administration provides instruction and guidance documents for faculty who are working to prepare a proposal or manage an award from NSF. Interested faculty can find this information at this link in Google Drive.

Research Events in April

U-M Library, Introduction to Zotero for Citation Management
- Zotero, a free citation management tool that lets you easily organize and cite all the resources you use for your research. In this workshop, you will:
  - Set up your Zotero account
  - Learn how to get citations into Zotero
  - Create and organize personal and group libraries
  - Annotate the PDFs you read
  - Add a bibliography and in-text citations in your Google Docs or Microsoft Word document.
  - Please note: To use Zotero, you will need a desktop or laptop computer – not a Chromebook or tablet – capable of downloading software. While having a desktop or laptop is not required during the workshop, it would help if you plan to get your account set up during this session.
- Thursday, April 3, 12-1 p.m., virtual
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: How to Address Reviewer Feedback - Friday, April 4, 11:30 a.m.-1 p.m. - 3725 Bob and Betty Beyster Building
- NSF CAREER: Project Description: The Research Plan - Thursday, April 10, 11:30 a.m.-1 p.m. - Johnson Rooms 3rd Floor LEC
- NSF Panel TBD - Thursday, May 8, 11:30 a.m.-1 p.m. - Ford Library
American Cancer Society (ACS), Extramural Discovery Science Grants Workshop
- The Extramural Discovery Science Grants Workshop, hosted by the American Cancer Society (ACS), will provide tips on applying for the upcoming spring application cycle. The ACS awards research grants and fellowships to promising scientists early in their careers who have unique hypotheses for cancer prevention and study.
- Wednesday, April 9, 2-3:30 p.m., virtual
- Register here by April 7.
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, April 16, 2-3:30 p.m., virtual
��-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:
  - 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!

Research Resource Highlight: National Institutes of Health Bio Art Graphics Collection

Every month, the Office of Research features a resource and/or tool that is available for researchers. This month, we are featuring the free National Institutes of Health Bio Art Graphics collection.

NIH offers over 2,000 high-quality scientific and medical graphics for free to aid researchers, educators and healthcare professionals. These graphics serve to enhance presentations and research by providing accurate visual representations of complex scientific concepts. The collection includes various file formats, making it easy to use in research papers, presentations or proposals, enhancing their impact. NIH 3D also offers an open, community-driven portal to download, share and create bioscientific and medical 3D models for 3D printing and interactive 3D visualization, including virtual and augmented reality. Access the free collections here: NIH Bio Art Graphics and NIH 3D.

Upcoming Funding Opportunities

Please refer to OVPR’s Tracking Federal Changes 2025 page 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

Research

Office of Research

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Mon, 03/31/2025 - 14:19

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

Reconstructing a life through letters

stuxbury — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 15:13:37 +0000

Reconstructing a life through letters stuxbury Mon, 03/17/2025 - 11:13

Surrounded by nearly 1,000 handwritten letters in an attic, History Professor Anna Müller got a front-row seat to what it was like to live throughout the historic turmoil of the 20th century.

The letters — written by a Polish Jewish woman named Tonia Lechtman — documented wars, prisons and the efforts to rebuild Poland through the eyes of someone who experienced all of these things. The letters included the ways Lechtman’s life was connected to anti-British actions in Palestine during the 1930s, as well as the Spanish Civil War, the Nazi occupation of France, Auschwitz, the Cold War and more.

“Tonia just tried to live day to day, just like you and me. She was an ordinary person. But the world around her was not ordinary. It was collapsing. Even through adversity, she made decisions influenced by kindness and care,” says Müller, recalling that Lechtman, who lived from 1918 to 1996, helped reconnect war orphans with surviving family members

After nearly a decade working with Lechtman’s children, reading the letters from the attic and tracing the government paper trail Lechtman left behind, Müller documented Lechtman’s life in her most recent book, “An Ordinary Life? The Journeys of Tonia Lechtman.” In it, Müller follows Lechtman’s life through multiple countries — Poland, Palestine, Spain, France, Germany, Switzerland and Israel — during some of the most pivotal and cataclysmal decades of the 20th century.

The book cover for "An Ordinary Life? The Journeys of Tonia Lechtman"

“In most of those places, she lived on the margins of society,” Müller says. “She wanted a better world than the one she saw around her. She wanted to create a safe space for her small children. She wanted to do what she could to help others. I think many of us can identify with that.”

However, Lechtman’s efforts came at a personal cost. “Tonia’s decisions, along with her identity, got her followed by governments, imprisoned and tortured,” says Müller, who shares that Lechtman identified as a Jewish woman, feminist, communist, refugee and migrant. “Tonia lived into her 70s and later reflected on if the struggle was worth it. She never said it wasn't.”

Born in Lodz, Poland, Lechtman moved to Palestine with her parents in the 1930s as a teen because of rising antisemitism in Poland. In Palestine, when Lechtman was aged about 19, she advocated for Palestinians, who were displaced due to immigration waves — and she was imprisoned and later exiled by the British, who controlled the land at the time.

With a man she met and married in Palestine, Lechtman relocated to France in 1937. Her husband then left to join the Spanish Civil War, leaving her with two young children. After the Nazis occupied Paris in 1940, Lechtman was sent to Nexon, a French internment camp near Limoges. She was rounded up for transport to Auschwitz in 1942. But a June 15, 1942 memorandum from SS Captain Theodor Dannecker said children under 16 should be excluded from the Final Solution. And Lechtman had two. “From my research, there isn't a more direct answer on why Tonia eluded Auschwitz, but we know she was excluded from being sent there,” Müller says.

Lechtman’s husband, Sioma, was sent to Auschwitz after fighting on the losing side during the Spanish Civil War. He died there. After Lechtman’s release from the Nexon internment camp, she fled to Switzerland as a refugee in 1942 and returned to her homeland of Poland in 1946 to help rebuild the country.

Tonia and Sioma Lechtman, circa 1937

Once back in Poland, Lechtman was impacted by the Cold War, Müller says. Suspicious of American influences, the Soviet-controlled Polish government imprisoned Lechtman from 1949 to 1954 because of the American ties she made through her humanitarian work. For example, Lechtman helped set up a hospital in southern Poland with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Aid.

“Even when she made it back to her homeland, dictatorships continued to deprive her of freedom. While in that prison, she was severely beaten, lost all of her teeth and, after prison, she was subjected to electroshock therapy for mental health treatment,” Müller says. “In a letter Tonia wrote after she got out, she said that she didn’t regret the choices that she made.” She stayed in Poland to support her country following her release until 1971, when Lechtman moved to Israel to be closer to her grandchildren and daughter, Vera, who relocated there as an adult. During that time, Poland was experiencing another wave of antisemitism.

“It’s incredible what Tonia lived through,” Müller says. “Even after she was released from prison, she maintained this calm, positive outlook and talked about helping people in her letters. She kept saying that it was going to be OK.”

Müller, who is from Poland, learned about Lechtman in 2010 while doing research about women in Polish prisons. One of the former female prisoners Müller spoke with for that research work mentioned Lechtman and Müller wanted to learn more about her.

Müller knew that Lechtman had died, but she reached out to Lechtman’s children. During a conversation with Lechtman’s daughter Vera, Müller learned there were letters in Vera’s attic written by her mother that spanned more than 50 years. The first one was written when she was a child, around age 8, while vacationing in Poland. Letters continued throughout her life, on average of three or four a month. They were from prisons, the Swiss refugee camp, the French internment camp and more.

Müller says the source material drew her into the project. But getting to know Lechtman through the letters — which were written in Polish, French, German and Hebrew — encouraged her to write the book.

“We often hear interesting family stories during historic times that were passed down, but we often don’t have documentation to back them up,” Müller says. “Famous people are written about more because their lives are documented in the news or very often they write their histories themselves. Ordinary people usually don’t have that, even when things are extraordinary. However, in this case, because all these letters were saved, I was able to connect the dots and reconstruct her story.”

Now Lechtman’s life, which was once remembered through family stories and letters in an attic, is out there for the world to read.

Interested in learning more about Müller’s book or having her speak at an event regarding her research? Contact Müller here.

Story by Sarah Tuxbury

Faculty Research

College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters

Off

Mon, 03/17/2025 - 15:11

History Professor Anna Müller read through handwritten letters that spanned 50-plus years and several countries to share the story of an ordinary woman who lived during an extraordinary time.

History Professor Anna Müller documented Tonia Lechtman’s life in Müller most recent book, “An Ordinary Life? The Journeys of Tonia Lechtman.” Photo by Sarah Tuxbury