The U-M Department of Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences has received $5.1 million funding for three projects to advance nuclear technology. 

The department is also collaborating on three more of the 74 projects that the U.S. Department of Energy is supporting with a total of $61 million. 

Smaller, robust heat exchangers

The biggest project U-M leads—funded with $4 million from the Integrated Research Projects program—is focused on compact heat exchangers, which would transfer heat from a nuclear reactor to the systems that use the heat directly or convert it to electricity. They are much smaller and thus less expensive than traditional designs.

Diffusion bonding, the process used to create compact heat exchangers, involves stacking grooved plates and pressing them together, causing the grooves to form channels. This new manufacturing technique creates a large number of small channels, which maximize the contact between the metal and the heated fluid, allowing more heat to pass through than in conventional heat exchangers.

However, high temperatures weaken the bonds between plates, limiting the heat exchangers to a lower temperature and eliminating the gains made by making them small. This project’s goal is to improve the knowledge of the bonding process to enable strong bonds at high temperatures.

“By bringing together the top experts from around the country, the research from this project will improve our ability to make lower-cost and efficient heat exchangers that will decrease the overall costs associated with nuclear energy,” said Todd Allen, principal investigator of the project and the Glenn F. and Gladys H. Knoll Department Chair of Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences. 

Another U-M contributor is Fei Gao, professor of nuclear engineering and radiological sciences. The project includes collaborators at the University of Wisconsin, Idaho National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, Electric Power Research Institute and engineering firm MPR.

Better reactor physics modeling

Funded with $600,000 by the Nuclear Energy University Partnerships program, Brendan Kochunas, U-M assistant professor of nuclear engineering and radiological sciences, will lead an effort to speed up the modeling of neutron physics for the software tools developed under the Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation program. 

Determining the distribution of neutrons in a reactor is critical to understanding the energy output, including how to ramp it up and how to shut it down. 

Kochunas and his team will focus on developing new simulation methods that can be applied to advanced nuclear technologies based on SPn theory. The renewed interest in the almost 60-year-old SPn method comes in part from recent theoretical breakthroughs that improve the method’s accuracy.

“lt is humbling, and I feel grateful for this opportunity to lead an outstanding team of researchers in developing the next generation of SPn methods,” Kochunas said.

If successful, the new methods could substantially reduce advanced reactor design cycle times and lead to safer designs. Other U-M contributors are Brian Kiedrowski, associate professor of nuclear engineering and radiological sciences, and Krishna Garikipati, professor of mechanical engineering and mathematics. The project includes collaborators at the Argonne National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Naval Nuclear Laboratory.

Understanding how reactor components degrade

Funded with $500,000 from the Nuclear Energy University Partnerships program, professor emeritus Gary Was and associate professor Kevin Field, both of nuclear engineering and radiological sciences, lead a study of how radiation damage evolves through creep, which can shorten the lifespan of a nuclear power plant by potentially affecting all components of a nuclear reactor’s core. 

Coupled with heat and neutron radiation in the reactor core, the mechanical stress causes metal components to slowly deform by a process known as creep. Because of these contributing factors, creep is extremely difficult to assess, and traditional testing cannot assess them independently. This project will use ion beam experiments to develop an understanding of how each individual factor affects creep, which will provide guidelines for the development of creep-resistant alloys.

“Thermal and irradiation creep are deformation mechanisms that can limit the long-term sustained operation of a nuclear power plant,” Was said. “However, traditional irradiation creep testing using neutron beams involves high costs and long lead times.”

The advantage of ion beams is that they can produce radiation damage much faster, and with additional computer modeling and simulation, they enable industry to predict when and how creep damage will progress. While data exists to make these predictions about radiation creep for current reactors, this project will produce both data and an understanding of radiation creep that is applicable to advanced reactor applications, for which the data is largely absent. 

Other U-M contributors on this work are Fei Gao, professor of nuclear engineering and radiological sciences, and Priyam Patki, a former U-M postdoctoral research fellow and current process engineer at Intel Corp.

Award announcements: 

• ​Advancing Diffusion Bonding for Compact Heat Exchangers
• Fast and Rigorous Methods for Multiphysics SPn Transport in Advanced Reactors
• Accelerated irradiation creep testing coupled with self-adaptive accelerated molecular dynamics simulations for scalability analysis

David Zinn is a man on a mission—a mission to, via his chalk art demonstrations, inspire others to want to make their own chalk art.

“Which is why I like chalk art to begin with, because it is possibly the simplest tool you could ever make art work with, and it’s one which almost everyone has likely used at some point in their lives—ideally as kids, the age at which we are most confident about our own ability to make art,” Zinn said.

Zinn’s whimsical chalk art can be seen around the world, around Ann Arbor and on demonstration at the Ann Arbor Art Fair next week. 

“The meaning of art in this case isn’t just what you can buy and hang on your wall, but it’s what you can create in your own space, on your own time and in your own way,” Zinn said.

By the end of each demonstration at the fair, Zinn will have created a new character interacting with the streetscape of the city. And by the end of each day, visitors will have contributed their own doodles to create a colorful, dusty tapestry unique to the art fair, never to be seen again come the next rainfall.

Did Zinn study art during his time at the University of Michigan? No. But the “first domino” that led to what the artist does now did fall while he was living at East Quad. 

“East Quad being an old, beloved building, had chalkboards on the fronts of the dorm room doors that had been there since the ’40s and did not work as chalk boards, but more like ancient pieces of slate you couldn’t write on,” Zinn said. “In the middle of the night my junior year I went out and found a roll of chalkboard surface contact paper. … I ended up covering my entire door with this chalkboard surface.” 

There was a 10-to-15 year gap between that and Zinn actually taking his art to the sidewalks, but it is why he had chalk in his house when he first had the idea to go outside and draw on that fateful sunny day.

“Chalk the Walk” will take place 1-3 p.m. July 21 and July 23 at Liberty Street and Fifth Avenue. Sidewalk chalk will be available so that fairgoers can join in on the creativity and add their own mark on this year’s Ann Arbor Art Fair.

The award extends the ANES, a widely used research data series at the U-M Institute for Social Research and preeminent source for studying public opinion, political participation, representation, accountability and democracy.

“The 2024 elections will occur at a moment of great uncertainty and change in American politics,” said Nicholas Valentino, research professor at ISR and professor of political science and communication and media. 

“Long-standing political norms involving executive power, electoral legitimacy and the rule of law, as well as societal norms such as the proper balance of public health advice with individual freedom, are under challenge. What does the public make of these disruptions? The 2024 ANES will help scholars from multiple disciplines answer this question.”

In addition to Valentino, the project’s scientific leadership team includes Shanto Iyengar of Stanford University, D. Sunshine Hillygus of Duke University and Daron Shaw of the University of Texas. 

After a nationwide competition, U-M’s Survey Research Center at ISR was selected to conduct the study’s data collection. The multi-university research team will be advised by an advisory board made up of a diverse group of 17 top public opinion scholars from around the country.

Due to its longevity, the ANES dataset provides researchers a unique opportunity to observe and document stability and change over time, Valentino said. The 2024 study will include key questions asked since the study’s inception in 1948, alongside new questions on topics such as public health, democratic norms and electoral legitimacy.

The centerpiece of the study will be the first eight-year panel in the history of the time series, connecting interviews with the same individuals from 2016, 2020 and 2024. Another innovation will be a social media study connecting individual survey responses to social media activity during the election, and a new survey of respondents during the final election certification process in January 2025. 

The 2024 ANES will also collaborate with prominent research projects such as the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and the General Social Survey, linking detailed information about social demographic conditions to political attitudes and behavior. This will be in addition to the standard, large number of interviews from new respondents in order to provide the highest data quality available about the 2024 election itself. 

The ANES investigators will also invite the public and scholarly community to submit ideas for new questions on important topics that are sure to arise.

The ANES is an acknowledged leader in data quality in the field of survey research. The 2024 ANES will use rigorous, modern research methods to survey a representative sample of eligible voters both before and after the 2024 election, using a combination of in-person, online, video and postal service interviewing. Special effort will be made to include traditionally underrepresented groups.

“The 2024 ANES includes several exciting methodological innovations. The 2016-24 reinterviews of the same respondents will permit systematic modeling of opinion dynamics over a period of extreme volatility,” Iyengar said. “These data will also open entirely new avenues of research into the spread of misinformation, support for political violence and threats to the legitimacy of our electoral institutions.”

ANES provides its data on its website as a free public good for the use of scholars, students, policymakers, journalists and all other interested persons in the U.S. and worldwide. ANES data have been used in thousands of journal articles, books, media presentations and dissertations. As part of the new grant, the 2024 team will make the data even more accessible by adding to the analysis and visualization tools on the ANES website.

“We hope the results will inform discussions about the integration of cost-effective cessation approaches for smokers receiving lung cancer screening,” said lead author Pianpian Cao, a research fellow at the U-M School of Public Health’s Department of Epidemiology.

Cao and colleagues used data from a national, randomized trial conducted by investigators at the Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center to evaluate the short- and long-term societal cost-effectiveness of interventions, including phone counseling with nicotine replacement therapy among individuals receiving lung cancer screenings. They used a well-established model developed by the Cancer Intervention and Surveillance Modeling Network to project the lifetime impact of the program to conduct an economic analysis of these cessation interventions. 

According to the researchers, the cost for delivery of the programs was $380 and $144 per person for the eight-week and three-week protocol, respectively, while quit rates were 7.14% and 5.96%. They also found differences in “quality-adjusted life-years” or QALYs, a measure of the value of health outcomes often used in economic evaluations of health interventions.  

While the three-week program was less expensive per person than the eight-week approach, the latter was most cost-effective, with an incremental cost-effectiveness ratio of $4,029 per quality-adjusted life-year vs. the three-week program.

Investigators say this is the first study to conduct an economic evaluation of a large, national clinical trial of a telephone counseling intervention for smokers at the time of lung cancer screening and to use that data to project lifetime costs and effects.  

According to early recommendations by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, about 8 million people in the United States are eligible for screening and about half of those are current smokers. The task force recently upgraded the recommendations, but data to guide the implementation of smoking cessation programs is still limited.

“Screening can be a teachable moment, providing the opportunity to motivate individuals who currently smoke to quit, but until now the data to guide implementation of smoking cessation programs in lung cancer screening settings is limited,” said the study’s senior author Rafael Meza, professor of epidemiology and global public health at U-M’s School of Public Health.

“These results provide important evidence for the value of smoking cessation in the setting of lung cancer screening and underscore the need to maintain reimbursement policies supporting this approach for the millions of screening-eligible smokers in the U.S.” 

Because of the study’s limited scope, the results should be taken as a conservative estimate of the net benefits, the researchers say. The analysis did not include sufficient numbers of racial/ethnic minorities to assess subgroup effects. Also, adherence to lung cancer screenings vary widely by state and race, differences that need to be evaluated in future studies. 

“That being said, the results strongly support implementing telephone counseling and other effective cessation interventions within lung cancer screening,” Cao said.

The study appears in this month’s Journal of the National Cancer Institute. It was supported by the National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health.

Related: Intensive Telephone-Based Cessation Counseling Results in Improved Smoking Quit Rates

The U.S. Senate has confirmed Michael S. Barr, dean of the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, as vice chair for supervision and governor of the Federal Reserve Board. Barr was nominated for the role by President Biden in May.

In the role, which was created as part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, Barr will be responsible for developing policy recommendations for the Federal Reserve Board and for overseeing the supervision and regulation of the largest U.S. financial institutions. 

Barr was confirmed with strong bipartisan support, with two-thirds of the U.S. Senate voting in support of his nomination. Earlier, he had been reported out of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs on a bipartisan basis by a vote of 17-7, with all Democrats, led by Chairman Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), voting yes, as well as five Republicans, including Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), the ranking minority member on the committee. 

Barr’s term as the Fed’s vice chairman of supervision runs for four years, and his term on the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors runs through 2032.

Barr is the Joan and Sanford Weill Dean of the Ford School, the Frank Murphy Collegiate Professor of Public Policy, the Roy F. and Jean Humphrey Proffitt Professor of Law at the Law School, and founder and faculty director of U-M’s Center on Finance, Law & Policy. At the Law School, he taught financial regulation and international finance, and co-founded the International Transactions Clinic and the Detroit Neighborhood Entrepreneurs Project.

Barr served in President Barack Obama’s administration as the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s assistant secretary for financial institutions, and was a key architect of Dodd-Frank. 

During the Clinton administration, he served as Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin’s special assistant, as deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury, as special adviser to President Bill Clinton, and as a special adviser and counselor on the policy planning staff at the U.S. Department of State.

Barr was a law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter, and previously to Pierre Leval, then a judge of the Southern District of New York. He received his law degree from Yale University; a master’s degree in international relations as a Rhodes Scholar from Magdalen College, Oxford University; and a bachelor’s degree, summa cum laude, with honors in history, from Yale.

Barr will take an unpaid leave of absence from the University of Michigan, retaining his faculty appointments in public policy and law, and planning to return to the faculty after serving his term on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.

U-M Provost Laurie McCauley will name an interim dean for the Ford School, to serve while the university conducts a search for the new dean.

Read Barr’s letter to the Ford School community about his first term as dean, from the spring 2022 issue of State & Hill.

Watch Barr’s May 2022 nomination hearing before the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. 

Santa J. Ono, an accomplished biomedical researcher and the president and vice chancellor of the University of British Columbia, has been named the 15th president of the University of Michigan.

The Board of Regents voted unanimously to appoint Ono during a special meeting July 13 in Ann Arbor. Ono, who previously served as the president of the University of Cincinnati and senior vice provost and deputy to the provost at Emory University, will officially step into the U-M role Oct. 13. 

“On behalf of all of us seated here and the entire University of Michigan community, here and around the globe, I’d like to extend my warmest welcome to Dr. Santa Ono and his wife, Wendy, who has joined him today,” said Paul Brown, chair of the Board of Regents, during the special meeting. 

“We look forward to meeting your daughters Sarah and Juliana, and son-in-law David, very soon. We are thrilled and honored to have you here today and to welcome all of you to the University of Michigan family. I know you will continue to help us serve the public good.”

Ono, 59, is an experienced vision researcher whose pioneering work in experimental medicine focuses on the immune system and eye disease. His track record of leadership at universities in the United States and Canada includes prioritizing sustainability efforts, strong advocacy for mental health issues and an open communication style.

He also has focused on accessibility and affordability in higher education through service in organizations such as the Posse Foundation, leadership of the Urban Health Initiative of the Coalition of Urban Serving Universities and launching new programs at the universities he has served. At UBC, he led substantial efforts focused on truth and reconciliation for indigenous groups and others.

Ono is the leader of the University Climate Change Coalition, a network that connects 23 of the world’s leading research universities and university systems committed to accelerating climate action. Times Higher Education ranked UBC among the top seven universities in the world in its “Impact Rankings” in each of the past four years for taking urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts. 

Ono also serves as chair of the U15 Group of Canadian Research Universities, a collective of research-intensive institutions similar to the Association of American Universities.

“The University of Michigan is recognized worldwide as being at the pinnacle of public higher education,” he said. “It is a singular honor to be chosen to lead such an extraordinary institution. 

“I look forward to embracing the university community and supporting their education, scholarship, innovation and service. And I look forward to joining Michigan’s 600,000 alumni in cheering for the Wolverines.” 

Ono, who is of Japanese heritage, is the first Asian American to lead U-M. He was born in Vancouver and grew up in Pennsylvania and Maryland, and earned a bachelor’s degree in biological science at the University of Chicago and a doctorate in experimental medicine from McGill University in Montreal. 

He has taught at Johns Hopkins University, Harvard University and University College London. While at the University of Cincinnati, he also served as a professor of pediatrics at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.

Ono is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, National Academy of Inventors and Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars. He also is a recipient of the Reginald Wilson Diversity Leadership Award from the American Council on Education. Earlier this year, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Ono’s appointment followed a comprehensive search that began in February. A presidential search committee that included students, faculty, staff, alumni and regents worked with executive search firm Isaacson, Miller to identify and review candidates.

The committee hosted seven public listening sessions earlier this year to collect input from members of the community about their hopes and expectations for a new president. An online survey collected additional thoughts from more than 1,000 respondents. 

“Several clear and consistent themes emerged in regard to what our community wanted in a new leader,” said Regent Denise Ilitch, who with Regent Sarah Hubbard co-chaired the search committee to select the new president. “Someone who could build trust, lead with integrity and actively engage the full range of Michigan’s constituencies. Someone who had strong emotional intelligence and communication and listening skills.

“It is readily apparent to me after getting to know Dr. Ono and learning about his experiences as a university administrator, that he is the right person to lead the University of Michigan at this moment in time.”

Under the Michigan constitution, the board is responsible for electing the university president.

“We listened. We heard you,” said Hubbard, thanking members of the U-M community who shared input during the search process. “I’m confident that the finalist seated before us today is the right choice for the University of Michigan.”

Ono’s five-year term as president will begin Oct. 13. He succeeds Mary Sue Coleman, who has been serving on an interim basis since the board removed former president Mark Schlissel on Jan. 15. She will continue in the role until Ono begins. Coleman led the university as its 13th president from 2002 to 2014.

Ono will receive a base salary of $975,000, subject to annual increases at the Board of Regents’ discretion, and $350,000 in deferred compensation starting after the first year. He also will receive regular university benefits and supplemental contributions to a retirement plan, housing in the President’s House, an expense allowance, and use of an automobile and a driver, all in accordance with university policies.

As president, Ono is responsible for the general oversight of the university’s teaching and research programs, as well as the libraries, museums and other supporting services. His duties also include overseeing the general welfare of the faculty and staff, health and order among students, and the university’s financial stability.

The university’s main campus in Ann Arbor includes 19 schools and colleges. There are also regional campuses in Dearborn and Flint, and a nationally ranked health system, Michigan Medicine. The university also boasts a world-renowned intercollegiate athletics program.

As one of the nation’s top public universities, U-M has been a leader in research, learning and teaching for more than 200 years. With the highest research volume of all public universities in the country, U-M is advancing new solutions and knowledge in areas ranging from the COVID-19 pandemic to driverless vehicle technology, social justice and carbon neutrality.

Its alumni body is one of the largest in the world and includes a U.S. president, scientists, actors, astronauts and inventors.

“In every sphere of human endeavor you will find Michigan graduates among the leaders and best,” Ono said. “I look forward to connecting with alumni around the world because I view them as an integral part of the university community; part of our family.”

Ono is married to Wendy Yip, who trained as an immunologist at McGill and as a lawyer at Boston University. They have two daughters, Juliana and Sarah.

EXPERTS ADVISORY

NASA today unveiled a batch of striking images from distant galaxies from the powerful, $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope that will allow humanity to see space as it never has before.

University of Michigan experts have been working for and expecting this development, and are available to discuss.

Emily Rauscher, associate professor of astronomy, specializes in 3D modeling of the atmospheres of exoplanets, or planets outside of our solar system. 

“As I watched these new data from JWST being revealed, I’m really struck by just how momentous the beginning of this mission is,” she said. “Across so many topics in astronomy, we are already seeing JWST providing profound new insights, and this is going to quickly become the new regular. 

“I’m not sure I have really adjusted my mindset to how much of a change these data will make to what we know in astronomy, but also even how we do astronomy. It’s almost too much information. And seeing classic Hubble Space Telescope images compared next to new JWST ones? How can this mission not inspire a whole new generation of astronomers? I can’t wait to meet them.”

Contact: erausche@umich.edu 

Michael Meyer is a professor of astronomy. As a postdoctoral researcher in 1997, he began working on a committee tasked with dreaming up cutting-edge scientific applications of what was then called the Next Generation Space Telescope.

“These first data from JWST are stunning,” he said. “With its extraordinary infrared sensitivity in space, JWST can pierce through obscuring dust, detect light from some of the coolest objects known, and trace light from stars in galaxies as they form and evolve from the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang to today.  

“These first images and spectra will enable astronomers to study star birth, star death, galaxy formation from the first galaxies, across cosmic time, and even planets around nearby stars. They represent the start of a new era, one that astronomers have been waiting many years for, and inviting a new generation of astronomers to help make great discoveries with this incredible new facility.”

Contact: mrmeyer@umich.edu

Larissa Markwardt, a graduate student in astronomy, will use JWST to observe and characterize the physical properties of Trojan asteroids, which astronomers call the fossils of our solar system. 

“While much of the science being done with JWST focuses on the distant edge of our universe, it will also revolutionize how we study objects in our own cosmic backyard,” she said. “People think that just because the solar system is nearby, we understand everything about it, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. 

“There are lots of tiny rocks in our solar system that are so small and faint they can only be studied with JWST. Understanding what these tiny rocks are like and what they’re made of is key to understanding how the much larger planets formed and what the early solar system was like.

“JWST is this generation’s great space-based observatory. It is already showing us the immense and infinite beauty of space in a way that not even the Hubble Space Telescope could. Seeing these images reminds me of when I fell in love with astronomy, and I hope that they will inspire young scientists to join this wonderful field, too.”

Contact: lmmarkwa@aishg

Buddy Stark, planetarium manager at the U-M Museum of Natural History, looks to the future of what additional data the JWST could collect.

“While the exoplanet spectrum image isn’t as visually appealing as the others, it also makes a profound statement for the JWST,” he said. “The idea that it confirmed the spectral signature of water in the atmosphere of an exoplanet so quickly and compellingly gives me a lot of excitement of what’s to come once it has had years to collect more data.”

Contact: starkbud@umich.edu 

Flor Sanchez, a student at Holland High School, described her anxiety about talking to the college adviser.

“Honestly, the first thoughts I had about college … it was impossible. The word impossible was in my mind, hearing about how much it cost, about the process. It’s a long process. Getting accepted, doing essays for me was impossible,” she said.

And then Sanchez met Freddie De La Rosa, who was once very much like her—a student unsure about if college was for him. He’s working with Holland students through a partnership with the University of Michigan where he’s part of the Michigan College Advising Corps program.

The MCAC helps high school students across the state determine and pursue their post-high school academic goals. They do this through training—and providing guidance to—a team of advisers, all recent college graduates, who work full time in schools across the state, all at U-M’s expense. 

The program, started in 2010, has helped more than 20,000 students throughout the state select and apply for colleges and scholarships.

“He helped me open doors. Without Mr. De La Rosa, I couldn’t have done anything to go to college and thanks to him, I had the confidence to keep going,” said Sanchez, who plans to attend Kendall College of Art and Design of Ferris State University in Grand Rapids to learn illustration and printmaking.

“I even saw there were opportunities that I never really had in my life. So I changed my mind and I said, ‘OK, it is possible, and if these people are helping me it is because they see something in me, and now I have to see it.'”

After four weeks of training over the summer, the MCAC advisers work in high schools across the state, anywhere from 15 minutes to 3 hours away. They live in those communities and are typically involved with the program for a year or two.

Along with Holland, the program’s 97 advisers work with students in 25 schools, including Battle Creek Central High School, Benton Harbor High School, César Chávez Academy High School, Chandler Park Academy High School, Flint Southwestern Classical Academy, Muskegon High School and Port Huron High School.

They work primarily with senior students, sometimes juniors, and determine what the next chapter could be for those students—community college, a university, potentially U-M.

And the impact over the past decade has impressed Bob Zwiers, a teacher at Holland High School. 

“I would guess we have hundreds of our kids that wouldn’t have gone to college, wouldn’t have reached their fullest potential without this program,” he said. “I think it’s incredible that the University of Michigan is paying for this program to help kids get into any college.”

And De La Rosa was one of those students and counted Zwiers as a teacher and mentor.

“So my goal to come back to Holland was definitely the fact that Holland was very influential in me getting to the University of Michigan through the scholarships, through the support of my high school and the community,” De La Rosa said. “I was able to get into the University of Michigan, and I wanted to give that same opportunity to students.”

De La Rosa figured he’s met with 90% of the seniors at Holland High to support them through whatever their next steps may be—whether that’s college, the military or the workforce.

Michael Turner, associate director of K-12 partnerships for the Center for Educational Outreach and program manager for the Michigan College Advising Corps, stresses that the program isn’t a recruiting tool for U-M.

“It’s really about outreach and making sure things are equitable,” he said. “So that students, no matter what their background, are able to map out some sort of strategy.”

‘Getting the funds necessary’

A critical piece of the puzzle for many students who strive to attend college is how to find scholarships, grants and other financial aid. And that’s a specialty of the Michigan College Advising Corps.

Tiffini Hollins, a school counselor at Battle Creek Central High, said the U-M trained advisers have been a tremendous help to her and the students and she’s grateful for the partnership. 

“The challenge with students is the knowledge and the equity and the opportunity to have access to college scholarship opportunities,” she said. “And for us, in my opinion, the Michigan College Advising Program solves that program.”

Noah Hollander, executive principal at Battle Creek Central, said the school serves an under-resourced population and a big barrier that students face when contemplating college is how they will pay for it. 

Partnering with U-M has also brought a greater sense of credibility to the school’s advising efforts, he said. 

Even more powerful for individual students is the self-confidence they gain from working with someone like De La Rosa or Charlotte Pierce, the MCAC adviser in Battle Creek.

“There’s that expectation of excellence and then being able to have access to a school that many of our kids never even thought was going to be a thing for them,” Hollander said. “So understanding that there’s a connection point in our building to the University of Michigan, that is powerful.”

“How do I make that dream a reality? By getting you the funds necessary to help you through school,” he said. “So having that support system in the school that they can access that says, ‘I will walk you through the process of figuring out how you make this financially possible’ is incredible.”

Pierce said that with a lack of resources and knowledge about different educational and career paths, students are often uncertain about where to turn.

“All of these students are capable of moving on to the next step after high school, but they just don’t realize it yet,” she said.

One of her students, Kameilah Mullen, said the advising made students more confident about their futures. At first, she didn’t think higher education was something for her. Neither of her parents finished high school, she said. 

But with Pierce’s guidance, she got a spot at Jackson State University in Mississippi to study business administration.

“She was introducing opportunities to me, giving me more confidence,” Mullen said. “I’ve dealt with confidence issues for a long time. But hearing that from a second person, instilling that into me was like ‘OK, maybe I can do this.'”

As scientists probe the question of how cells remember what kind of cells they are supposed to be, or their genetic lineage, it’s important to understand how cells express different genes without changing the DNA sequence itself. 

But studying this subject is difficult: Researchers can purify the proteins that drive genetic expression, put them in a test tube and watch them bind. But doing so inside the nucleus of cells, their native environment, has been so far impossible.

Now, a team of researchers at three University of Michigan labs have been able to track how a protein binds to its chromatin substrate within a living cell by establishing a collaboration that combines state-of-the-art ultra high-resolution imaging, synthetic protein design and computational modeling. Their results are published in Science Advances.

“The biological question that we’re asking is, ‘How do cells actually remember past experiences? And how do these experiences also lead to cells establishing distinct identities, as it happens in the case of the human body where you have lineages of cells that form neurons, or blood cells, or brain cells, and all actually maintain their identities for many generations,'” said lead author Kaushik Ragunathan, assistant professor of biological chemistry at the U-M Medical School.

“An example I like to think about is that if you chop off your nose, you don’t get a hand growing there, even though the genome in your nose and the genome in your hand are exactly the same.” 

Cells control how and which genes are expressed from a copy of the DNA sequence held within each cell, despite that sequence being the same across all cells in the body. One way they control expression is by changing how tightly the DNA is packaged within the nucleus using proteins called “histones.” Histones can be modified through the addition of small chemical tags that regulate how tightly the DNA is wound around them and thus whether the genes can be expressed.

Proteins that have the ability to read, write and erase these histone tags explore the DNA within the nucleus of the cell very rapidly—on the order of milliseconds, according to Ragunathan. Ultimately, all this epigenetic information needs to be inherited across generations, but the recognition of these tags is a complicated process that involves chromatin binding and proteins meeting and interacting with each other amidst the chaos of all other possible competing interactions within the cell. 

Being able to understand each step of the process—and therefore enabling control of how the epigenetic information is inherited—intrigued co-author Julie Biteen, professor of chemistry and biophysics.

Biteen uses single-molecule fluorescence imaging to track individual proteins inside cells. Her lab can see where these proteins are relative to the chromatin, and   Ragunathan’s expertise is in the molecular mechanisms underpinning how histone modifications and histone-binding proteins interact. These two worlds needed to come together so that the biochemistry of what happens in a test tube outside of cells could be tested to figure out what happens inside of them. 

“The timing of this process is critically important to ensure that the right genes are silenced at the right place and at the right time,” Biteen said. “What hooked me on this project is that in vitro—in a test tube—you can purify two proteins, watch them bind and see how good that binding is, or what is the affinity for one another. That tells you what can happen in the cells, but not what does happen in the cells.”

Biteen and Ragunathan worked with Peter Freddolino, associate professor of biological chemistry, and computational medicine and bioinformatics at the U-M Medical School, to combine computer modeling with their experimental results.

“This is really where our collaboration becomes really powerful,” Biteen said. “On one hand, seeing molecules is very helpful and knowing how fast the molecules move helps a lot in terms of understanding what is possible inside the cell, but here we could take a leap forward by perturbing the system even in unnatural ways in order to understand what these different motions of molecules in the cell actually mean.”

While epigenetic marks are tremendously important for maintaining different tissues in complex organisms like humans, they also play an important role in regulating genes of single-celled organisms such as yeast. The team focused on a type of HP1 protein in yeast cells called Swi6. This family of proteins binds to a specific type of histone modifications in the cell to enforce gene silencing. By integrating fluorescent labels with Swi6, Bitee’’s lab watched Swi6 move inside the cell’s nucleus. 

While Swi6 searches for the correct binding site on DNA, it moves quickly, Biteen said. When it finds its target, it slows down significantly. The movement of a protein within the cell is akin to gears in a car and things can move at different speeds based on whom proteins interact with.

“From these spaghetti tracks that we get inside the cell, we then figure out how much time they are spending searching and how much of the time they are spending bound,” Biteen said. “The amount of time they spend not moving tells us about how strongly they’re interacting and their biochemical properties.”

While Biteen’s lab can measure movements in the cell on the scale of tens of milliseconds, much of the biochemistry happening in the cell is happening even faster, she said. Freddolino took this experimental information and developed models to estimate the ability of the Swi6 proteins to jump between the binding states that were identified in experiments. 

Freddolino’s modeling took into account the experimental measurements and the possible biochemical properties, which includes how the Swi6 molecules interact in the cell. These interactions include molecules that freely float in the solution of the cell, molecules that have bound to DNA, and molecules that are “holding hands” with each other, he said.

“My lab wanted to come up with a more fine-grained model that estimated what was the most likely set of molecular states of the proteins and their ability to jump between those states, that would then give rise to the imaging data that Biteen’s lab created,” Freddolino said. 

“Having this numerical model allows us to do the computational experiments of what happens if the protein binding is twice as fast as we think. What if it’s 10 times as fast as we think? Or 10 times slower? Could that still give rise to the data? Very happily, in this case, we were able to show that the relevant processes were really being captured in the fluorescence microscopy.”

After identifying the binding properties of natural Swi6, the researchers tested their findings by redesigning Swi6 from its components to see whether they could replicate some of its biochemical properties, Ragunathan said. This allowed the researchers to determine that the imaging and modeling conducted in the first part of the paper reflects how the protein was binding in its native environment.

“Can we do what nature did over the course of millions of years and make a protein that in many ways has properties similar to that of Swi6 in cells?” Ragunathan said. “In vivo biochemistry, which is what we’ve decided to call this, was not something that was ever thought to be possible inside living cells, but we have shown this is entirely feasible by using imaging as a modality. We are using this project as a foundation in order to understand how these epigenetic states can be established and maintained across generations.” 

Study: How do managers evaluate individual contributions to team production? A theory and empirical test

How can supervisors evaluate individual performance when a worker is part of a team?

That question has interested economists for years, but a new study by Ross School of Business professor Jose Uribe provides an answer: Managers instinctively pay attention to changes in team performance based on which team members are present on any given day.

“Theoretically, there’s a longstanding problem in economics about how you evaluate individuals when all you see is the product of their team work,” said Uribe, assistant professor of management and organizations. “There’s a classic paper, Production, Information Costs, and Economic Organization, that talks about something as simple as two people moving cargo onto a truck. Their supervisor might be able to see how much has been loaded at the end of the day, but it’s going to be very hard to have a precise estimate of exactly how much each person helped with that task. That’s puzzled academics for quite a while.”

Working with a Midwestern manufacturing company that keeps detailed productivity data, Uribe and his coauthors developed and tested a theory: Managers pay attention to how a team’s performance varies when a particular member is present or absent, and they use that information to rate individuals apart from their teams.

“This is a place that keeps their production lines humming 24/7, and often people have to switch teams,” Uribe said. “They do rotations for learning purposes, and sometimes people are absent and you’ve got to pull somebody in from another line.”

This type of setup provides managers an opportunity to see whether productivity falls or rises when any given team member is present or absent. 

“Supervisors actually pay attention to how the work is done and who is doing the work, and they’re very attuned to nuances about shifts in team membership,” Uribe said. 

The researchers then tested the managers’ ability to accurately gauge the effects of changes in team membership. They created a measure of individual presence and team productivity, then compared those figures to workers’ performance evaluations.

With some caveats, the researchers found that supervisors were quite accurate in separating out individual productivity. 

“Without doing all of this math, the supervisors came up with a not perfectly accurate, but pretty accurate, estimate of who’s pulling their weight in the team,” Uribe said.

The supervisors were most accurate in rating performance of workers who had some authority over their team’s performance, and of workers who were rotated among different teams, Uribe said. On the other hand, demographic factors like race and gender did not affect the accuracy of the supervisors’ ratings. 

Uribe said the study suggests a few key takeaways for companies struggling with evaluating individual performance in team settings. 

First, regularly rotating employees among different teams could help clarify differences in individual contributions. 

“When you have a worker who’s always on the same team with the same co-workers, it’s a little more challenging for the manager to understand who’s doing what,” he said. 

This could be particularly useful for lower-authority workers, whose evaluations from supervisors may be less accurate. 

Second, although more rotations can provide more information to separate out individual contributions, there is a potential downside of implementing such a system explicitly. Managers should be aware that workers who know how they are being evaluated might try to “game” the system—for example, by withholding necessary tools from their teammates when they are absent to ensure that productivity falls.

The study—co-authored by Seth Carnahan of the Olin Business School at Washington University, John Meluso of the University of Vermont’s Complex Systems Center, and Jesse Austin-Breneman of the University of Michigan’s Department of Mechanical Engineering—has been accepted for publication in Strategic Management Journal.

Uribe said the researchers’ analysis was specific to a manufacturing setting. He hopes to research the issue further with different types of work, such as information technology or consulting, where productivity is less standardized. 

“It would be wonderful if we could obtain the kind of data that we have about fine-grained production at the team level to understand how this plays out with different types of work,” he said. “If we get into work that is harder to measure, this kind of process is actually more important.”

A new particle detector searching for dark matter has closed in on the region where physicists may detect dark matter—an elusive particle that creates 85% of the mass in the universe—all in its first four months of operation.

Deep below the Black Hills of South Dakota in the Sanford Underground Research Facility, an innovative and uniquely sensitive dark matter detector—The LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) Dark Matter Experiment, led by Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and supported by University of Michigan researchers—has passed a check-out phase of startup operations and delivered first results.

The experiment is performing well and in a study posted online on the LZ website, researchers report that with the initial run, LZ is already the world’s most sensitive dark matter detector. The study will appear on the online preprint archive arXiv.org. This first result covers only a small fraction of the total data to be taken with many leading dark matter and other science results to come.

Unseen, because it does not emit, absorb or scatter light, dark matter’s presence and gravitational pull are nonetheless fundamental to our understanding of the universe. For example, the presence of dark matter shapes the form and movement of galaxies, and it is invoked by researchers to explain what is known about the structure and expansion of the universe. 

“We know that dark matter exists. We see its imprint in the universe; we see how it tracks around stars and galaxies. We see it in the primordial radiation of the Big Bang,” said U-M physicist Bjoern Penning, whose lab has contributed significantly to setting up the detector. “We have the world’s most powerful result already, after just four months, and we’re going to run this detector for another five years. It’s very, very powerful and this bodes well for our ability to detect dark matter.”

Dark matter particles have never actually been detected—but perhaps not for much longer. The countdown may have started with results from LZ’s first 60 “live days” of testing. These data were collected over a three-and-a-half-month span of initial operations beginning at the end of December. This was a period long enough to confirm that all aspects of the detector were functioning well. 

“We’re ready and everything’s looking good,” said Berkeley Lab senior physicist and past LZ spokesperson Kevin Lesko. “It’s a complex detector with many parts to it and they are all functioning well within expectations.” 

The heart of the LZ dark matter detector is comprised of two nested titanium tanks filled with ten tons of very pure liquid xenon and viewed by two arrays of photomultiplier tubes able to detect faint sources of light. The titanium tanks reside in a larger detector system to catch particles that might mimic a dark matter signal.  

“We plan to collect about 20 times more data in the coming years, so we’re only getting started. There’s a lot of science to do and it’s very exciting,” said LZ spokesperson Hugh Lippincott of the University of California Santa Barbara.

The design, manufacturing and installation phases of the LZ detector were led by Berkeley Lab project director Gil Gilchriese in conjunction with an international team of 250 scientists and engineers from more than 35 institutions from the U.S., U.K., Portugal and South Korea. The LZ operations manager is Berkeley Lab’s Simon Fiorucci. Together, the collaboration is hoping to use the instrument to record the first direct evidence of dark matter, the so-called missing mass of the cosmos. 

An underground detector

Tucked away about a mile underground at Sanford Underground Research Facility, or SURF, in Lead, South Dakota, LZ is designed to capture dark matter in the form of weakly interacting massive particles, called WIMPS. The experiment is underground to protect it from cosmic radiation at the surface that could drown out dark matter signals. 

Particle collisions in the xenon produce visible scintillation or flashes of light, which are recorded by the photomultiplier tubes, said Aaron Manalaysay of Berkeley Lab who, as physics coordinator, led the collaboration’s efforts to produce these first physics results.  

“The collaboration worked well together to calibrate and to understand the detector response,” he said. “Considering we just turned it on a few months ago and during COVID restrictions, it is impressive we have such significant results already.” 

The collisions will also knock electrons off xenon atoms, sending them to drift to the top of the chamber under an applied electric field where they produce another flash permitting spatial event reconstruction. The characteristics of the scintillation help determine the types of particles interacting in the xenon.

In order to get a clear picture of these interacting particles, the interior of the detector has to be ultra clean, as free as possible from other particles and radiation, says Penning. Led by U-M physicist Wolfgang Lorenzon and Penning, U-M graduate students and postdoctoral researchers were instrumental in mitigating backgrounds. 

Penning built a detector to mitigate neutrons, the main dark matter background, while U-M students and postdocs, led by Lorenzon, developed a system to remove radioactive particles from the detector. In addition, the U-M team was heavily involved in assembling the detector, which took place to a large extent during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The entire SURF team congratulates the LZ Collaboration in reaching this major milestone. The LZ team has been a wonderful partner and we’re proud to host them at SURF,” said Mike Headley, executive director of SURF Lab.

Fiorucci said the onsite team in South Dakota took excellent care of LZ and deserves special praise at this startup milestone, given that the detector was transported underground late in 2019, just before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. He said with travel severely restricted, only a few LZ scientists could make the trip to help on site.

“I’d like to second the praise for the team at SURF and would also like to express gratitude to the large number of people who provided remote support throughout the construction, commissioning and operations of LZ, many of whom worked full time from their home institutions making sure the experiment would be a success and continue to do so now,” said Tomasz Biesiadzinski of SLAC, the LZ Detector operations manager. 

With confirmation that LZ and its systems are operating successfully, the researchers say it is time for full-scale observations to begin in hopes that a dark matter particle will collide with a xenon atom in the LZ detector very soon. 

The South Dakota Science and Technology Authority, which manages SURF through a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy, secured 80% of the xenon in LZ. Funding came from the South Dakota governor’s office, South Dakota Community Foundation, South Dakota State University Foundation and University of South Dakota Foundation. 

LZ is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science (Office of High Energy Physics) and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science user facility. LZ is also supported by the Science & Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom; the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology; and the Institute for Basic Science, Korea. More than 35 institutions of higher education and advanced research provided support to LZ. The LZ collaboration acknowledges the assistance of the Sanford Underground Research Facility.

The communities formed by human gut microbes can now be predicted more accurately with a new computer model developed in a collaboration between biologists and engineers, led by the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin. 

The making of the model also suggests a route toward scaling from the 25 microbe species explored to the thousands that may be present in human digestive systems.

“Whenever we increase the number of species, we get an exponential increase in the number of possible communities,” said Alfred Hero, the John H. Holland Distinguished University Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan and co-corresponding author of the study in the journal eLife. 

“That’s why it’s so important that we can extrapolate from the data collected on a few hundred communities to predict the behaviors of the millions of communities we haven’t seen.”

While research continues to unveil the multifaceted ways that microbial communities influence human health, probiotics often don’t live up to the hype. We don’t have a good way of predicting how the introduction of one strain will affect the existing community. But machine learning, an approach to artificial intelligence in which algorithms learn to make predictions based on data sets, could help change that.

“Problems of this scale required a complete overhaul in terms of how we model community behavior,” said Mayank Baranwal, adjunct professor of systems and control engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, and co-first author of the study. 

He explained that the new algorithm could map out the entire landscape of 33 million possible communities in minutes, compared to the days to months needed for conventional ecological models.

Microbial Sim Cities

Integral to this major step was Ophelia Venturelli, assistant professor of biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin and co-corresponding author of the study. Venturelli’s lab runs experiments with microbial communities, keeping them in low-oxygen environments that mimic the environment of the mammalian gut. 

Her team created hundreds of different communities with microbes that are prevalent in the human large intestine, emulating the healthy state of the gut microbiome. They then measured how these communities evolved over time and the concentrations of key health-relevant metabolites, or chemicals produced as the microbes break down foods. 

“Metabolites are produced in very high concentrations in the intestines,” Venturelli said. “Some are beneficial to the host, like butyrate. Others have more complex interactions with the host and gut community.”

The machine learning model enabled the team to design communities with desired metabolite profiles. This sort of control may eventually help doctors discover ways to treat or protect against diseases by introducing the right microbes.

Feedback for faster model building

While human gut microbiome research has a long way to go before it can offer this kind of intervention, the approach developed by the team could help get there faster. Machine learning algorithms often are produced with a two step process: accumulate the training data, and then train the algorithm. But the feedback step added by Hero and Venturelli’s team provides a template for rapidly improving future models.

Hero’s team initially trained the machine learning algorithm on an existing data set from the Venturelli lab. The team then used the algorithm to predict the evolution and metabolite profiles of new communities that Venturelli’s team constructed and tested in the lab. While the model performed very well overall, some of the predictions identified weaknesses in the model performance, which Venturelli’s team shored up with a second round of experiments, closing the feedback loop.

“This new modeling approach, coupled with the speed at which we could test new communities in the Venturelli lab, could enable the design of useful microbial communities,” said Ryan Clark, co-first author of the study, who was a postdoctoral researcher in Venturelli’s lab when he ran the microbial experiments. “It was much easier to optimize for the production of multiple metabolites at once.”

The group settled on a long short-term memory neural network for the machine learning algorithm, which is good for sequence prediction problems. However, like most machine learning models, the model itself is a “black box.” To figure out what factors went into its predictions, the team used the mathematical map produced by the trained algorithm. It revealed how each kind of microbe affected the abundance of the others and what kinds of metabolites it supported. They could then use these relationships to design communities worth exploring through the model and in follow-up experiments.

The model can also be applied to different microbial communities beyond medicine, including accelerating the breakdown of plastics and other materials for environmental cleanup, production of valuable compounds for bioenergy applications, or improving plant growth.

This study was supported by the Army Research Office and the National Institutes of Health.

Hero is also the R. Jamison and Betty Williams Professor of Engineering, and a professor of biomedical engineering and statistics. Venturelli is also a professor of bacteriology and chemical and biological engineering. Clark is now a senior scientist at Nimble Therapeutics. Baranwal is also a scientist in the division of data and decision sciences at Tata Consultancy Services Research and Innovation.

Study (PDF): A small molecule redistributes iron in ferroportin-deficient mice and patient-derived primary macrophages

A natural small molecule derived from a cypress tree can transport iron in live mice and human cells that lack the protein that normally does the job, easing a buildup of iron in the liver and restoring hemoglobin and red blood cell produ ction, a new study found.

Researchers at the University of Michigan, University of Illinois and University of Modena in Italy, found that the small molecule hinokitiol potentially could function as a “molecular prosthetic” when the iron-transporting protein ferroportin is missing or defective—offering a potential treatment path for ferroportin disease and certain kinds of anemia.

“This is a really striking demonstration in a whole animal model that an imperfect mimic of a missing protein can reestablish physiology, acting as a prosthesis on a molecular scale,” said study co-leader Martin Burke, professor of chemistry at Illinois. “The implications are really quite broad with respect to other diseases caused by loss of protein function.”

Ferroportin is a protein that forms a channel for transporting iron in and out of cells. Ferroportin deficiency can be due to a genetic mutation or caused by inflammation or infection. Patients without the protein have an excess buildup of iron in the liver, spleen and bone marrow, particularly in a type of cell called a macrophage. Macrophages in the liver chew up old red blood cells and transport the iron in them for recycling into new red blood cells. However, without ferroportin, the iron builds up inside the cells and can’t be recycled, Burke said.

Removing blood from the body, as is usually done for other diseases caused by iron buildup, is not an efficient treatment, since the buildup is localized and iron levels in blood are actually low, said study co-author Antonello Pietrangelo, professor of medicine at Modena. Pietrangelo was the first to identify genetic ferroportin disease in patients as distinct from a more well-documented form of iron overload that causes iron to build up in blood serum.

Burke’s group at Illinois detailed hinokitiol’s ability to shuttle iron across cell membranes and correct anemia in zebrafish in 2017, establishing it as a potential candidate for therapeutic application. In the new study, published in the journal PNAS, researchers studied hinokitiol’s action in live mice lacking the gene for ferroportin, as well as in macrophages from patients with ferroportin disease.

U-M public health professor Young-Ah Seo‘s research group, which studies genetic disorders of iron and manganese, provided proof-of-concept that hinokitiol could improve anemia in mice.

“We saw that the mice treated with hinokitiol reduced iron accumulation in the liver and improved hemoglobin and red blood cell production,” said Seo, professor of nutritional biochemistry at the U-M School of Public Health and a co-lead author of the study. “These findings suggest that hinokitiol could deliver iron from the liver to red blood cells and thus improve hemoglobin in mice.”

The researchers noted that although the iron distribution still fell short of normal in mice treated with hinokitiol, hemoglobin and red blood cell levels were improved to normal range. This indicates that the small molecule, while not a perfect replacement for ferroportin, could effectively address anemia, said Illinois graduate student Stella Ekaputri, first author of the study.

“In healthy organisms, there is a threshold of functionality. Our goal is to give a little bit of a boost so that the threshold is reached,” she said. “Even though our small molecule is not perfect, homeostasis is recovered for hemoglobin. Just a little bit of boost is enough to overcome the bottlenecks that are created by the ferroportin deficiency.”

The researchers dug deeper to understand the mechanisms of how hinokitiol bolstered iron transport and hemoglobin production in mice. They found that hinokitiol bound to iron within the macrophages where it had built up and ferried the iron out of the cells. Then, hinokitiol handed off the iron to another protein, transferrin, which inserted the iron back into the normal hemoglobin-production cycle. The researchers verified that hinokitiol functioned the same way in human cells by studying its action in liver macrophages from human patients with ferroportin disease.

“Using our patients’ macrophages, we were able to show that hinokitiol can very efficiently remove ‘free iron’ and also iron stores from macrophages of patients with different mutations,” Pietrangelo said. “This, combined with the data in mice that show the hinokitiol also is effective in vivo, opens a completely new avenue for the treatment of this disorder.”

The researchers are working with Kinesid Therapeutics, founded by Burke, to facilitate further work toward clinical application for hinokitiol or its derivatives.

The National Institutes of Health supported this work.

“If we can generate syngas from carbon dioxide utilizing only solar energy, we can use this as a precursor for methanol and other chemicals and fuels. This will significantly reduce overall CO2 emissions,” said Zetian Mi, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Michigan, who led the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

Composed mainly of hydrogen and carbon monoxide with a little methane, syngas is commonly derived from fossil fuels with the help of electricity. In addition, toxic chemicals are often added to make the process more efficient.

“Our new process is actually pretty simple, but it’s exciting because it’s not toxic, it’s sustainable and it’s very cost effective,” said Roksana Rashid, first author of the study, who performed the experiments as a doctoral student in electrical and computer engineering at McGill University in Canada.

To create a process that uses only solar energy, Mi’s group overcame the difficulty of splitting carbon dioxide molecules, which are among the most stable in the universe. For this, they peppered a forest of semiconductor nanowires with nanoparticles. Those nanoparticles, made of gold coated with chromium oxide, attracted the carbon dioxide molecules and bent them, weakening the bonds between the carbon and oxygen.

The gallium nitride nanowires used the light energy to free electrons and the positively charged spaces they leave behind, known as holes. The holes split water molecules, separating the protons (hydrogen) from the oxygen. Then, at the metal catalysts, the electrons split the carbon dioxide, producing carbon monoxide and sometimes drawing in the free hydrogen to make methane. Processes are under development to separate the oxygen from the other gases.

“Our technology sheds light on how to build distributed syngas production from air, water and sunlight,” said Baowen Zhou, co-corresponding author of the study with Mi and a former postdoctoral research fellow in Mi’s lab at McGill University and U-M. 

By changing the ratio of gold to chromium oxide in the nanoparticles, Mi’s team was able to control the relative amounts of hydrogen and carbon monoxide produced in the reaction. This is important because the ratio of hydrogen to carbon monoxide affects how easy it is to produce a type of fuel or chemical.

“What is surprising is the synergy between gold and chromium oxide to make the CO2 reduction to syngas efficient and tunable. That was not possible with a single metal catalyst,” Mi said. “This opens up many exciting opportunities that were not previously considered.”

Mi’s tunable syngas setup uses standard industrial manufacturing processes, and is scalable. While Rashid used distilled water in this experiment, seawater and other electrolyte solutions are also expected to work, and Mi has used them in related water-splitting studies. 

“The semiconductor we use as the light absorber is based on silicon and gallium nitride, which are the most commonly produced semiconductors, and we use very little material for the gallium nitride. Each nanowire is about one micrometer in thickness,” Mi said.

Mi’s next goal is to increase the efficiency of the device, which currently stands at 0.89%. When 10% of the light energy is converted to chemical energy, he hopes that the technology could see the technology be adopted for renewable energy, similar to solar cells. 

The project was supported through the Emission Reduction Alberta ERA, based at McGill University in Canada, former home of Mi. The co-authors all have current or former ties to McGill. Rashid is currently a postdoctoral researcher in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Zhou is currently an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

A licensing agreement for intellectual property developed in this study is in the process of being negotiated in order to bring the technology to market and make a positive environmental impact. The two companies are NS Nanotech Inc. and NX Fuels Inc, both co-founded by Mi. The University of Michigan and Mi have a financial interest in these companies.

According to those local leaders surveyed by the University of Michigan, 62% saw things going in the wrong direction, compared with 67% last year. Meanwhile, only 28% say the state is generally going in the right direction, a slight improvement from 23% last year.

The findings come from the first results of the spring 2022 wave of the Michigan Public Policy Survey conducted by the Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy at U-M’s Ford School of Public Policy.

The views are strongly associated with partisan identification, with most Republicans and independents expressing pessimism about the state’s direction, compared with Democrats’ optimism. Among self-identified Republican local leaders, only 12% say the state is going in the right direction, similar to the 10% who said the same last year. 

Among independent local officials, there was more notable improvement: 32% say the state is headed in the right direction, up from 24% in 2021. Meanwhile, 72% of self-identified Democrats remain positive about the direction of the state, up from 63% in 2021.

“Assessment of the job performance of both Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and of the Michigan Legislature has risen slightly in the past year, but skepticism about state government remains strong,” said Debra Horner, senior program manager on the Michigan Public Policy Survey. “That is despite the massive infusion of federal and state aid since the start of the pandemic, which has led to an economic boost to local governments.” 

The survey shows that despite partisan differences in concerns about the state and nation as a whole, local officials across the board are overwhelmingly optimistic about the direction in which their own local jurisdictions are headed, with around 90% saying their local jurisdiction is headed in the right direction.

“Local leaders overwhelmingly give their communities high marks, across all parties, and that’s been consistent over time,” said Tom Ivacko, executive director of the Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy. “But evaluations of the governor, and views of the state’s direction are consistently and strongly tied to partisanship. This latest survey finds the widest partisan disparity since we started gauging the ‘right direction’ question in 2011.”

The Michigan Public Policy Survey is an ongoing census survey of all 1,856 general purpose local governments in Michigan conducted by U-M’s Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy since 2009.

Researchers at the University of Michigan have now discovered a very fast brain rhythm that helps your left brain and right brain communicate better as you run faster—and even when you dream.

The fast rhythm linking the left and right halves of the brain has a new name: “splines,” so-called because they visually resemble mechanical splines, the interlocking teeth on mechanical gears.

Omar Ahmed, assistant professor of psychology and lead author of a new study appearing in Cell Reports, says that splines represent a pattern of rhythmic communication across the left and right brain that is different from other known brain rhythms.

“Previously identified brain rhythms are akin to the left brain and right brain participating in synchronized swimming: The two halves of the brain try to do the same thing at the exact same time,” he said. “Spline rhythms, on the other hand, are like the left and right brains playing a game of very fast—and very precise—pingpong. This back-and-forth game of neural pingpong represents a fundamentally different way for the left brain and right brain to talk to each other.”

Study first author Megha Ghosh, doctoral student in psychology, says splines serve a key function in allowing the left and right brain to coordinate information.

“These spline brain rhythms are faster than all other healthy, awake brain rhythms,” she said. “Splines also get stronger and even more precise when running faster. This is likely to help the left brain and right brain compute more cohesively and rapidly when an animal is moving faster and needs to make faster decisions.”

Splines are also seen during rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep—when most dreams happen, Ahmed says.

“Surprisingly, this back-and-forth communication is even stronger during dream-like sleep than it is when animals are awake and running,” he said. “This means that splines play a critical role in coordinating information during sleep, perhaps helping to solidify awake experiences into enhanced long-term memories during this dream-like state.”

The new findings focus on a part of the brain called the retrosplenial cortex. This region helps us figure out when to turn left vs. right, and is also important for memory and imagining the future. Importantly, it is also one of the first brain regions to become impaired in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.

“We studied many different brain regions, and splines were consistently strongest in the retrosplenial cortex.” Ahmed said. “Given that the retrosplenial cortex is altered very early in Alzheimer’s disease, this means that we may be able to use spline rhythms in people as an early biomarker for Alzheimer’s. We are currently investigating this possibility in preclinical models of neurodegenerative diseases.”

The study’s other authors—all members of Ahmed’s lab at the U-M Department of Psychology—are Fang-Chi Yang, Sharena Rice, Vaughn Hetrick, Alcides Lorenzo Gonzalez, Danny Siu, Ellen Brennan, Tibin John and Allison Ahrens.

A new policy brief from the University of Michigan’s Poverty Solutions initiative offers recommendations for ways to target funding to key programs and priorities, focus on program implementation, and consider long-term impacts as Washtenaw County leaders decide how to allocate the rest of its American Rescue Plan Act money. 

With about half of Washtenaw County’s $71 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds allocated, U-M researchers evaluated the county’s spending priorities to offer new insights on strategies to maximize long-term impact and promote equity with the one-time spending. 

The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 provides $350 billion in federal funding for state and local governments to assist with pandemic recovery for small businesses, households and hard-hit industries, and replace lost revenue for government services. Washtenaw County has received the $71 million over two allotments in May 2021 and May 2022, and the county’s Board of Commissioners has voted on how to spend $36 million of the funds so far. 

“These funds will be substantial in aiding the county’s pandemic recovery efforts. With more money to be allocated and distribution decisions still undetermined, this is an opportunity to maximize the impact of the ARPA funds to increase equity within Washtenaw County,” said Amanda Nothaft, senior data and evaluation manager at Poverty Solutions and author of the policy brief, “One-time Spending for Long-term Impact: Evaluating Washtenaw County’s American Rescue Plan Act Allocations.”

While Washtenaw County boasts high levels of educational attainment, relatively high incomes and good health outcomes, these overall metrics hide wide disparities in outcomes for residents in different parts of the county. Access to opportunity in Washtenaw County is often tied to race and place. 

Poverty Solutions partnered with the county’s Office of Community and Economic Development to revamp the Washtenaw County Opportunity Index, which combines 16 indicators into five categories of opportunity—health, job access, economic well-being, education and training, and community engagement and stability—to identify which parts of the county experience the highest and lowest levels of access to opportunity. 

Washtenaw County commissioners formally committed in 2021 to use the Opportunity Index to apply an equity lens to their decision making and county initiatives. ARPA funds provide a unique opportunity to bolster the county’s current efforts to eliminate gaps in opportunity and promote equity, Nothaft said.

The policy brief offers an evaluation of Washtenaw County’s current ARPA allocations, which include:

• Navigation and financial assistance to help families find child care
• Creation of Children’s Savings Accounts for all public school students
• Broadband expansion 
• Expanding access to home weatherization services 
• Investing in the Washtenaw County Health Department 
• Launching a Mobile Support Services Initiative
• Creating a Community Priority Fund to provide funding to organizations serving communities with low access to opportunity that were hit hard by the pandemic

The evaluation recommends considering the number of people eligible and amount of money dedicated to the currently-funded initiatives to determine whether additional funds are necessary to achieve the intended impact. The policy brief also cautions against creating too many new initiatives and programs that will not have sustainable funding sources once the ARPA money is spent, and instead points to the value of investing in projects like water, transportation, and neighborhood infrastructure that will have long-term impact after a single infusion of funds. 

Distributing ARPA money via grants and in partnership with community organizations should include a process to ensure the recipients have the capacity and track record to accomplish what they propose and that their interventions are backed by evidence and have measurable outcomes. 

According to the policy brief, the goals of closing gaps in educational, economic and health outcomes by bringing services to people in need and providing funding to organizations that work within the community can only be met if these programs are fully funded and carefully implemented.

Four in 10 children in the United States grow up in households in which a parent or co-residing adult faced at least one criminal charge, were convicted of a felony or spent time in prison, a University of Michigan study shows.

This dwarfs estimates from the Bureau of Justice Statistics that less than 1 in 40 children have a parent in prison in a given year, says Michael Mueller-Smith, assistant professor of economics and faculty associate at the Population Studies Center at the U-M Institute for Social Research.

Prior efforts to quantify the extent of crime and justice spillovers within households have been hampered by severe data limitations, he says. Federal data collection fails to capture nonincarceration events, track intergenerational spillovers within families that depart from the nuclear family model or follow children over time.

“Data limitations have left us in the dark on just how many kids grow up in households with justice involvement,” Mueller-Smith said. “That we find estimates with close to half of U.S. children having intergenerational exposure to crime and justice is a wake-up call to the failures of our public policy to date. Even if the justice system were completely overhauled today, we will be living with the damage done to current and former generations for decades to come.”

Using data from the U.S. Census Bureau, Treasury Department and Criminal Justice Administrative Records System, Mueller-Smith and colleagues were able to overcome data limitations that have constrained this area of research for decades.

In addition to finding dramatically higher rates of intergenerational exposure overall, the researchers found that child exposure is heterogeneous in the U.S. population. More than 60% of Black and Native American children and kids from households with below-median income have intergenerational exposure to the justice system—twice the rate of white children.

“Circumstances during early childhood play an important role for a range of lifetime outcomes. It is quite alarming that the modal experience for minority children in the U.S. is one of indirect exposure to the criminal justice system,” said Brittany Street, a co-author of the study and assistant professor of economics at the University of Missouri. “These findings have important implications not just for criminal justice policy, but our overall social policy in the U.S. more generally.”

Early life exposure is highly correlated with a range of negative child development outcomes, including cognitive difficulty, being behind in school, teen fertility, teen crime and death by age 18, even after controlling for a range of factors including household income, place of birth, age, sex and race, the researchers say.

The expansive prevalence, demographic heterogeneity and estimated relationship with child outcomes provide strong evidence that the justice system is a major factor in the intergenerational propagation of economic inequality and racial disparities in the U.S.

This research was performed by economists from the University of Michigan, University of Missouri and U.S. Census Bureau.

In the wake of President Biden’s signing of a new Bipartisan Safety Communities Act that focuses on firearm injury prevention, school safety and mental health services, experts from the University of Michigan reacted to the law’s intent and provisions. 

Justin Heinze and Hsing-Fang Hsieh are co-investigators at the National Center for School Safety at the U-M School of Public Health. Heinze is an associate professor of health behavior and health education, faculty lead for Public Health IDEAS for Preventing Firearm Injuries and part of U-M’s Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention.

Hsieh is an assistant research scientist​ at the School of Public Health who studies adolescent resilience, youth violence and violence victimization. She is co-investigator for the National Center for School Safety and part of the leadership team of the Prevention Research Collaborative 

Stephanie Salazar is the manager of outreach and education programs at the U-M Eisenberg Family Depression Center. She works with U-M faculty and public school district leaders and students on the Peer-to-Peer Depression Awareness Project, a mental health program for middle and high school students.

What is your reaction to the Bipartisan Safety Communities Act?

Heinze: In public health, we are trained to think ecologically; the assumption is that you cannot solve a multifaceted problem like firearm injury burden focused on just one level, like individual interventions. Rather, you need action at the individual, interpersonal, community, policy and societal levels, and I am delighted to see evidenced-informed approaches represented within the legislation to complement some of the work occurring on the ground in communities around the country.  

Certainly, as a school safety researcher, I’m glad to see attention directed toward improving building security and training school personnel to respond to student mental health concerns. But now it’s time to turn our attention to how these strategies are implemented in practice. Every context is different and we’ll need to be mindful of how to translate these approaches to individual school communities.

Hsieh: It’s certainly encouraging to see that a good portion of the bill draws attention to school safety and mental health. We know that our school community desperately needs resources and support for identifying and implementing evidence-based practices.

Salazar: It is hopeful to know that our leaders are addressing this urgent need. We are hopeful that future federal and state-level investment can lead to effective, evidence-based mental health programs that increase awareness, early intervention, peer support, suicide risk management and more.

Will funding attached to this bill fund any strategies that have been proven successful in your research?

Heinze: Even though extreme risk protection orders were designed with intimate partners in mind, there have been a handful of cases where ERPOs were filed on behalf of a concern related to harm in or toward a school. Several colleagues are systematically cataloging how ERPOs are filed, reviewed and enacted in a number of states and as more of this information comes to light, it will be important to understand whether they can serve as a means to protect students when there is an immediate danger. 

Hsieh: The evidence supporting positive school climate, threat assessment and youth engagement in enhancing school safety has been accumulating. Our team also has seen preliminary but promising results of using an anonymous reporting system combined with training for students, teachers and school staff to recognize warning signs to help prevent school violence. However, for a multifaceted problem like school safety and firearm violence, it’s unlikely to see a single safety approach being effective in a sustainable way. The consideration of taking a comprehensive approach with multiple strategies spanning from prevention, assessment and response to building security and trauma-informed practices is very important and more likely to help for the long run. 

What are some research-proven school interventions that could be implemented with the new funding?

Heinze: Poor mental health does not cause firearm violence, but I think the bill’s focus on mental health is absolutely critical. Teaching students and staff to recognize warning signs of internalizing behaviors or mental health crises—along with increasing access to mental health supports for students in need—is both protective for the small minority of students at risk for perpetrating violence and also promotive for any student who might be struggling with mental health challenges. By supporting positive mental well-being, the evidence supports both direct and indirect reductions in violence, and any violence with a firearm involved is much more likely to be lethal.

Hsieh: I would love to see two things happening and these are what many of us as school safety researchers are resolute to do. One is the expansion of research that can eventually inform best practices on mental health and other school safety interventions. The other is more research and intervention considering approaches that are inclusive for minority youth, whether it’s race, ethnicity, gender identify and sexual orientation, immigrant status and so on. The safety and well-being perceived by all, rather than by part of the student body/school community, is essential for us to move the needle.

The act includes funding for school mental health programs. Why is this needed?

Salazar: We have been and continue to face an unprecedented mental health crisis for our kids. With COVID-19 causing disruptions to routines and social relationships, our students’ ability to learn and thrive as they deserve is at stake. Scientific research shows that an emotionally healthy learner is a better learner, leading to improved academic and social outcomes. Parents and community members cannot do this alone. We need system-level solutions.

What does U-M offer to help schools with this issue?

Salazar: Through our school-based outreach programs, the U-M Depression Center has a history of supporting teacher training and peer-based programming, and providing in-school initiatives that help ensure students have equitable access to mental health services. For example, our Peer-to-Peer program uses a “peer advocate” method to train high school students to understand depression and effective methods for reaching and listening to their peers. The goal is to create a supportive environment that allows students to connect with information and treatment resources. Our data suggests it results in greater awareness and knowledge of depression and improved school climate surrounding mental health issues.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate carbon emissions from power plants, dealing a blow to the Biden administration’s efforts to address climate change.

University of Michigan experts are available to comment.

Thomas Lyon is the Dow Chemical Professor of Sustainable Science, Technology and Commerce at the Ross School of Business and School for Environment and Sustainability and director of the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise. He is a leader in using economic analysis to understand corporate environmental behavior and how it is shaped by emerging government regulations, nongovernmental organizations and consumer demands.

“The court’s decision not only undermines the ability of the United States to address one of the world’s most critical issues, it does so by wielding a blunt instrument that is totally out of line with precedent,” he said. “The Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act put forward bold goals to achieve a cleaner and healthier environment. They intentionally left the details to the EPA because Congress lacks the expertise to deal with complex technical issues. In fact, cost/benefit analyses show that the Clean Air Act has been perhaps the single most beneficial piece of regulation in our nation’s history. For these activist judges to turn around now and claim that Congress must micromanage regulatory policy is not just foolish but also overturns a long history of effective regulation.

“The claim by coal companies that EPA is only allowed to regulate power plants individually flies in the face of economic efficiency and of long-standing EPA policies like the National Ambient Air Quality Standards, which are the primary means of regulating air quality in the U.S. Those standards focus on overall air quality in particular regions, which is the primary concern from the point of view of human health. Similarly, the concern with climate is with regard to overall levels of greenhouse gases, which are most effectively regulated through broad-based policies such as carbon taxes or cap-and-trade programs. The justices appear to have utter disregard not only for precedent but also for economic efficiency.”

Contact: 734-615-1639, tplyon@umich.edu

Barry Rabe is the J. Ira and Nicki Harris Family Professor of Public Policy at the Ford School of Public Policy and professor of political science and the environment. He studies U.S. climate policy, including issues of federal-state relations and the roles of respective branches of government. Rabe has written widely about these issues, including the evolution of the Clean Power Plan under President Obama and the subsequent Affordable Clean Energy Rule under President Trump, which are focal points in the current case. These are examined in his book, “Trump, the Administrative Presidency, and Federalism.”

“The ability of presidents to reinterpret established laws to address emerging challenges such as climate change is further eroded by today’s Supreme Court decision,” he said. “The majority concludes the Obama administration exceeded its authority in using the Clean Air Act to try to address climate, putting tight limits on the ability of President Biden or subsequent presidents to use these powers on climate issues.

“Today’s decision indicates the growing likelihood that presidents will face strict limits on their ability to address climate change through their own executive actions. This shifts responsibility for climate to Congress and to the states, particularly in the electricity sector, and further underscores uncertainty about whether the U.S. can hit its own pledged reductions of greenhouse gas emissions. This decision further underscores the unique position of the U.S. as the only developed nation without a comprehensive strategy for climate that has been approved by its national legislature or supported by its judiciary.”

Contact: brabe@umich.edu

Gregory Keoleian is the Peter M. Wege Endowed Professor of Sustainable Systems at the School for Environment and Sustainability and in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and directs U-M’s Center for Sustainable Systems. He served on the U-M President’s Commission on Carbon Neutrality and was named to the Reuters Hot List of the world’s top climate scientists in 2021.

“The Supreme Court’s ruling today is unjust and will slow clean energy transitions that address our climate emergency,” he said. “The conservative members of this Supreme Court do not seem to understand or value basic climate science and the need for robust climate policy and action. Humanity is facing a climate crisis, and urgent action is needed to curb greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity sector, which currently accounts for 25% of total U.S. emissions. 

“Clean electricity is fundamental for decarbonizing transportation and building sectors and necessary for achieving U.S. and global climate policy goals and targets. The EPA has a mandate to protect human health and the environment, which is our life support system. Climate change is the greatest threat to human health and environment, and interfering with the EPA’s mission has severe consequences for our future.”

Contact: 734-764-3194, gregak@umich.edu

Richard Rood is professor of climate and space sciences and engineering at the College of Engineering and professor at the School of Environment and Sustainability. He is an expert on U.S. weather modeling and can discuss the connection between weather, climate and society. He is also a co-principal investigator at the Great Lakes Integrated Sciences and Assessments, a federally funded partnership between U-M and Michigan State University.

“The ruling complicates an already broken approach to climate regulation and policy, which, in the absence of meaningful legislation, has been carried out by vacillating executive orders,” he said. “It makes it more difficult to intervene and reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Hence, the world will be warmer, and the U.S. will be less influential in climate solutions.”

Contact: 301-526-8572, rbrood@umich.edu 

Nina Mendelson is the Joseph L. Sax Collegiate Professor of Law at Michigan Law. She teaches and conducts research in the areas of administrative law, environmental law, statutory interpretation and the legislative process.

“This decision represents an anti-regulatory power grab by the court,” she said. “It is declaring the power to declare an agency regulation illegal simply because the court sees the regulation as ‘too major,’ whether too costly, too innovative, or too political. This particular decision undercuts EPA’s ability to address climate change. But it also represents a broader threat to the federal government’s ability to regulate to protect the United States’ environment, public health and consumer safety. 

“Congress has long sought to authorize agencies to respond rapidly and flexibly to challenges Congress knows it cannot anticipate at the time it passes a statute. The court is signaling that for the issues the court picks out as ‘major’ with its ‘we know it when we see it’ approach, it will bar an agency from regulating unless Congress legislates twice by going back and passing a second, specifically worded statute.”

Contact: 734-936-5071, nmendel@umich.edu 

Sara Adar is an associate professor of epidemiology at the School of Public Health. Her research focuses on the human health effects of air pollution, with a growing interest in identifying intervention strategies to reduce exposures and improve health. 

“I am disappointed by this decision of the Supreme Court,” she said. “The Clean Air Act tasks the EPA with protecting the public from the harmful effects of pollutants in the air. This ruling will make it much harder for the EPA to accomplish their mission by hindering their ability to address climate change, which is quite frankly one of the biggest environmental and public health threats that we face today.”

Contact: sadar@umich.edu

Stuart Batterman is a professor of environmental health sciences and global public health at the School of Public Health and professor of water resources and environmental engineering at the College of Engineering. His research and teaching interests address environmental impact assessment, human exposure and health risk assessment, and environmental management.

“This ruling dramatically limits the ability of the federal government to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and other pollutants from industry, transportation and other sectors,” he said. “While some voluntary, state and local programs will continue, the lack of a national program means that the U.S. will not meet the emission reduction targets needed to limit warming and prevent adverse impacts on climate, agriculture, environment, water supplies, forest fires and public health. While the ruling appears to allow EPA to undertake some case-by-case actions, solutions must be scaled up rapidly to reduce emissions and mitigate further harms.”

Contact: stuartb@umich.edu

Michael Craig, assistant professor of energy systems at the School for Environment and Sustainability, is an expert on power system emissions, operations, planning and the consequences of the Clean Power Plan for power systems and the potential rollback for emissions and investments.

Contact: mtcraig@umich.edu

Drew Horning is special adviser to the U-M president for carbon neutrality and managing director of the Graham Sustainability Institute. He manages universitywide efforts to achieve carbon neutrality, and he previously served as administrative director for the U-M President’s Commission on Carbon Neutrality.

“Despite the Supreme Court’s misguided decision to limit the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, the University of Michigan maintains a steady commitment to achieving carbon neutrality universitywide,” he said. “If anything, today’s decision emboldens U-M’s efforts toward meaningful climate action. Large institutions now have an even greater responsibility to take bold steps to address the climate crisis and set examples for others to follow.”

Contact: 734-274-1631, ahorning@umich.edu

Jennifer Haverkamp is director of the Graham Sustainability Institute and a professor from practice at Michigan Law and the Ford School of Public Policy. She is also a former co-chair of the U-M President’s Commission on Carbon Neutrality. Haverkamp is an environmental lawyer and a former ambassador and U.S. climate negotiator.

“The court has thrown responsibility for complex environmental regulations back into the lap of a hyperpolarized Congress that is simply incapable of combatting the climate crisis on its own,” she said. “The consequences are just too dire and the need for climate action too desperately urgent to regard this decision as anything less than a travesty.

“By further limiting President Biden’s options for reducing U.S. climate pollution, the court has also grievously undercut U.S. leadership in getting other countries to live up to their Paris Agreement commitments.”

Contact: jhaver@umich.edu

Amy  Schulz is a professor of health behavior and health education at the School of Public Health. Her research examines social factors that contribute to health with a particular focus on social and physical environmental factors and their effects on health, health equity and urban health.

“Power plants that use fossil fuels, such as coal, to create energy are an important driver of climate change,” she said. “They emit pollutants that include particulate matter, sulfur dioxide and air toxics such as mercury and arsenic that cause great harm to human health. These harms fall disproportionately on low income communities and communities of color.

“The Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia vs EPA narrows the range of options available to address greenhouse gas emissions from power plants at a time when the nation cannot afford to delay efforts to address climate change and its public health impacts. It places greater urgency on EPA to move forward with actions not affected by today’s decision, such as updates to national air pollution standards and limits to polluting sources, and on Congress to invest in clean energy such as solar and in zero-emission vehicles. It also highlights the critical role of local and state health decision-makers in protecting the health of communities from pollutants that fuel climate change and have adverse effects on public health.”

Contact: ajschulz@umich.edu