The Board of Regents approved these items at its Sept. 17 meeting.

The Board of Regents approved the establishment in 2021 of a new, cutting-edge academic unit called the College of Innovation and Technology at UM-Flint with help from a $10 million Mott Foundation grant. 

The University Health Service will enter into an agreement with LynxDx Inc. to offer saliva-based COVID-19 diagnostic surveillance testing services on the Ann Arbor campus, giving U-M a testing capacity to up to 6,000 individuals per week.

The Board of Regents approved on Thursday revised 2020-21 academic calendars for the Ann Arbor, Dearborn and Flint campuses, designed to reduce the amount of back-and-forth travel for students during the pandemic. The calendars still ensure the university adheres to the federal definition of a credit hour.

Celeste Watkins-Hayes, professor of sociology in LSA and of public policy in the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, has been appointed a University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor.

U-M has begun to implement recommendations from the July 31 report that detailed decades of sexual harassment by the university’s former provost, President Mark Schlissel says.

The 2020 virtual Saltiel Life Sciences Symposium, “Broadening the Biosciences,” will explore innovative and creative research already taking place to address scientific challenges across the biosciences.

President Mark Schlissel says he will establish a faculty group specifically devoted to issues related to COVID-19 on campus, and also is developing a new initiative around public safety and policing.

Vaping marijuana and vaping nicotine have increased dramatically among 19- to 22-year-olds, both more than doubling between 2017 and 2019, according to U-M’s annual national Monitoring the Future Panel Study.

The President’s Commission on Carbon Neutrality is exploring emissions from direct campus operations and purchased power, as well as those from individual actions relating to university business.