Faculty/Staff Spotlights
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April 14, 2025
“Traveling has served as an informal classroom for me. It has corrected misconceptions and biases about other cultures and taught me to be more inclusive.”
– Ashley Cureton, assistant professor in the School of Social Work and in the Marsal Family School of Education who has traveled to more than 100 countries, often doing so alone
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April 7, 2025
“When I’m really engaged with a project, it tunes out the noise. I just lean into the flow of creation and it’s a lovely feeling, like everything is right.”
— Candice Wilson, DevOps manager, ICPSR at the Institute for Social Research who is a self-proclaimed “hobbyist engineer”
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March 31, 2025
“The moment my pen touched the paper, it was symbolic to me. I was embarking on an arduous, lengthy journey of sobriety and I had an arduous, lengthy artistic endeavor to go along with it.”
— Eddie Verdonk, a patient services associate at Mary Rackham Institute who has explored a variety of artistic mediums throughout his life
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March 24, 2025
“We wanted to design something that would teach participants about the process of vacant building reuse, what steps precede the renovation, and key decisions that impact your ability to acquire or occupy a vacant building.”
— Cyrus Peñarroyo, assistant professor of architecture at the A. Alfred Taubman College who co-created an interactive board game that uses augmented reality to teach players about urban redevelopment
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March 17, 2025
“One of the most challenging things in our history has been sticking to our guns because we are an atypical instrumentation. But our secret sauce is that Akropolis is a family.”
— Andrew Koeppe, a research technician associate for Michigan Medicine who with Kary Landry, lecturer in SMTD, won a Grammy with their reed quintet
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March 10, 2025
“The sanctuary has given me space to play with my professional goals and ambitions, and I think I’ve brought some organization and expertise.”
— Liz Swaynie, the stewardship officer for UM-Dearborn who is on the board of Great Lakes Rabbit Sanctuary, where she serves as fundraising chair
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February 24, 2025
“Even when I’m busy and think, ‘I can’t fit in a game,’ as soon as I get to the rink, we’re just laughing and having fun.”
— Deb Demski, a clinical research coordinator at the School of Kinesiology who plays forward for Swarm, a senior women’s hockey team
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February 17, 2025
“As I move toward retirement, I see life opening up. It might be the perfect time to start performing and singing regularly again.”
— Christina Fields, an administrative assistant at Michigan Medicine who envisions becoming a lounge singer in retirement and also dabbles in beading and jewelry making
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February 10, 2025
“As competitive as I am, I was really happy that all three of us solved puzzles during the show, and we all won a nice amount of money.”
— Jennifer Hawkins, division administrator for Infectious Diseases at Michigan Medicine who recently competed on “Wheel of Fortune” and won nearly $24,000 in cash and prizes
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February 3, 2025
“Being at Stamps helped me affirm the fact that I am a maker and an artist because I never would have described myself as an artist before.”
— Sandra Wiley, director of international study programs at the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design who has been knitting since she was a child and makes her own clothes
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