Faculty/Staff Spotlights
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August 11, 2025
“One of my favorite aspects of costuming is working with young kids who are building their confidence. It’s tough to get on stage and sing and dance when you’re 7 years old.”
— Julie McCormick, project senior manager at Child Health Evaluation and Research Center, Michigan Medicine.
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July 21, 2025
“When I’m baking, I feel like I’m in a state of flow because I’m fully immersed in what I’m doing.”
— Rujuta Umarji, director of data curation at the U-M Institute for Social Research’s Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research
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June 23, 2025
“We handle cardiac arrests in our profession, but I never thought I would have to witness and experience that with family.”
— Taylor Krupp, a nurse in the Emergency Department at Michigan Medicine
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June 9, 2025
“I eventually moved into marketing in part because of my acting education. Storytelling in marketing is a type of performance.”
— Glenn Bugala, marketing manager at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business who is beginning to become involved in acting again
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May 19, 2025
“The program enables the kids to be around others who share a similar lived experience, and that might not always be available to them in classrooms or other activities with able-bodied peers.”
— Daniel Ellman, communications manager, Michigan Medicine, who coaches the Rollverines, a competitive wheelchair basketball team for children
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May 5, 2025
“When a win is that close, as a coach, you don’t doubt that everything you did was worth doing, every effort mattered.”
— Jordan Gaarenstroom, U-M assistant men’s gymnastics coach, who has won the NCAA team title as both an athlete and a coach
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April 21, 2025
“When I’m writing, my inner critic is gone, which is nice. I love seeing the story come to life, and sometimes it surprises even me.”
– Shanelle Boluyt, a DevOps business systems analyst for the Institute for Social Research’s Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research who has a passion for writing and has published a novel
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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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