Multimedia Features | The University Record

October 21, 2024

Democracy in motion

In his monthly message to the U-M community, President Santa J. Ono discusses the Year of Democracy, Civic Empowerment, and Global Engagement and the role faculty, staff and students play in a healthy, vibrant democracy. In addition, in this month’s Portrait of a Wolverine, co-chairs Jenna Bednar, faculty director of UMICH Votes and Democratic Engagement, Celeste Watkins-Hayes, dean of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, and Rosario Ceballo, dean of LSA, speak on the importance of the initiative.

October 16, 2024

Celebrating U-M inventions

Ethan Miles, chief executive officer of Precision Trauma, demonstrates his company’s product, the Turn-I-Kit, at U-M’s annual Celebrate Invention event Oct. 15. The event included the presentation of this year’s Distinguished University Innovator of the Year Award to Kevin Ward, professor of emergency medicine and of biomedical engineering, and Precision Trauma’s chief technology officer. Celebrate Invention, sponsored by Innovation Partnerships, showcases companies whose innovations or technology were developed at U-M. (Photo by Leisa Thompson, Michigan Photography)

United Way campaign

The university has embarked on its annual United Way campaign with a fundraising target of $1 million, reinforcing a partnership that has existed for more than 50 years, supporting vital community services in Washtenaw County and beyond. In this video, President Santa J. Ono encourages the U-M community to participate in this year’s campaign.

Read more about the 2024 United Way campaign

October 14, 2024

Robotics for kids

An engineer in the U-M Robotics Department is working to introduce younger students without programming knowledge to robotics. Brody Riopelle uses Scratch, a coding language with a simple visual interface, to bring the exploration of robotics to students at the Center for Success Network in Pontiac. In this photo, a Center for Success student runs their Scratch program on a MBot to have it autonomously navigate the maze. (Photo courtesy Brody Riopelle)

Difficulty deciding

An undecided voters should not take personally the less-than-flattering labels — lazy, indecisive or frustrating — that partisan voters use, says Yanna Krupnikov, professor of communication and media and of political science in LSA. Instead, she says they simply have struggled with selecting a presidential candidate whose policies neatly align with their beliefs. In this video, Krupnikov explains that undecided voters may be more about showing up to vote than indecisiveness.

Read a Q&A with Yanna Krupnikov about undecided voters

October 7, 2024

Watt a journey!

A group of U-M engineering students has worked closely with rural communities in Brazil’s Pantanal region on ways to improve residents’ lives, like putting power in schools and designing innovative incinerators. In this video, the students of the Pantanal Partnership and the Brazilian people they worked with talk about the efforts to support community autonomy, preserve unique habitats and generate ecotourism.

Read more about the Pantanal Partnership

October 1, 2024

Creatively creating lifelong voters

U-M student voters place pins on a “Participatory Voting Map” showing where they plan to vote. The map is located at the Campus Voting Hub at the U-M Museum of Art. Through the Creative Campus Voting Project, U-M has incorporated design thinking informed by behavioral insights to develop voting spaces for students — aimed at creating lifelong voters. This is the third year the CCVP has partnered with Ann Arbor city clerk’s office, UMMA and the Duderstadt Center Gallery to design voting hubs on campus. Stephanie Rowden and Hannah Smotrich, associate professors in the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design, are co-leading the project. (Photo by Stephanie Rowden, Stamps School)

Read more about the Creative Campus Voting Project

September 30, 2024

Blueprint for Our Future

Campus Plan 2050 is a comprehensive physical campus plan designed to respond to the evolving needs of the University of Michigan’s growing academic community for the next 25 years. This video explores how the plan will ensure the physical campus evolves to provide the living, learning and working environments necessary to fulfill the university’s strategic vision.

Celebrating sustainability

Chris Pozza (right) speaks with a student at the Program for the Environment table at Earthfest 2024 on Sept. 26. Faculty, staff and students engaged with representatives from a variety of campus units, student organizations and community non-profits about environmental topics and came together toward a shared culture of sustainability at the annual celebration on the Diag. (Photo by Jaime Crawford, for Michigan Photography)

View a gallery of photos from Earthfest

September 25, 2024

Come and they will build it

The College of Engineering’s Wilson Student Team Project Center was founded 25 years ago as a place where students could build and learn without limits. One of the first of its kind among U.S. universities, today it’s a nearly 25,000-square-foot makerspace for students to build solar-powered cars, rockets, off-road vehicles, submarines, Mars rovers, even a concrete canoe. In this video, members of the some of the many student groups that call the Wilson Center home discuss what it means to them.

Read more about the Wilson Student Team Project Center