Multimedia Features | The University Record

May 4, 2024

Commencement surprise

From left, Heisman Trophy winner Desmond Howard, commencement speaker Brad Meltzer, and Blake Corum and J.J. McCarthy, both members of the national championship Michigan football team, reveal shirts bearing the Block M from under their gowns at the May 4 Spring Commencement ceremony. At the end of his address, part of which suggested how magic could offer insight for graduates’ future lives, Meltzer sprung “a final trick” on his audience by bringing the past and present football stars to the stage. (Photo by Eric Bronson, Michigan Photography)

Read more about the 2024 Spring Commencement

May 3, 2024

Helping Michigan grow

Undergraduate students in the A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning’s new Urban Technology program have partnered with the state of Michigan to develop technology-driven urban services aimed at attracting and acclimating — aka “onboarding” — young people to the state. In this photo, program participants engage in roundtable discussions with Taubman Dean Jonathan Massey and guest reviewers following presentations to the state’s population growth campaign, Let’s Grow Michigan. (Photo by Dori Sumter)

“W4”

The winner of the U-M Arts Initiative’s recent ACTIVE-themed Photo Competition is “W4” by Ava Muntner, an undergraduate student in the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design.

View all the finalists in the recent competition

April 29, 2024

Roman’s battle

Roman DiLeo was born in June 2022 with what U-M Health C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital pediatric cardiologist David Peng described as “the most extreme and severe case of newborn dilated cardiomyopathy” he’d ever seen. Roman has had his share of life-saving medical procedures, from heart pumps to a heart transplant. But what his parents didn’t expect was what came after he received his new healthy heart. Like his namesake, professional wrestler Roman Reigns, Roman is not only a fighter but a cancer survivor. This video chronicles young Roman’s battles.

Wege Lecture

Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe (right) speaks with Jonathan Overpeck, dean of the School for Environment and Sustainability, during the 22nd Peter M. Wege Lecture on Sustainability. Hayhoe said talking about climate change doesn’t mean trying to change the minds of those who believe it is a hoax. Rather, it’s about “spending my energy on the people who are worried about climate change but don’t know what to do. That is a huge group of movable people,” she said. (Photo by Dave Brenner, School for Environment and Sustainability)

ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Awards

The 2023 ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award recipients are, from left: Lulu Shang, biostatistics; Markus Borsch, electrical and computer engineering; Maria Ahmed, molecular, cellular, and developmental biology; Kayla Kroning, chemistry; Evan Radeen, English language and literature; Luis Flores, sociology; and Kevin Napier, physics. Not pictured: Salem Elzway, history; Alex Kapiamba, mathematics; and Graham Liddell, comparative literature. The awards recognize exceptional work produced by doctoral students for the high caliber of their scholarship and the significance and interest of their findings. (Shannon Schultz, Michigan Photography)

Digital wellness

Middle school students engaged in a two-day symposium at North Quad on Feb. 8 and 15 as part of a digital wellness program that is a collaboration among the Marsal Family School of Education, School of Information and School of Social Work. U-M students and scholars launched an interprofessional course in partnership with sixth-graders at Ann Arbor Public Schools to provide classroom and real-world engagement about digital wellness.(Photo by Niki Williams)

Read more about the digital wellness project

April 17, 2024

Surname order and grades

Knowing your ABCs is essential to academic success, but having a last name starting with A, B or C might also help make the grade. An analysis by U-M researchers of more than 30 million grading records from U-M finds students with alphabetically lower-ranked names receive lower grades. In this video, researchers Jun Li, Jiaxin Pei and Helen Wang discuss the study’s findings and how they arrived at them.

Trees to tables

Storm-damaged trees and others from across U-M are being turned into new, functional campus furniture. Associate professor Joseph Trumpey and his students are milling logs and working with wood from trees that include the historic Tappan Oak. The resulting conference and coffee tables will be placed around the Ann Arbor campus. In this photo, Trumpey (far left) and his students pose with one of their projects, a conference table. (Photo by Jen Hogan, Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design)

Better battery manufacturing

New chemistries for batteries, semiconductors and more could be easier to manufacture, thanks to a new approach to making chemically complex materials that researchers at U-M and Samsung’s Advanced Materials Lab have demonstrated. Their new recipes use unconventional ingredients to make battery materials with fewer impurities. This video illustrates how a robotic lab tests these new designs.

Read more about the new battery research