Research

Natural Sciences

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Off

Mon, 03/31/2025 - 16:31

Postdoctoral researchers on campus are another sign of 51��Ƶ-Dearborn’s growing research culture. But what exactly do postdocs do, and why can they be a game changer for university research?

Postdoctoral researcher Gajendra Singh Chawda is currently researching high-frequency AC microgrids with Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Wencong Su. Photo by Annie Barker

Office of Research update for April 2025

lblouin — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 14:23:26 +0000

Office of Research update for April 2025 lblouin Mon, 03/31/2025 - 10:23

External Awards Received

U-M Principal Investigator: Tian An Wong
Project Title: Assessing Surveillance Efficacy and Fostering Visions for Community Safety for Social Justice in Detroit, MI
Sponsor: American Council of Learned Societies (via University of Cincinnati)
Awarded Amount: $23,500

The Safety Ain’t Surveillance Coalition is a citywide organization seeking to build non-punitive ways to build safety across our city, without continued reliance on surveillance technologies that strip Detroiters of their privacy while criminalizing Black neighborhoods and people. The research work will involve collaborating with community members to address the current divide between digital justice, racial injustice and public safety. We are carrying out this work by building critical perspectives that inform the protection of rights to privacy in the nation's largest majority-Black city through collaborative analysis, the development of a layered interactive digital map, and corresponding oral histories of Detroiters addressing digital justice, racial injustice and public safety.

U-M Principal Investigator: Jacob Napieralski
Project Title: Building and Enhancing Environmental Education and Stewardship in SE Michigan
Sponsor: DTE Energy Foundation
Awarded Amount: $18,000

The goal of this project is to increase access to and diversity of educational programming at the 51��Ƶ-Dearborn Environmental Interpretive Center for homeschool groups, K-12 classes, community members and our campus community in 2025. Engaging with as many residents (young and old) as possible will generate informed citizens that can tackle tough issues and help shift communities toward sustainability and equity. The project will also support stewardship opportunities to manage the natural area, both in terms of improving the safety and quality of the habitats.

Announcements

Tracking Federal Changes: 51��ƵOR Research Blog

The U-M Office of Research has continued to monitor and update their research blog Tracking Federal Changes related to ongoing changes in the federal administration. There you will find useful information such as the process for appealing terminated federal awards, as well as eligibility for the new research funding program that was developed in response to federal stop-work orders.

Resources for Faculty Preparing Proposals to NSF

The Office of Research Administration provides instruction and guidance documents for faculty who are working to prepare a proposal or manage an award from NSF. Interested faculty can find this information at this link in Google Drive.

Research Events in April

U-M Library, Introduction to Zotero for Citation Management
- Zotero, a free citation management tool that lets you easily organize and cite all the resources you use for your research. In this workshop, you will:
  - Set up your Zotero account
  - Learn how to get citations into Zotero
  - Create and organize personal and group libraries
  - Annotate the PDFs you read
  - Add a bibliography and in-text citations in your Google Docs or Microsoft Word document.
  - Please note: To use Zotero, you will need a desktop or laptop computer – not a Chromebook or tablet – capable of downloading software. While having a desktop or laptop is not required during the workshop, it would help if you plan to get your account set up during this session.
- Thursday, April 3, 12-1 p.m., virtual
- Register here
NSF Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Seminars
- The Ann Arbor Office of the Associate Dean for Research, College of Engineering is hosting an NSF CAREER seminar series and has extended an invitation to interested Dearborn faculty to join. Registration is required- register for individual events using the links below.
- NSF CAREER: How to Address Reviewer Feedback - Friday, April 4, 11:30 a.m.-1 p.m. - 3725 Bob and Betty Beyster Building
- NSF CAREER: Project Description: The Research Plan - Thursday, April 10, 11:30 a.m.-1 p.m. - Johnson Rooms 3rd Floor LEC
- NSF Panel TBD - Thursday, May 8, 11:30 a.m.-1 p.m. - Ford Library
American Cancer Society (ACS), Extramural Discovery Science Grants Workshop
- The Extramural Discovery Science Grants Workshop, hosted by the American Cancer Society (ACS), will provide tips on applying for the upcoming spring application cycle. The ACS awards research grants and fellowships to promising scientists early in their careers who have unique hypotheses for cancer prevention and study.
- Wednesday, April 9, 2-3:30 p.m., virtual
- Register here by April 7.
IRB-HSBS, IRB On-the-Road Drop-In Session
- Elizabeth Molina, the 51��Ƶ-Dearborn Health and Services and Behavioral Sciences Institutional Review Board (IRB-HSBS) liaison will be resuming the virtual “IRB On-the-Road” sessions once a month for any study team members who would like to have a one-on-one discussion about any questions they may have about the IRB process.
- Wednesday, April 16, 2-3:30 p.m., virtual
51��Ƶ-Ann Arbor Office of Research Development Grant Prix Seminar Series
- 51��Ƶ-Ann Arbor Office of Research Development (ORD) has launched a seminar series on research proposal development, featuring a range of topics designed to boost grant writing expertise. View previous sessions on the ORD YouTube. Grant Prix will continue every third Friday of the month at 12 p.m. starting in February:
  - April 25: NIH Updates to the Biosketch and using SciENcv, virtual
  - May 23: Broadening participation and inclusive excellence in grant proposals, virtual
- Register now for an opportunity to elevate your grant writing skills!

Research Resource Highlight: National Institutes of Health Bio Art Graphics Collection

Every month, the Office of Research features a resource and/or tool that is available for researchers. This month, we are featuring the free National Institutes of Health Bio Art Graphics collection.

NIH offers over 2,000 high-quality scientific and medical graphics for free to aid researchers, educators and healthcare professionals. These graphics serve to enhance presentations and research by providing accurate visual representations of complex scientific concepts. The collection includes various file formats, making it easy to use in research papers, presentations or proposals, enhancing their impact. NIH 3D also offers an open, community-driven portal to download, share and create bioscientific and medical 3D models for 3D printing and interactive 3D visualization, including virtual and augmented reality. Access the free collections here: NIH Bio Art Graphics and NIH 3D.

Upcoming Funding Opportunities

The Office of Research maintains a list of selected funding opportunities, organized by college on our website under Announcements. In addition, we encourage you to check out the Hanover Research subject area calendars with funding opportunities which we upload on a regular basis to our website.

Please refer to OVPR’s Tracking Federal Changes 2025 page for more information and updates related to the Trump administration's changes to federal research funding.

Use the updated U-M Research Commons to look up internal (to U-M) funding opportunities and Limited Submission opportunities open to Dearborn researchers.

Contact the 51��Ƶ-Dearborn Office of Research if you would like more information about submitting a proposal to any of the programs.

Faculty Research

Off

Mon, 03/31/2025 - 14:19

See which of your colleagues' work is getting funded, browse the calendar of upcoming research events and learn about ways to support your work.

Fixing the damn . . . waterways

kapalm — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 17:04:02 +0000

Fixing the damn . . . waterways kapalm Fri, 03/21/2025 - 13:04

Last Friday, one of Michigan’s largest tourist attractions — which also happens to be a tremendous driver of the state and nation’s economy — reopened for business. Every year, the Soo Locks close in mid-January for about 10 weeks so the Army Corps of Engineers can perform maintenance and ensure this gateway to the Great Lakes — in 2024, the locks enabled 68 million tons of raw materials like iron ore, taconite, coal, crude oil, salt, grain to be delivered to ports from Duluth to Buffalo and beyond — functions smoothly during the shipping season. An unexpected closure for maintenance would be devastating, causing costly delays in everything from auto assembly to food processing. Around 500,000 visitors will head to Sault Ste. Marie, in the northeastern Upper Peninsula, between now and next January to watch ships enter the Poe and Macarthur locks, then be slowly lowered to continue toward Lake Michigan or Lake Huron or raised to enter Lake Superior.

The nation’s extensive network of inland locks receives far less attention, but it is equally vital to the U.S. economy, facilitating the movement of 12 billion tons of commodities worth $770 billion each year. And the need to prevent unexpected malfunction is just as great. In 2003, costs from the closure of the main lock chamber, known as a miter gate, at the Greenup Locks in Kentucky resulted in a loss of approximately $41.9 million from delays and alternative shipping costs. While our nation’s system of lakes and rivers functions much as our highways do, with branching arteries ferrying traffic in multiple directions, there are a couple crucial differences. First, when traffic is blocked, there are no surface roads to hop onto. So when goods can’t make it through a waterway, they have to be delivered by different means, like trucks or trains.

Second, shipping lane shutdowns typically last much longer than freeway closures. “You can’t finish the maintenance within one or two days. Sometimes it takes several weeks or several months,” explains Associate Professor of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering Zhen Hu. “So we cannot do the maintenance or repair of the locks too frequently. We have to consider the disruption to the supply chain and other transportation, that kind of stuff.”

Armagan Bayram

Currently, lock maintenance scheduling decisions are made based on what might best be described as highly informed guesswork: decision-makers consider the age of the lock, the duration of operation, the results of inspections and other relevant factors — much like you bring your car in for maintenance based on mileage, time of year and whether you hear a strange noise. Using advanced mathematical models and machine learning, Hu and his fellow IMSE Associate Professor Armagan Bayram aim to develop a much more fine-tuned and integrated system to inform lock maintenance schedules. Their work, which will incorporate sensor data from locks along the Ohio River, is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Hu explains it like this: “You have locks in different places along the rivers. On one river, you have maybe 10 locks. The traditional way of predicting failures is just looking at the lock by itself. But using this machine learning model, it allows us to share information across the different locks. If you consider the locks like a patient, when a doctor diagnoses the failures or disease of a patient, they do not only look at that individual, but also consider other similarities among different patients. That can help us to predict failure faster and with higher confidence.”

Data security is especially vital in this project — the monitoring data of the locks, if breached, could compromise national security and have far-reaching economic effects. In the method the researchers will use — known as federated learning — the data remains decentralized rather than stored on a central server, as in more traditional AI-training models, so it is considered highly protected. “This new machine learning approach allows us to preserve the privacy of the data. You do not have to share the data directly,” Hu explains.

A major challenge of the project is that there is a limited amount of data to work with. “Locks typically operate for anywhere from 60 to 90 years and failure is rare,” Hu explains. “Also, a miter gate is not like a car. You have millions of cars, but you don't have that many miter gates. There are only a few hundred in the U.S. This makes it hard to get failure data.” To address this challenge, Hu and Bayram plan to tackle the highly complex task of integrating information from computer simulations with data from real-time, sensor-based observations as they build out their model.

In addition to enabling engineers to set more precise maintenance schedules of individual miter gates, Hu and Bayram’s project aims to analyze the economic impacts on the overall transportation and supply chain networks when one or two locks are shut down. This information could point to the optimal time to take a specific lock out of service, Hu says. “We want to create a framework that will help with making a decision regarding when to perform maintenance, repair or replacement and look at it at a system level, not the individual level. That can reduce unnecessary downtime and reduce the overall system operational costs,” he explains.

”We don’t want to perform the repair too frequently, and we don’t want to perform the repair too late,” Hu adds. In other words, he and Bayram aim to find the sweet spot that will keep both ships and our economy flowing smoothly.

###

Story by Kristin Palm

The preliminary results of Hu and Bayram's research were generated through the support of a digital twin project funded by the United States Army Corps of Engineers through University of California San Diego and Hottinger Bruel & Kjaer.

Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering

Off

Tue, 03/25/2025 - 15:49

In the U.S., ships transport $770 billion worth of commodities via inland lakes and rivers each year. IMSE Associate Professors Zhen Hu and Armagan Bayram aim to make this system more cost-effective and efficient.

IMSE Associate Professor Zhen Hu is leading a project to make inland waterway transport more efficient. Photo by Annie Barker

Understanding cultural beliefs to bridge mental health literacy gaps

stuxbury — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 18:20:28 +0000

Understanding cultural beliefs to bridge mental health literacy gaps stuxbury Wed, 03/19/2025 - 14:20

Clinical Health Psychology graduate student Abirami Suthan is passionate about mental health. Many times, people can point to an accolade or interest that influenced their career choice. For Suthan, it was a person.

When Suthan was an undergraduate student and a resident assistant at the University of Toronto, she held weekly meetings. One of Suthan’s favorite residents, CJ, who was an international student from India, would always be there and ready to help. Then CJ stopped showing up. “When I noticed a shift in her behavior, I reached out. CJ told me she was having suicidal thoughts, but was fearful to seek help. When she was in high school in India, a teacher she confided in suspended CJ after she shared that she was having these thoughts,” says Suthan, who helped CJ make a counseling appointment and walked her to the first session. “CJ has since graduated and is now doing well. Years later, her experience still affects me. Being from the South Asian culture myself, I know how deeply stigma shapes our responses to suicide. I needed to do something more to address this."

Suthan — who was raised by Sri Lankan parents and grew up in a South Asian American neighborhood in Texas — says there's a pattern of silence and shame around mental health in her community. To address this, Suthan became focused on educating herself and others.

Suthan, who started at 51��Ƶ-Dearborn in Fall 2023 and has an undergraduate degree in psychology and anthropology, is working on her thesis, "Cultural Identity and Suicide in South Asian Americans." She’s looking at age, cultural perspectives, mental health literacy, societal stigma and more.

To do this, Suthan — who’s advised by Psychology Professor Nancy Wrobel — created a survey that asks a variety of questions aimed at South Asian American-identifying adults aged 18 to 60 to gauge what people believe about mental health and suicide and how it’s tied to their cultural identities. Her research work is funded by an EXP+ Graduate Student Independent Research grant, which allows Suthan to compensate survey participants for their time.

“I believe suicide prevention work in a community starts with destigmatization and understanding cultural beliefs,” says Suthan, who chose 51��Ƶ-Dearborn for graduate school because of the faculty expertise and its clinical-based experiences. “For example, if someone believes depression is due to laziness and can be fixed through working harder — that’s one belief I’ve heard in my community — mental health literacy efforts can be made to explain how conditions are biological and psychological.” She’s also looking at how South Asian and American identities can be at odds with one another — one is more of a collective mindset and the other is more about the individual, respectively — and ways to bring those closer together. “I want to know, ‘How can we balance the norms of both cultures?’”

Suthan says her research didn’t start with suicide in mind. It began with a curiosity about mental health resources and how much they were accessed by South Asian Americans. “There was quite a bit of research on this and it says access is minimal because there are lots of stigma barriers,” she says. “Then I noticed a huge literature gap on South Asian American beliefs about suicide — there’s barely anything out there. I wanted to help find answers.” Data about South Asian Americans and suicide was so scarce that she looked to the United Kingdom, a comparable Western society to the United States, for statistics. Suthan found that South Asians in the UK were three times more likely to commit suicide and South Asian women were 7.8 times more likely to inflict self-harm than their white counterparts. “I’m not entirely sure why there is a lack of data in the U.S.,” Suthan says. “But it’s an issue that needs to be addressed.”

Suthan and her research took first place at the recent Three Minute Thesis Competition at 51��Ƶ-Dearborn. The competition, run by the Office of Graduate Studies, provides an opportunity for graduate-level students to share their research in three minutes or less in an uncomplicated and easy-to-understand way. Suthan will represent the university at the Midwestern Association of Graduate Schools regional competition from April 2 to 4 in Indianapolis. “I’m looking forward to representing 51��Ƶ-Dearborn and having a larger audience to talk with about this research gap in the South Asian American community and what I plan to do about it,” she says.

Suthan says she has identified participants for her survey, which will be sent out soon. And she’s hoping the answers show trends that will give insight for next steps in building bridges between the South Asian American community and mental health literacy.

Suthan has seen how education can open conversations to create change in her own family. When she first told her parents — who lived through the Sri Lankan Civil War — that she wanted to pursue a career in psychology, they had negative feelings about her working in mental health. But, knowing her parents' story about leaving their country because of a war and relocating nearly 10,000 miles away with nothing but hope for a better life, puts things in perspective. “Honestly, it helps me understand why mental health was put on the back burner for them. It was just about survival — it’s hard to think beyond that when your basic needs aren’t being met. Many people from South Asian communities have this type of trauma,” Suthan says. “But once things have stabilized, there is an opportunity to go beyond the physical needs.”

Now, Suthan says her mother sends her journal and magazine clippings about careers in suicide prevention and mental health. “It was once a topic that wasn’t discussed and now she is sending me articles and making comments on how interesting they are. She is now my biggest supporter. And my father, even though he was skeptical when I first chose this career path, is one of my biggest cheerleaders,” she says.

Suthan says she has hopes that educating the South Asian American community in a way that embraces cultural awareness will open doors for more South Asian therapists, more research studies and an increased acceptance of mental health needs.

These would all help to realize the ultimate goal of suicide prevention. “I love my community and I come from some very resilient people. But, even when we don’t talk about it, trauma still exists,” she says. “Imagine how much better life would be if we took care of each other now — before it is too late.”

Story by Sarah Tuxbury

Behavioral Sciences

Off

Wed, 03/19/2025 - 18:18

Three Minute Thesis Competition winner Abirami Suthan’s research looks to open doors for mental health care acceptance in South Asian American communities.

Graduate student Abirami Suthan won the 2025 Three Minute Thesis Competition at 51��Ƶ-Dearborn. Photo by Annie Barker

Office of Research update for March 2025

lblouin — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 12:22:01 +0000

Office of Research update for March 2025 lblouin Wed, 03/12/2025 - 08:22

External Awards Received

U-M Principal Investigator: Pravansu Mohanty
Project Title: Digital Enterprise Technology for the Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle Phase II
Sponsor: Department of Defense - Army (via National Center for Manufacturing Sciences)
Award Amount: $1,645,200

This project supports the Army’s Digital Transformation Strategy by creating a collaborative digital engineering environment where industry partners can improve the design, manufacturing, and maintenance of military systems. By using digital tools and models, teams can manage engineering changes more efficiently, optimize supply chains, and reduce costs. The project also includes workforce development efforts, offering training in systems engineering and digital technologies to better prepare professionals for the future of defense manufacturing.

U-M Principal Investigator: Suvranta Tripathy
Project Title: Elucidating the Impact of Early Endosomal pH on SARS-CoV-2 Transport in Cardiomyocytes
Sponsor: American Heart Association
Awarded Amount: $199,327

Cardiac injury is the most frequent complication of COVID-19. We aim to understand how the virus gets into heart cells, hoping to find ways to stop it. The virus is taken into the heart cell within a membrane-bound compartment known as an endosome. The acidity in the endosomes typically increases as the compartment moves from the cell periphery towards the inside. Intriguingly, genetic studies of COVID-19 patients have highlighted the importance of the protein NHE9 in controlling this acidity. Higher levels of NHE9 make the endosome less acidic, which we observed disrupts the virus's journey within the cell and makes it harder for it to infect. This disruption involves how tiny "motor proteins" move the endosomes along pathways within the cell. We will study how changes in NHE9 manipulate the acidity to affect the movement of the virus-containing endosomes, including the role of these motor proteins. The goal is to see if targeting NHE9 could be a new way to stop viral entry and prevent COVID-19 related heart damage.

U-M Principal Investigator: Finn Bell
Project Title: The Least of These: Violence, freedom, and the promise of a new world
Direct Sponsor: American Bar Foundation
Awarded Amount: $36,000

The Least of These traces the legacy of black freedom making in former slave societies. It attends to the ways that emergent collectives imagined and enacted forms of freedom, for themselves and for others, and worked toward a future without bondage. The project does so to better inform how we might design a more just world. The project is led by Reuben Jonathan Miller at the University of Chicago. Bell lends methodological expertise on oral history and research coordination.

U-M Principal Investigator: Zhen Hu
Project Title: Surrogate Modeling for Dynamic Systems Based on Reduced-Order Modeling
Direct Sponsor: Sandia National Laboratories
Awarded Amount: $80,000

Hu will work with researchers from Sandia National Laboratories to develop reduced-order modeling techniques for fast surrogate modeling of computational expensive nonlinear dynamic systems. The surrogate model will accelerate the analysis, monitoring and control of complex nonlinear dynamics systems.

U-M Principal Investigator: Christos Constantinides
Project Title: Leveraging Radical Dynamics to Generate Nuclear Spin Hyperpolarization
Direct Sponsor: Department of Energy
Award Amount: $600,000

This project aims to improve Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, a technique used to analyze molecular structures, by developing new materials that enhance signal strength. By designing and testing special molecules called radicals, this project aims to make NMR imaging more sensitive and efficient. This could lead to better tools for studying chemistry, materials and even medical imaging.

Announcements

51��Ƶ-Dearborn Earns the R2 Carnegie Classification

Earlier this month, 51��Ƶ-Dearborn was reclassified as an R2 institution–a designation for universities with high research activity and one of three classifications for doctoral universities, along with R1 (very high research activity) and D/PU (doctoral/professional universities).

This designation comes from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the American Council on Education for universities that award at least 20 research doctorates and have $5 million average annual research spending. It is the first time the university has received this designation. See the Reporter article here!

51��ƵOR Continues to Monitor Updates to Federal Funding

The U-M Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR) continues to update their webpage for researchers and administrators to track information related to federal directives that may impact research and federally sponsored projects. Everyone is encouraged to visit this page periodically to view the most recent updates and recommendations from OVPR.

Virtual Gift Card Option for Human Subjects Payments

The Human Subjects Incentives Program (HSIP) has added an option for virtual gift cards that can be e-mailed to subjects. Researchers who have IRB approval to provide gift cards to research participants can submit their requests through our HSIP Request form to obtain such payments, including electronic gift cards.

Research Events in March

M-PACT Career Development Series: Early-Career Faculty as Change Agents
- In this webinar, you will discover strategies to navigate tenure while remaining a committed change agent. Experience insightful discussions with both early-career and seasoned faculty who will share their experiences and lessons learned. The webinar will provide valuable resources to enhance leadership skills and foster advocacy for emerging academic leaders. Designed to both inspire and equip, this session will prepare early-career faculty to excel as both scholars and transformational leaders.
- Registration required
- Wednesday, March 10 @ 12 p.m., virtual
IRWG; Sustaining Feminist Research in an Era of Change
- Join the 51��Ƶ-Ann Arbor Institute for Research on Women & Gender (IRWG) for an engaging town hall focused on navigating the changing research landscape with confidence and innovation. This conversation will highlight the experiences of scholars who have successfully adapted to shifts in politics, policy, funding, and institutional priorities — offering actionable insights for the future. Panelists will share their experiences, discuss strategies and take questions from attendees.
- Thursday, March 13 @ 4-5:30 p.m.
  - In-person (location TBD) and virtual option
  - Registration required
NSF Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Seminars
- The Ann Arbor Office of the Associate Dean for Research, College of Engineering is hosting an NSF CAREER seminar series and has extended an invitation to interested Dearborn faculty to join. Registration is required- register for individual events using the links below.
- NSF CAREER: Structuring your CAREER for Reviewers - Thursday, March 13, 11:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m. - Johnson Rooms 3rd Floor LEC
- NSF CAREER: How to Address Reviewer Feedback - Friday, April 4, 11:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m. - 3336 Duderstadt or Robotics
- NSF CAREER: Project Description: The Research Plan - Thursday, April 10, 11:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m. - Johnson Rooms 3rd Floor LEC
- NSF Panel TBD - Thursday, May 8, 11:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m. - Ford Library
IRB-HSBS, IRB On-the-Road Drop-In Session
- Elizabeth Molina, the 51��Ƶ-Dearborn Health and Services and Behavioral Sciences Institutional Review Board (IRB-HSBS) liaison will be resuming the virtual “IRB On-the-Road” sessions once a month for any study team members who would like to have a one-on-one discussion about any questions they may have about the IRB process.
- Wednesday, March 19, 2-3:30 p.m., virtual
- Wednesday, April 16, 2-3:30 p.m., virtual
PERI Winter 2025 Focused Intensive: Strategically Navigating Projects for Public Impact
- The Office of Public Engagement and Research Impacts is hosting a Winter 2025 Focused Intensive, composed of four virtual learning experience sessions between Feb. 21 and March 21 on planning and managing projects for public impact, including designing, implementing, evaluating, and closing projects and partnerships. Participants will explore and apply frameworks, resources and best practices in equitable, collaborative project planning and management to an initiative of the participant's choosing. All U-M faculty, research trainees and research support staff are welcome to apply. Faculty are eligible for $500 in research discretionary funds after completing the final session.
  - Session 3: Keeping Your Project on Track (or Changing Course if Necessary); Friday, March 14 - 10-11:30 a.m., virtual
  - Session 4: Transitioning and Wrapping up for Impact; Friday, March 21, 10-11:30 a.m., virtual
- Registration required
51��Ƶ-Ann Arbor Office of Research Development Grant Prix Seminar Series
- 51��Ƶ-Ann Arbor Office of Research Development (ORD) has launched a seminar series on research proposal development, featuring a range of topics designed to boost grant writing expertise. View previous sessions on the ORD YouTube. Grant Prix will continue every third Friday of the month at 12 p.m. starting in February:
  - March 28: Budgeting for large-scale proposals, virtual
  - April 25: NIH Updates to the Biosketch (and using SciENcv, virtual)
  - May 23: Broadening participation and inclusive excellence in grant proposals, virtual
- Register now for an opportunity to elevate your grant writing skills!
MICHR, Communicating the Value of Your Research to a Broad Audience: How to Tailor Communications to Specific People or Groups
- This two-hour workshop will teach the importance of value propositions and tailoring research communication in a way that makes it compelling for every audience. Often referred to as the “elevator pitch,” you will have the opportunity to create a short, professional introduction for your research that can be used at any social gathering, departmental meeting, or professional conference. You will learn how to tailor your elevator pitch to fit the different audiences and situations you may face in the future.
- This workshop is sponsored by FastForward, Office of Faculty Development, and MICHR.
- Faculty can register. If you are a U-M staff member or student, please contact Faculty Development at 51��ƵMS-Faculty-Development@med.umich.edu to request registration.
- Thursday, March 13 @ 12-2:00 p.m., virtual

Research Resource Highlight: Protocols.io

Every month, the Office of Research features a resource and/or tool that is available for researchers. This month we are featuring Protocols.io.

Protocols.io is a free and open-access repository and workflow tool for researchers to collaboratively create step-by-step, interactive, and dynamic protocols that can be read and run on mobile or the web. With protocols.io, you can share protocols with colleagues, collaborators, or specific research communities while maintaining control over who sees your work. Alternatively, you can make your protocols publicly discoverable, ensuring you receive credit and enabling other researchers to build on your work. The platform's versioning, Q&A, and troubleshooting features foster real-time communication. To learn more, please visit the protocols.io website.

Upcoming Funding Opportunities

The Office of Research maintains a list of selected funding opportunities, organized by college on our website under Announcements. In addition, yearly grant calendars organized by subject area provided by Hanover Research are available there as well.

Please refer to the Research Resource Highlight section above for more information and updates related to the Trump administration's changes to federal research funding.

Use the updated U-M Research Commons to look up internal (to U-M) funding opportunities and Limited Submission opportunities open to Dearborn researchers.

Contact the 51��Ƶ-Dearborn Office of Research if you would like more information about submitting a proposal to any of the programs.

Faculty Research

Off

Wed, 03/12/2025 - 12:21

See which of your colleagues' work is getting funded, browse the calendar of upcoming research events and learn about ways to support your work.

51��Ƶ-Dearborn earns R2 research designation

lblouin — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 12:34:13 +0000

51��Ƶ-Dearborn earns R2 research designation lblouin Wed, 02/26/2025 - 07:34

By every big metric that Vice Provost for Research and Dean of Graduate Studies Armen Zakarian tracks, 51��Ƶ-Dearborn’s research enterprise is on a tear. The big top line stat: Since 2018, externally funded research expenditures have nearly tripled, increasing from $4.8 million to a projected $13.2 million for FY25. Earlier this month, that growth led to a reclassification of 51��Ƶ-Dearborn as an R2 institution, a designation from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the American Council on Education for universities that award at least 20 research doctorates and have $5 million average annual research spending. It’s the first time the university has received this designation. 51��Ƶ-Dearborn Chancellor Domenico Grasso says the honorific is, without a doubt, an important new feather in the cap for the university. But, for him, the real achievement is all the work that it’s a reflection of. “This recognizes something which we already accomplished — and that is great and I’m very proud of that — but we were going to do it anyway. And honestly, we’re not even satisfied with where we are. There remains enormous untapped potential, so this is really just the start for us,” Grasso says.

So how did we get here? Zakarian and Grasso point to a number of contributing factors. Flash back to 2018 and Zakarian says you’d see an institution where research was “recognized but not prioritized.” The tone changed when Grasso came in and made growing the university’s research and scholarly output one of his top priorities. “In my view, distinguished universities are defined by a faculty comprising scholar-teachers. To my mind, the definition of a professor is someone who is a scholar at the forefront of their field, sharing their passion, knowledge and discoveries with their students,” Grasso says. “Even in the elite small liberal arts schools in New England, where they are known for their focus on educating undergraduate students, the faculty are active scholars.” Zakarian says the administration endorsed that model and supported faculty with larger investments in research development and pre- and post-award support, so researchers could get assistance securing and administering grants.

Aside from the messaging and support from leadership, Zakarian thinks three other things helped set the stage for the explosive research growth the university has seen over the past few years. First, he says faculty consistently cite a shortage of time as their biggest impediment to building their research careers. So some departments decided to lighten the teaching load from three to two courses per semester. The second big factor: the sanctioning of the College of Engineering and Computer Science doctoral programs by U-M’s Rackham Graduate School in 2019. That affiliation meant the programs had to meet the same rigorous standards as doctoral programs on the Ann Arbor campus, which boosted 51��Ƶ-Dearborn’s prestige and ability to recruit top PhD students. This helped faculty recruit valuable talent to power their labs, which further eased their time/labor burden. Finally, Zakarian says when filling faculty vacancies, colleges prioritized hiring ambitious, early-career, research-focused scholars who had the potential to become leaders in their fields.

Then, of course, there’s something to be said for momentum. As some of the above changes started to take root, a few faculty started landing bigger grants, and a larger share of the awards were coming from federal funders, like the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy and Department of Defense. “We used to get very few million dollar grants. But it just took a few teams to do that and then we started getting more,” Zakarian says. “You basically reach a point where I think people are looking at what each other are doing, and the mood shifts. Now, we are approaching $85 million in submitted proposals, which I think is just incredible. And the number of proposals hasn’t gone up by a whole lot. That means faculty are more confident going for bigger and bigger grants. Frankly, that’s what it’s going to take. It would be difficult for us to reach the next level, $200,000 at a time.”

Zakarian says the university has also reached a point where the research enterprise has a fairly broad base. “When I think about how sustainable this is, I’m basically looking at whether this is just a handful of people bringing in the big dollar amounts. But it’s much broader than that,” he says. Moreover, while engineering disciplines are responsible for the largest share of the research growth, Zakarian says other disciplines, particularly in the natural sciences, are starting to develop the same momentum. Last year, with engineering in a good spot, the Office of Research made it a priority to assist faculty in the natural sciences. That resulted in several big research grants in biology and chemistry from national funders, including the National Institutes of Health and Department of Energy. Looking ahead, Zakarian and Grasso say the most untapped potential lies in those disciplines, along with computer science, artificial intelligence, and health and human services — the latter of which could also be targeting NIH grants, one of the national funders with the biggest budget.

Grasso notes, however, that realizing that potential now faces some new political hurdles. The Trump administration has pursued several measures that directly disrupt university research, including attempting to severely cut the amount of indirect costs covered by NIH grants, layoffs at the National Science Foundation and pauses by grant review committees. “This is a significant threat,” Grasso says. “I understand the desire to be cost conscious and efficient. But research has been the fuel in the engine that has powered this country, whether you’re talking about revolutionary medications, transistors, AI or practically everything that has changed the world — it all has roots in research — and many of those roots found a home in American soil. To hamper this is incredibly reckless and foolhardy.”

Even within the climate, Zakarian says the R2 designation and what it represents should help keep the momentum going. “Obviously, a lot of this goes back to our ability to recruit and retain top faculty, and I think this designation really does help us communicate that if you are really ambitious and you want to build a strong research program, you can do it here. It says, ‘We’re open for business. We have the resources and the vision. Others have done it, you can do it too.’”

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Story by Lou Blouin

College of Education, Health, and Human Services

College of Business

Off

Wed, 02/26/2025 - 12:33

The recognition follows six years of rapid growth in which externally funded research spending at 51��Ƶ-Dearborn has nearly tripled. So how did we get here? And what’s next?

Associate Professor Dr. Zhi Zhang (not pictured) and Assistant Professor Jie Fan (pictured, middle) recently landed a $465,000 grant from the NIH. Large federal grants helped power 51��Ƶ-Dearborn to an R2 designation in 2025. Photo by Julianne Lindsay

For a 51��Ƶ-Dearborn student and professor, the influence goes both ways

lblouin — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 13:06:36 +0000

For a 51��Ƶ-Dearborn student and professor, the influence goes both ways lblouin Mon, 02/24/2025 - 08:06

In 2020, Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Wencong Su was looking for an undergraduate student to assist with a project focused on adding innovative energy efficiency measures to the already LEED-certified Engineering Lab Building. At the time, Su was teaching all graduate courses so he didn’t have many undergrads in his orbit. So Su asked for a little help from one of his graduate assistants, who emailed the job posting to the students in a 200-level lab. LaRico Andres, a sophomore and recent transfer from Henry Ford College, thought it sounded interesting and reached out to Su with his resume. Su remembers Andres didn’t exactly fit the description of the type of student who usually applies for these kinds of opportunities. Andres was a few years older than Su, already had a full-time job working as an instrument tech at the Great Lakes Water Authority, and his GPA at the time wasn’t knocking anyone out. But after the two chatted for a little while, Su offered him the job. Andres was personable, seemed excited to learn, and though he was a research novice, it turned out his background in instrumentation was actually quite relevant to the types of things they would be investigating in the ELB.

Andres excelled on the project and it led to many more opportunities to work alongside Su. On one project supported by the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps — a program that helps researchers translate their laboratory work into marketable products — Andres traveled to conferences in Orlando, San Diego and Austin, completing a flurry of more than 100 interviews with industrial professionals in seven weeks about a product Su’s lab was developing. On another project, he and Su created an app that used the ELB’s building management software and the utility’s fuel profile to give users an idea of what being a building occupant added to their personal carbon footprint. As you’d expect, Andres picked up a lot of skills working with Su. But as often happens when two people spend a lot of time together, Andres and Su also started talking about things other than their work. Andres jokes that they initially bonded over the fact that they “both like to eat.” But the conversations gradually grew more personal. Both men had daughters, so they talked about their kids. Su shared some of the challenges he faced when he first came to the United States for college and he knew very little English. Andres reciprocated with stories about some challenges he faced growing up in Detroit, not always having enough money to pay all the bills at once, and some things that happened when he was younger that tripped up his plans to go to college earlier in his life.

Su says he enjoyed Andres' perspective — in part, because Su is someone who’s interested in people, and the ups and downs of Andres’ life made for a compelling personal story. In addition, Su says he’s always been interested in Detroit, and through Andres, a lifelong Detroiter, he enjoyed learning about a side of the city that “you don’t hear about on the TV news.” Interestingly, at a certain point, both men noticed that many of their personal conversations weren’t actually that separate from their field of study: energy systems. For example, Andres shared stories about how, in his family, when the power would go out, that meant you didn’t open the fridge so his grandfather’s insulin wouldn’t spoil. Or how, if the power was out long enough, they’d start barbequing the meat they had in the freezer so it wouldn’t go to waste. Or how he and his relatives used to take turns refilling his grandmother’s boiler when she couldn’t afford to fix it right away. “The biggest burden a lot of my people have is energy, whether it’s fuel, gassing up your car going to work, or just trying to keep your house warm,” Andres says. “I know what it’s like to struggle to pay a utility bill and choose between paying that bill on time or buying food. I know people whose furnaces go out and can’t afford to get them fixed. That’s the impact energy has. Energy helps. But if you don't have a lot of money, energy can be a burden.”

Andres’ testimony left an impression on Su, and eventually the two of them started kicking around ideas for projects focused on energy justice, an emerging field that focuses on equity, affordability, accessibility and participation in the energy system and the ongoing transition to new energy technologies. That lens became the cornerstone of their 2023 Summer Undergraduate Research Experience project, in which Andres helped create an interactive mapping tool that explores the connection between historical real estate redlining and disparities in energy access in metro Detroit. Using Andres’ dashboard, a user can quickly toggle through different layers and explore whether a neighborhood is formerly redlined, where current utility outages are and their causes, locations of renewable energy installations and EV charging stations, as well as census data that provides demographic information about the people currently living in the neighborhood. One of the big reveals from Andres’ work is that metro Detroit neighborhoods that were historically redlined tend to be lower-income, non-white, have power outages that tend to be longer, and have less access to renewable energy and EV charging infrastructure. Their work on the app led to an IEEE conference publication in 2023.

Andres shows off an interactive mapping tool he helped create that explores the connection between historical real estate redlining and disparities in energy access. Photo by Annie Barker

After the project, Andres was nearing the end of his undergraduate career, and Su began asking him a little more frequently and persistently if he’d ever thought about grad school. Andres says that honestly wasn’t on his radar when he initially transferred to 51��Ƶ-Dearborn. At that time, his thinking pretty much revolved around the straightforward calculus that getting an engineering degree would help him get a higher-paying job and lead to a more comfortable life for him and his family. But after working in Su’s lab, particularly on the energy justice-focused mapping project, he says his perspective began to change. “If I did the safe thing and got a job, yeah, that would help me. But working with Professor Su helped me see what it is that I really wanted to do. And what I really wanted to do was help people,” Andres says. To do that, Andres decided to take a chance and continue his education, enrolling in the department’s doctoral program, where he’s now continuing his work alongside Su. Andres is still just in his first year of the program, but the pair have already started discussing ideas for Andres’ dissertation research. Not surprisingly, energy justice topics are rising to the top of their list. One idea they’ve been kicking around recently is creating a machine learning-based app that would use weather and outage data to forecast the likelihood of power outages, sort of like the snow day prediction models that have become super popular with parents and kids. “A technology like this could have multiple applications,” Su says. “It could help a utility identify where they need to upgrade their infrastructure to make it more resilient, or where they might need to deploy the most crews ahead of a storm. But it could also directly help people. Like, if you saw that there was a 90% chance you were going to lose your power for five hours tomorrow, people could charge their batteries or make a trip out to get food.”

Andres says it’s still a little wild to think he’s in a PhD program, and the future he’s contemplating for himself now is much different than the one he was thinking about a few years ago. For the time being, he’d love to continue to do research in the energy justice field and develop innovative ways to help people. He also wants to start a nonprofit that gets young people excited about things like sustainable energy technologies and smart cities. Ultimately, if all goes well, he’d love to be a college professor just like his mentor. “It’s funny, the opportunities that come up in your life,” Andres says. “Like, what if I had ignored that email? What if I hadn’t stepped out and emailed professor Su? He saw something in me that I didn’t even know about myself. And he probably doesn't even know how many other people that’s going to touch. My daughter and little cousins, they all get to see that, ‘Hey, Uncle Rico is gonna be a doctor.’ Because of Professor Su, I’m setting a new example for the people in my life. My wife, sister and other family members, everybody is, like, ‘Wow, you was always smart.’ I just went the long way. And I’m just glad I have an opportunity now to make an impact in the community.”

That a college professor would have such a profound impact on a student isn’t super surprising. It’s what many faculty shoot to achieve every day. But Su says Andres has also had a big influence on him. On a personal level, he finds Andres' life so inspiring, and admires his work ethic, the personal sacrifices he’s making to be part of the PhD program, and his vision for using research to help people in his community. Their relationship has also had a big influence on Su’s own work. “For example, losing power for one hour in a wealthy neighborhood compared to a disadvantaged neighborhood, it has totally different impacts. Or if you lose power, then that suddenly becomes a food issue for some people. I never really thought about stuff like that before,” Su says. “Now, I'm thinking more about how our research has the potential to help people. Because, otherwise, maybe you’re just publishing a paper with some very fancy solutions and complicated equations. But how are you helping average people?”

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Story by Lou Blouin

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Off

Mon, 02/24/2025 - 12:56

Unlikely collaborators who met through a job posting, first-year PhD student LaRico Andres and Professor Wencong Su have forged a partnership that’s left a lasting mark on both men.

Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Wencong Su (left) and doctoral student LaRico Andres have teamed up on a number of research projects focusing on energy justice. Photo by Annie Barker

Helping nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy go hi-res

lblouin — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 13:48:43 +0000

Helping nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy go hi-res lblouin Wed, 02/19/2025 - 08:48

Whether you’re talking about MRI, which doctors use to image tissues in the body, or the brand of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy used by organic chemists, Assistant Professor of Chemistry Christos Constantinides says the core idea behind the technique is basically the same. You start with a sample — in organic chemistry, it’s a compound you want to know the structure of, and in an MRI, it’s your body — and you surround it within a powerful magnet. The magnetic field causes the nuclei in the atoms in the sample, which have naturally occurring random spins, to momentarily align these spins with the external field, either in a parallel (lower energy state) or antiparallel orientation (higher energy state). Then, you shoot radio waves at the sample, which causes the spins of the parallel-spinning nuclei to momentarily flip to an antiparallel state. When you turn off the radio waves, these flipped nuclei then “relax,” returning to their original orientation. That releases a small amount of energy as an oscillating magnetic field, which induces an electrical signal. This signal is detected and processed to generate an NMR spectrum in the case of molecular analysis. For MRI, it can be used to create an image of tissues in the body.

Constantinides says NMR is an extremely powerful technique, but it still has some limitations. Notably, certain substances give off very weak signals when they relax out of their “excited” state, which means the spectra generated through NMR often don’t tell you everything you want to know. Scientists have discovered various ways to enhance NMR’s powers. For example, with MRI, contrast dyes can help doctors see more details in the brain, heart, blood vessels, soft tissues and tumors. In materials chemistry, Constantinides says organic chemists use what are called polarizing agents, which are chemical compounds that are added in solution with the sample. Chemically speaking, these compounds are “radicals,” meaning they have at least one unpaired electron (most atoms have electrons which orbit the nucleus in pairs). In an NMR environment, Constantinides says these unpaired electrons are able to influence the nucleus of the molecules in the sample through spin polarization transfer mechanisms, indirectly assisting the “flipping” process that is essential to NMR imaging. “This basically increases the sensitivity of the technique,” he says. “So for molecules that are difficult to get a good NMR spectrum because they give very weak signals, by adding a little bit of this organic radical substance, it basically amplifies the signal and you get more detail.”

Polarizing agents have greatly enhanced NMR spectroscopy, but they aren’t universally effective. For example, Constantinides says today’s most common polarizing agents, known as nitronyl nitroxides, can only be used with certain kinds of substances, because these radicals react with compounds that oxidize easily. With a new $600,000 project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and in conjunction with the Ames National Laboratory, Constantinides is looking to create novel polarizing agents that don’t have these limitations. He says when he describes this project to others, it ends up sounding like a lot of physics, because of the potential applications for NMR and MRI. But the day-to-day work will be a lot of advanced and, at times, unglamorous synthetic organic chemistry. During the three-year project, Constantinides estimates they’ll create 50 to 100 new derivatives of a class of molecules known as Blatter radicals — each of which takes weeks and a carefully planned sequence of chemical reactions to create. “Each compound requires six to 10 different steps,” he says. “One step can take multiple days to set up the chemical reaction, then you have to process it, clean it up a little bit and remove all the inorganic stuff, purify it, and then characterize it to see if you’ve made what you think you’ve made.” To assist with the labor-intensive research, Constantinides is hiring a postdoctoral research fellow and several undergraduates, which will give students an opportunity to get hands-on experience in some very advanced chemistry.

Constantinides in the lab with student research assistants Haidar Dakdouk (middle) and Carter Allen (front). Photo by Annie Barker

Even with this patient, methodical approach, Constantinides says success in organic chemistry is never assured. Over the years, he’s refined multiple techniques for creating certain kinds of molecules. But when you’re making something totally new, he says you never really know which methods will give you the best result — or whether your plan will even work — until you actually try it. “Maybe all of them fail, and then you have to try something totally different. It can be a lot of trial and error,” he says. As each new polarizing agent is created, Constantinides says they’ll first characterize it using the NMR setup at 51��Ƶ-Dearborn. After that, they’ll send the new compounds to the Ames National Laboratory, where they will be mixed in solution with substances that have well-known NMR profiles. By seeing how much of a boost in the signal the nuclei give off, they’ll know which new polarizing agents have the most potential to enhance NMR techniques.

Constantinides says some of his preliminary published research on this topic has shown a lot of potential for Blatter-type radicals, which is why the DOE has funded further work in this area. He says if all goes well, he’s hoping for two big applications: One, it’ll give materials chemists like himself tools for providing detailed characterizations of molecules which have been hard to study using other techniques. The even bigger payoff would be if one of the new molecules they create is suitable for use in MRI, which would give doctors much higher-resolution images of tissues and tumors.

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Story by Lou Blouin

Faculty Research

Technology

Natural Sciences

Off

Wed, 02/19/2025 - 13:48

Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, used in technologies like MRI, helps scientists see the unseen. New research from Assistant Professor Christos Constantinides could help magnify NMR’s powers even more.

With a new $600,000 project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Assistant Professor Christos Constantinides is hoping to create novel chemical compounds that can enhance nuclear magnetic resonance-based technologies, like MRI. Photo by Annie Barker

Researchers prep for landmark field test of ‘second-life’ EV batteries

lblouin — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 15:30:35 +0000

Researchers prep for landmark field test of ‘second-life’ EV batteries lblouin Mon, 02/10/2025 - 10:30

Connecting large batteries to the electric grid is an idea that has multiple benefits. Most fundamentally, an electricity system powered by an increasingly large share of solar and wind will almost surely require storing energy in some fashion, given the variability of the wind and sunshine at any particular moment in the day coupled with our expectation that power will always be available. Indeed, large battery storage systems are already being deployed across the world in sophisticated ways. For example, a Massachusetts town of about 27,000 people is building a 15 MWh, grid-connected battery storage system that can help power the town during power outages, stock up on less-expensive energy during off-peak hours and feed electricity back to the grid during times of peak demand, when utilities generally have to fire up their most carbon-intensive diesel-powered backup systems. Grid-tied battery storage systems, however, come with a few caveats. For one, it takes a lot of batteries to store enough energy to actually make a significant difference, which means battery storage systems are expensive. Moreover, if you consider the climate emissions involved in manufacturing the batteries and the mining for the lithium and cobalt needed to make them, battery storage systems are far from being climate neutral.

Throw at this predicament a seemingly too-good-to-be-true solution: Right now, electric vehicles represent the largest use of large batteries, and EVs are steadily gaining market share across the globe. However, manufacturers estimate that batteries in new EVs will likely need to be replaced after eight to 12 years, or when they can hold about three quarters of their original charge. These slightly diminished batteries, however, could still be useful for other things, like — you guessed it — grid-tied storage. Now add into the mix the fact that EV sales have been strong for the past few years and we could be a decade or so away from having millions of used batteries ready for a “second life” in the electric grid. Importantly, this approach could reduce the costs and climate impacts of building large storage systems compared to those that use new batteries.

Undoubtedly, it’s an idea with tons of promise. The catch, at least for now, is that we don’t really know how well it will work, according to Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Xuan Zhou. Zhou says our understanding of the performance of new EV batteries is pretty solid and getting better all the time. However, we simply don’t have the same level of data about what’s really going on inside used EV batteries to say for sure they’ll be as reliable an option for grid storage as we hope they’ll be. The reason is that charging and discharging a battery hundreds of times — and subjecting it to thousands of hours of road vibrations — changes its underlying chemical and physical properties. That’s ultimately why it loses capacity over time. And many details about a battery’s potential second life inside a grid storage system — like how many years it would last, how safe it would be and how cost-effective it would be — are still largely unknown.

Zhou, along with his Electrical and Computer Engineering Department collaborators Associate Professor Mengqi Wang and Professor Wencong Su, hope they’re about to provide the world with some of the best data-backed answers to date. With a new $1.48 million grant from the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy, the largest state grant in the university's history, the team of researchers is set to build a 500 kW grid-tied storage system that will use actual used EV batteries.

Su and Wang say some of the best work in this field is currently being done at Stanford University. But those experiments involve taking new EV batteries and subjecting them to hundreds of charging and discharging cycles in order to intentionally deplete them in a way that mimics what happens in an EV under certain driving conditions. “For the emulation, however, they might not be able to emulate the true environment the batteries would be operating in,” Wang says. “We can imagine, in an EV, there will be vibrations. There will be accelerations and decelerations. The devices around the pack might also generate heat. And there will be variations in the temperature and all these environmental conditions for the battery pack — they will not be constant at all. This all impacts the battery. So by using real used EV batteries, we hope our data will end up being more practical.”

From left, Associate Professor Xuan Zhou, Associate Professor Mengqi Wang and Professor Wencong Su.

Zhou says they are still working out many details for the design and build of the project. One of the unexpected challenges was simply locating used EV batteries. “Initially, it looked like we were going to have to get them from Europe, where EVs have been more popular,” Zhou says. “But now it looks likely that we will be able to get about eight to 20 battery packs from used GM vehicles.” After they secure the batteries, Zhou says they’ll perform extensive tests to get a sense of their chemical and physical properties. Meanwhile, Wang and Su will work out how the batteries can be connected and tied to the grid. Because the team is planning to test several types of use cases, this will require a carefully planned system of custom power converters, controllers and control algorithms. For example, they want to see how well the batteries perform in a “peak shaving” role. That’s when the batteries would feed electricity back to the grid during times of peak demand, which helps utilities avoid using their expensive, carbon-intensive backup systems. They also want to test “load shifting,” which is where the batteries would charge during non-peak hours and then release that energy during peak hours, when electricity is more expensive. Another variable: the partner site that will host the storage system has a solar array. Wang says connecting all those components and systems in a way that doesn’t produce harmonics on the grid, damage equipment or compromise power quality takes careful planning. Many of the components will have to be custom built, too, since this kind of system is not an off-the-shelf technology.

Another big hurdle the team might encounter is testing the system. At 500 kWh, this project is so big that the current testing facilities at 51��Ƶ-Dearborn — or any other university the team knows of — isn’t equipped to handle a test of the full system. Zhou says the new battery lab in Ann Arbor may be able to provide single pack-level testing, and they may need an industry partner for tests beyond that. Wang says the size and testing requirements also make it more challenging to design other aspects of the system. “I think the piece of equipment that has the highest power rating is our battery simulator in our IAVS lab, which has 100 kW testing capacity. So we’ll start with a smaller system as a proof-of-concept design. And then we’ll scale up to the real-world test. But this makes it much more challenging. The components, like the semiconductors or power converters, can’t just be scaled up. They’ll have to be swapped out with new hardware with higher power ratings. So we’re going to be busy!”

One other noteworthy feature of the project: After the study of the storage system is complete, the research team’s Genesee County-based industry partner on the project, ReCharge ReCycling, which is helping design and build the storage system, will help prepare the battery pack for a third life. “That’s why we’re calling this project ‘Closing the loop,’” Zhou says. “They’ll be dismantling the battery down to the cell level and then trying to recover the precious metals so they can be used to make a new battery. So we’ll really get a full picture of what it’s going to take to take a battery through this full cycle.”

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Story by Lou Blouin. Photos by Annie Barker.

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Off

Mon, 02/10/2025 - 15:30

Connecting millions of used electric vehicle batteries to the grid is an idea that holds tons of promise. But how well will this strategy work in the real world?

Associate Professor Xuan Zhou (right), Associate Professor Mengqi Wang (left) and Professor Wencong Su are heading up a new project that will tie used EV batteries to the electric grid.

How can we make driver assist features play nice together?

lblouin — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 13:14:53 +0000

How can we make driver assist features play nice together? lblouin Mon, 01/27/2025 - 08:14

The periodic cycles of excitement and disappointment over the emerging future of fully autonomous vehicles sometimes overshadow the reality that our vehicles are steadily getting more intelligent. Blind spot monitoring, which is often standard in new cars, will give you an alert anytime a driver (and maybe even a pedestrian) enters an area that generally represents the vehicle’s blind spot. Adaptive cruise control automatically maintains a preset distance to the car in front of you. Lane keep assist varies by vehicle, but in vehicles with electronic power steering, it can nudge your vehicle back between the lane markers if you start to drift too far. Autonomous emergency braking forcefully engages the brakes if your car detects an imminent frontal collision. And a total of eight 2024 models available in the U.S. offer some version of hands-free driving under certain conditions. This is on top of more convenience-focused technologies, like cars that parallel park for you and those with optional one-pedal driving, where the driver brakes and accelerates with a single pedal.

Assistant Professor of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering Areen Alsaid says these driver assist features have the ability to reduce driver workload and make driving safer. But as an expert in human-technology interactions, she’s also been wondering if the learning curve associated with this growing list of advanced features could limit their benefits. “For example, I have a vehicle that has both lane keep assist and adaptive cruise control, and I was under the impression that you couldn’t have them both engaged at the same time, but I tried it and I totally could,” she explains. “That sort of made it like an AV, because the car was controlling both its speed and lateral orientation within the lanes. I definitely did not expect that.” She says sort of like an AV, of course, because, in her vehicle, she discovered these features only remain engaged as long as she has her hands on the steering wheel. But for Alsaid, the experience underscores an important caveat about new driver assist features: When drivers are purchasing a vehicle equipped with several of these advanced technologies, they don’t automatically understand how they work, what their limitations are, and if features will interact with each other in ways they find intuitive. It’s only once drivers become more familiar with how these technologies function that they can fully reap their benefits.

Doctoral student Duha Alkurdi is helping Alsaid with a new project that explores how drivers respond to using multiple driver assist features simultaneously. Photo by Julianne Lindsey

Alsaid says there is a growing body of research on individual driver assist technologies, but researchers are just scratching the surface on understanding the various scenarios when multiple features are operating simultaneously. As part of a new project funded by Toyota, Alsaid is hoping to build some foundational knowledge in this space by studying how drivers behave as they use multiple longitudinal features — technologies that, as contrasted with lateral features like lane keep assist, control the forward momentum of the vehicle. These include things like adaptive cruise control, one pedal driving, forward collision warning, autonomous emergency braking and hands-free driving at low speeds. In the first stage of her study, she’ll observe 10 participants as they engage multiple driver assist features in real vehicles on real roads, monitoring their behavior with cameras and real-time questions, as well as biometrics, like eye tracking and heart-rate monitoring. Using some of the initial insights from this experiment, she and her student research assistants will then design a full driving simulator experience, where dozens more drivers will be confronted with challenging driving situations.

Alsaid says after this initial study, the team will review the results and try to identify areas where the interactions between features and the user interfaces can be made more intuitive for drivers. Her hope is that their work in this area can help drivers adapt more smoothly to these new features so they can enjoy the full potential of their smarter new cars.

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Story by Lou Blouin