Good morning, and welcome to the Rackham Graduate School. This is our wonderful
Rackham Amphitheater. I'm delighted to welcome those who, this is the first
time attending this event. And I know there's a number of you that
have been coming for a number of years. It's really delightful to have
you here for this very special event.
As we get ready to hear from our main event, our outstanding Rackham students,
about their research and scholarship, I wanted to begin by sharing with
you just a few thoughts about what we, at the graduate school,
have been working on in the last year.
I'm really excited to share this news with you,
that we've recently launched a strategic vision for graduate education at
Rackham. This has grown out of our longstanding efforts to support our students
and to drive innovation that impacts their academic experience.
And in order to highlight for you what we see as the future
of graduate education at the University of Michigan, I'd like to take a
moment to discuss our past and present as a university and graduate school,
and then how that sets us up for this future vision.
So looking first back at the past,
as you would know
as alumni and those that are interested in the graduate school,
our model of graduate education here at Michigan and across the nation,
at its core, relies on a deep intellectual connection between faculty,
and often a specific faculty member and graduate students.
More than a century old, this is often called the apprenticeship model of
graduate education, and it's produced wonderful, important discoveries and
new understandings of people and society. Even today, it draws both students
and faculty from the world over to join us here at the university.
But despite the many contributions this model has inspired for us in the
past, and even the present, we know there are some pressures on it
that have been building up over time. So at Rackham, we have been
working hard to stay ahead of these pressures and indeed lead the national
conversation about the future of research based graduate education, both
Master's and Doctoral. So I'd like to take just a moment to highlight
a few of the most pressing dynamics that are shown here
from some headlines from the national press4 and from the trade press,
and these are informing our vision of what we should be focusing on
in the future.
First, I'd like to highlight the very idea of the apprenticeship model assumes
that the apprentice will ultimately become, assume the role of the teacher
mentor. However, this is not actually the case today, in the year 2019.
The reasons for this are complex. The number of PhDs outpaces available
jobs in academia, and the academic job market is increasingly tight in all
fields. On the other hand, and at the same time, many of our
graduates who are arriving here for their studies wish to pursue careers
in industry, in non profits, in government service, in academic institutions
that have primarily a teaching focus. These career pathways typically differ
from the career paths of their mentors here in the graduate school.
I wanna report to you that this shift is already well under way.
At Rackham, more than half of doctoral graduates who are receiving their
degrees are going on to careers that are very different from the tenure
track positions that their mentors hold.
At the same time, if we focus for a moment on Master's training,
those degrees are hard pressed to keep up with the demand for expertise
in emerging fields and indeed the way in which emerging fields themselves
are changing rapidly. At the same time, there's increased public skepticism
about the benefits of evidence based research, like we focus on here in
the graduate school, and growing concerns about the affordability of graduate
education.
There are reports in the national and trade press that speak of a
crisis in graduate student mental health. And finally, there are rare but
unacceptable cases of misuse or abuse of the faculty student dynamic that
underpins this apprenticeship model of graduate education.
So those are the pressures that we face,
but at the same time, and perhaps most important of
all to me, we see that society has never had a need,
a greater need for the advanced training of research based graduate education,
for evidence based science, for expertise that cuts across multiple disciplines,
for thinking from the social sciences and the humanities that can help people
address deep societal problems, and for the understanding that helps us
talk across difference, communicate across difference. These are the essential
elements of what scholarship for the public good means, and it's really
built into Rackham's mission. We feel that we have an opportunity to address
both the pressures and seize the opportunity here at Rackham, especially
at a university like Michigan, given our scope as a world class research
enterprise and also a national leader in graduate education.
So, because of those pressures and opportunities, Rackham is pursuing a
new strategic vision for graduate education, which I mentioned just a moment
ago. So, in rethinking graduate education in this way, we really hold to
three beliefs. The first is that graduate education needs to be student
centered. This means... What does this mean? Student centered means that
the students' own scholarly and research interests, their needs for academic
and professional development and their career aspirations are increasingly
incorporated into the design of their curriculum and their academic experience.
And second, we think that this innovation to support the academic experience,
to make it increasingly student centered should be faculty led, it should
be led by our faculty, because they can respond to the needs of
the discipline... To the needs of the students as they work within the
disciplines.
And the third piece is that Rackham can support faculty as they develop
ideas and move them forward, and also support students to have these opportunities
to engage in the sorts of experiences that are student centered and expand
their education.
So, based on this idea,
we have four goals that we'll be focusing on in the next few
years at the graduate school. The first is what we're calling a reimagined
academic experience, in which faculty themselves are supported to innovate
and experiment in offering new curricula, new kinds of experiential learning,
and new types of interdisciplinary learning. Our second major goal is to
strengthen diversity of the graduate school.
In this school, Rackham students from different backgrounds, with different
life experiences, with different distances traveled to the university can
thrive and have a sense of belonging within their academic programs.
Our third major goal is to enhance partnerships and community, and this
is in which all members of the Rackham community, students, faculty,
staff, alumni are welcomed into this work, 'cause we all have a role
to play.
And the last major goal is to strengthen the organizational culture and
climate of Rackham itself, in which we'll examine our own work and strengthen
it to support what will be happening as part of this
plan.
Some of the efforts that have grown out of the conversation to reach
this point are already underway. We have been launching initiatives around
internships. Rackham is gonna be continuing offering intern experiences
across campuses, and we're gonna use a variety of different modes and models
to try to pilot what works best within particular disciplines. As an example,
already with the support from the Mellon Foundation, Rackham was able to
fund internships for professional development in the humanities and social
sciences. This involves summer experiences, for example, in museums, our
curating collections, working in non profits. And we're also, starting this
year, expanding these opportunities for students in the biological sciences,
so they too can hold internships that both advance their career interests
and also are well integrated into their academic experiences.
A second activity that's launching at the moment is that we've established
a graduate student mental health task force. This is a team of graduate
faculty, graduate students and mental health professionals, and their goal
is to develop actionable ideas that can be used to support graduate students
in their mental health and their academic progress. They're our core team,
they'll be reaching out to the many organizations across campus that are
currently engaged in this work, and trying to coordinate it in a way
that will directly benefit Rackham students. And finally, to continue this
idea generation, we've been starting up a series of conversations with faculty
and campus partners. We've been shaping this work in various ways,
we've held retreats and engagements to arrive at this point with a range
of campus partners, that work began in summer 2018. So it's more than
a... Been going on for more than a year, and we've hosted already
two symposium: One, about research and graduate education, in May,
and one just with the broader campus community that was held here in
this amphitheater just two weeks ago.
And our next step in this direction will be on February 7th.
I'm pleased to announce that we'll be welcoming national leaders in graduate
education here for a third symposium to engage with you and the faculty
on this topic, and that is critical to the future of the university.
So, I invite you to visit the Rackham website to learn more about
our vision for our graduate education.
The website is here. We have, in particular, just some information that
will give you a sense of some of the nascent programs that are
already active, both at Rackham and are initiated by faculty across the
university. They're extremely innovative, and they show some of the things
that are percolating across campus at the moment. So, in coming years,
I really hope to be able to continue with faculty, staff,
students, alumni, other members of the community to advance this vision,
and I'm looking forward to further conversations about it.
Okay. So that was a few words about the future, now I wanna bring
our attention back to the present, and our six... It's looks like seven,
right? Right, I didn't get the... I got six, but it's seven, and
that's perfect. It will be seven, six better.
We'll hear about their research and they're gonna share their perspectives
about being graduate students in Michigan. So I invite you all to come up,
and then we'll get going. Thank you.
So, this will be a... This... The way we're having this organized is I'm
gonna let each student... I'm gonna start with Yiran Chen, who's gonna introduce
himself. Each student is gonna speak just for less than about five minutes
about their area of research and scholarship. We'll move our way,
one by one, down. And then, at that point, we'll open this up
for general discussion and questions. And so, with that, I'm gonna...
I'll be here to MC, but from past experience, my role is just
to let everybody go and we'll have a nice conversation. And so,
we'll start with you. Thank you. Sure. Before that, may I say I
prepare something for seven minutes, because the email say I can have seven...
Okay, sounds good. Right. Go ahead and... Go ahead. Go right in.
Thank you. Appreciated. So, good morning everyone. My name... My name is
Yiran Chen. I'm a fourth year doctoral student from the higher education
program. I received the Karl Ma Scholarship this year. It's a scholarship
that was recommended by my program, selected by Rackham and made possible
by the generosity of our donors. So, I want first to take this opportunity
to thank you all for giving me this award, and I'm deeply honored. In
terms of academic work, my research centers around college choice. I ask
questions like, how do students choose college? Why do they make such decisions?
And what are the consequences for themselves and for the society at large?
My current research focus on academic undermatching, a phenomenon describing
some high achieving students do not attend colleges that match their academic
strengths. This pattern concentrates among the disadvantaged students. And
so, the researchers and the policymakers believe that if we can address
this problem effectively, we can help the underprivileged students to get
a better future. The prior research suggests that there are two reasons
that students go undermatched. First, the lower ranked colleges might be...
Actually work better for the students, for a variety of reasons, such as
close to home. If staying close to home is important to you,
then you may choose a college nearby over a more...
A more prestigious university that's far away. Second, maybe the students
don't have the accurate information about college so that they are not making
informed decisions. For example, empirical evidence suggests that first
generation students are particularly bad at evaluating the institutional
quality. Often, they have an attitude to say colleges are colleges. If there's
no difference between colleges, then why not go to the college nearby? So,
this is clearly something that we can do, and the policy intervention in
the past, the 15 years focus primarily on providing information to the students.
While I acknowledge both reasons are valid, I think undermatching is more
complex than that. And my research explores the role of educational aspiration
in the process of decision making. Following... Nobel Prize winner Daniel
Kahneman argues that people are loss averse. When making decisions, they
do not evaluate the alternative based on the absolute benefit and the cost
of that alternative, but evaluate the alternatives against some sort of
benchmark. The importance of benchmark is that it determines whether an
alternate will be perceived as a gain or a loss. If the alternative is better
than the benchmark, then it is a gain. Otherwise, it is a loss. And
Kahneman's research shows that the same amount of difference may carry more
weight when it happens on the losing side than on the winning side. In other
words, the pain of losing $5,000 is much more intense than the pleasure
of gaining $5000. In the context of a college choice, I argue that
the benchmark is largely determined by one's educational aspiration. The
college that you believe that you are able to get in serves as a reference
point, and that will change how you perceive the rest of the decision making
scenario. For example, let's say there's a student applied to both the University
of Michigan and Harvard, and just for the sake of discussion,
let's assume that the student think Harvard is better than Michigan. We
all know it's not true, but people are entitled to their own opinion so...
And I respect that. Anyway, doesn't matter. Now assume the student considers
Michigan as her reference point, then if she's lucky enough to get into
Harvard, that's good for her, she will perceive that as a gain, and
something that is something better than what she was expecting. But if Harvard
rejects her application, then she probably will still be quite happy to
spend four years in this charming place. On the contrary, if she considers
Harvard as her reference point, then Michigan would have become her de facto
safety college. In that case, if she is rejected by Harvard, then she
has to choose to attend Michigan because she has nowhere to go,
then she might be a grumpy freshman on the campus. For the same
student, the perceived difference between Harvard and Michigan should be
the same. However, depending on the reference point, the gain from Michigan
to Harvard and the loss from Harvard to Michigan will be perceived quite
differently, and that's the influence of a benchmark. My hypothesis is that
students, in general, will not actively pursue the colleges that are below
the reference point, because otherwise they will go into a situation called
sure loss, that means if you choose that alternative, then no matter what
will happen, you lose. And Kahneman's research shows that because people
hate a loss so much that they, in general, will not choose a
sure loss alternatives. Now applying this argument to the undermatching
phenomena, I hypothesize that if you go to ask the student who went
undermatched how do they feel about the college of their choice,
they probably will say something like, "It's not the best college in the
world, but it's a good enough option for me." If that is the case,
then some of the undermatching problem may not be caused by the lack
of information, but by the lack of aspiration. Accordingly, if we want to
address the undermatching problem more effectively, we need to not only
give right information to the students, but also need to incorporate the
aspiration component into the intervention. So that's my research. And finally,
I want to, once again, acknowledge the importance of the scholarship to
my research that frees me from the work duties that I have, and considerably
accelerated my research program. I really appreciate that. Thank you.
Good morning. My name is Cara Janusz.
You might say that I am a disease detective working on a case
that has global and local implication. So, before I take the opportunity
to share a little bit about my research background, I do want to extend
a heartfelt thanks to Rackham and the donor community. I'm kind of coming
back to academics after a unique experience working with the World Health
Organization for some years,
and the funding and space that Rackham has provided for this opportunity
to lead the employment market has been really important
for my research and just the opportunity to be back here at Michigan.
I've been able
to undertake some of my dissertation research in Kenya over the past summer,
with a research international Rackham award, as well as some other funding
opportunity, so again, I'm very appreciate of this community.
My research focuses on identifying and characterizing
the determinants of immunization uptake, primarily in Sub Saharan Africa.
But the thing about what impedes uptake of immunization, generally, is going
to be a diverse set of reasons, but the implication is the same,
that we have susceptible communities.
Largely, the global immunization
practice has focused on this indicator of 95% coverage
to protect children, and now many countries have family oriented programs,
in adolescents and adults as well. But what that doesn't get at is
if you have an isolated community that has
either zero protection or untimely protection,
you're opening up the wider community to risk. So I look at trying
to use classical statistical methods to predict the determinants of where
these clusters are, but then map often to
disease acquisition that can result in sustained transmission and the loss
of some incredible gains that, globally, we've been able to achieve with
immunization. We like to say in the immunization community that we're often
a victim of our own success.
With eradication has come equivocation, and to an extent, complacency,
taking hold of... Just behavior change.
While in higher resource settings, we talk a lot about vaccine has certain
sentiments and outright refusal. A lot of that is just
an opportunity for education and conversation instead of blame and
pointing of fingers.
We found, in our research, taking
hold of that relationship between the practitioner and patient, there is
an opportunity to reverse those
sentiments. And then, in the settings that I work with, where generally
it's an issue of access,
we're looking to identify where those access barriers are
to inform more successful programming and outreach. But again, the implication
is the same, that where you have these clusters of under or untimely vaccinated
populations, we're at risk for resurgence, re emergence of diseases that
have largely been eliminated and eradicated. In fact, Britain, last year,
lost its elimination status for measles. The Americas, as a whole,
lost it, which was a huge heartbreak for me, personally, 'cause I previously
worked at the Pan American Health Organization, or was part of the effort
in achieving that elimination status. And we're quite close to losing it
here in the US, so
my research, I hope to continue to use the skillsets that I'm gaining
through my program to
continue
this global achievement of eliminating and eradicating vaccine preventable
diseases. I don't think I got a chance to say, but I am
in the PhD program for integrates the
public healthcare at the University of Michigan. And I would welcome the
opportunity for continued discussion during the Q&A or over lunch. Hello,
my name is Rachna Reddy and I'm... Hello? Is this better?
Hello, my name is Rachna Reddy and I am a PhD candidate in Anthropology,
and Rackham has supported me in every part of my career, and really
every stage of the project that I'm about to tell you about.
I'm interested in understanding the emotional and cognitive underpinning
for social relationships, and what their function is in our lives,
and how they're shaped by power and knowledge over time.
And I study social relationships in wild chimpanzees that live at Ngogo,
in Kibale National Park in Uganda. This is the place where chimpanzees have
been studied for 25 years,
which seems like a very long time, but chimpanzees can live to be
over 70,
so in their lifespan, that's actually a very short time.
The chimpanzees I study specifically are adolescent and young adult males,
and like humans of that age, adolescent males occupy this very minimal social
space.
They begin to travel independently from their mothers when they're about
12, but they're kept on the outskirts of the social world of adult
males. Adult males, when adolescents are around 10, withdraw all the affection
they used to show them, and they start to target them with aggression.
And adolescents become aggressive themselves and they regularly attack and
eventually dominate all females in their community.
In my research, I examine how dominance, aggression, and affiliated relationships
like friendships
shape the social relationships between male and female chimpanzees, and
how these contribute to male reproduction, which, in the evolutionary process
is the main currency of success. Just to give you some background,
in most mammal species, mothers are the primary caregivers of offspring.
I think many of us know that since we are mammals. But offspring care requires
so much time and energy from mothers, that at any given moment,
very few females are able to mate and conceive, and this causes a
shortage of mates for all males in the animal kingdom. This is the
biggest challenge for their reproduction.
They need to fight other males to obtain matings. In these contests,
the males that win are usually really big, strong, and experienced males.
However,
relatively weak and small and young males still manage to reproduce in a
lot of species. And we call... In animal behavior research, we call the
strategies they use "Alternative Tactics", even though sometimes they're
highly successful and widespread.
And they're just anything that allows a male to avoid direct combat.
And in our closest living relatives, Chimpanzees, multiple males and multiple
females live together in communities where members of both sexes mate promiscuously,
so they're not pair bonds like those we see sometimes in humans.
These groups that they live in have up to 200 members.
Males... Even though everyone mates with everyone in chimp communities,
males don't sire equal numbers of offspring. High ranking males have the
most offspring and they issue the status by competing with other males and
fighting with them. But even before they're contenders in this hierarchy,
they can still father offspring. Adolescent males, even though they're small,
and socially and physically immature, like adolescent humans, manage to
have a lot of offspring. In my research, I try to figure out
how this happens.
And I studied the behavior of 20 adolescent males and 10 young adult
males, so this is males ages 9 to 20 years old,
which is similar to males 9 to 20, in humans.
And I recorded all of their social interactions for two years,
and I found that they mated with females by forming strong affiliative bonds
with them. And in these relationships, males and females would groom each
other, they would spend time resting together, holding hands, embracing
each other when they were fighting.
And males also were really, really affiliated with the offspring of the
females, so they would groom them and play with them as well.
But despite the affiliative nature of these relationships, males also directed
aggression to these females,
and
this aggression often involved intimidating them, shaking branches to scare
them, doing things just to restrict their movements and where they went.
And I found that that, the affiliative and aggressive aspects of these relationships
influenced mating success differently as males got older. So male chimpanzees
become dominant to females when they're around 15 years old, so when they
were younger than 15, the only thing that determined how often they mated
with a particular female were the affiliated behaviors, so how often they
were sitting near each other, holding hands and grooming,
and as they got older, aggression also started to improve their mating success.
So not just how often they were grooming a female and being nice to her,
but how often they were shaking branches at her and causing her to
fear them and sort of controlling her movements.
But even in that case, I found that
the aggression influenced mating success only when it was happening within
a really strong affiliative relationship. So if the male was aggressive
to the female he didn't have a bond with, she wouldn't listen to
him, that they would in these relationships. So,
taken together, these results sort of...
They inform my understanding of how male chimps reproduce,
but they also have important implications for understanding relationships
in humans. So male chimps and females form highly affiliative relationships,
and these bonded pairs mate and they have offspring together, and males
have really strong bonds with these offspring, they're really gentle and
affiliative with them. But males also dominate females and they sometimes
use coercion to control their behavior. And these are things that...
Some disturbing things we see in our own species too.
So, as I mentioned, Rackham supported this research in a number of stages.
It supported my first summers, going out to this chimpanzee research site,
so all the data I collected, I was only able to do after
I had already learned how to find chimpanzees in the forest,
follow them for 12 hours a day, navigate and not get lost, and
learn to identify all of them. So they're now as familiar to me
as any person is. I can't really describe how I recognize any one
individual in... One particular detail, it's just like a person I know.
And when I went out to conduct the main research
or main data collection, the two years of data collection I did, Rackham
also supported that research time. And now that I'm back, they're supporting
me to write up the results of my research, and that allows me
time to write about all of this, but also to work on other
academic activities, one of which is writing policy, and to prevent... Coming
up with actions to take to prevent sexual misconduct at remote field sites,
which is something that's really common in my field. We're working out at
these places where everyone is living together in tents, and together,
and really isolated for long periods of time, so that's something that's
really important. Rackham has a lot of that type. And so, thank you.
Good morning, everyone. My name is Joseph Iafrate, but please call me Joe.
I am in my sixth year in the PhD program in Applied Physics,
working in the physics department. And my sixth year in the program is
going to be my best year, and should be my last year as
well.
I wanna thank Rackham for giving me the pre doctoral fellowship to support
me through this sixth year, so that I have time to finish up
the really exciting projects I've been working on over the past five years.
So if I wanted to sum up my research in Applied Physics for
you in one sentence, I would say that I hit semiconductors with lasers
today to get us better electronics tomorrow. So, let me
give a little more detail on what I'm talking about. So who here
has some electronics with them? Maybe a cell phone, a tablet,
a laptop computer? I can see quite a few of these just from
here on the panel.
Technology is amazing and it gets better and better every year.
And
one thing that has been a part of that, one drive that's been
a part of that is something that's called Moore's Law. Has anyone heard
of Moore's Law here? So Moore's Law is this industry drive to make
the little electronic components on computer chips smaller and smaller,
to make the... To have the ability to have twice as many on
a chip every two years or so.
Now, that sounds great, and it's led to a lot of cool innovation.
However, that can't last forever. Eventually, you're going to get so small
that you're gonna run into different physical barriers, such as heating,
or so small that physics doesn't work quite the way you expect it
to anymore. So, if we're gonna keep innovating, keep getting better and
better electronics, even if we're gonna run up against a size limit,
we might need to rethink how we think about electronics. So,
electronics comes from the word electron, right? It's that tiny, negatively
charged particle that hangs out in atoms. And electronics use currents,
flows of electron charge, we turn those currents on and off,
that's how you get the sorts of electronic chips we have today.
But electrons have more than charge. They have this really quirky quantum
property called spin. And spin is really cool
and could be the key to a new form of electronics that has
been called, very appropriately, Spintronics. So instead of using a charge
of the electron, what if you could use the spin? Now, I haven't
told you what the spin is. If you wanna know more about that,
we can have a 10 to 30 minute discussion
after this, where I can wax politically about electron spin.
But the idea is a fundamentally different kind of electronic
device. Now, if you wanted to build such a device, you'd need to
check off a couple of boxes. You'd need to have some material where
you could align electron spins. Now, I wanna say here I'm not doing
quantum computing, that's another buzzword you might be familiar with, where
we might look at a single electron spin. Instead, I'm looking at lots
of electrons, billions and billions and billions, in tiny materials the
size of my fingernail.
And so, we would need to have a way to access those electron
spins. That's one thing we'd have to figure out. We'd have to figure
out how... With what... How to manipulate them, and what happens to them
just naturally, and then we would need to figure out a way to
measure them or detect them.
And so, my research has intersected with a few of these questions over
my time at Michigan.
Luckily, I work with a material known as gallium arsenide. Gallium arsenide
is used in things like red LEDs. So if you've seen a red
LED, you might have seen gallium arsenide in your life.
And we can use a laser to access the electron spins,
we can align all of these spins together.
We can also use a laser to figure out how well they stay
aligned some time later. And when I say time, I'm not talking seconds,
I'm talking picoseconds, that's trillionths of seconds, which is a really,
really short time. And we're able to do that using
mirrors and lenses and a whole table full of optical elements.
And so we wanna know what happens once we've aligned electron spins, and
then, when we measure them, what happens in between? And there are lots
of complicating factors there, one of which I mentioned atoms before,
and atoms have nuclei, the protons and neutrons at the center.
Those also have spin. And so the electron spins and the nuclear spins
interact there, they're going back and forth throughout this really short
timescale I'm talking about, and we wanna understand that interaction.
If we can answer all three of these questions, how to
align electron spins, how to manipulate and also figure out what's going
on with them when we're not looking, and then detect electron spins, if
we can answer all three of those questions, we could identify materials
that could then be used to make Spintronic devices.
So, as I've hinted at, I'm not a device person myself.
I'm trying to lay the groundwork for these devices by understanding the
underlying spin physics. And so, like I said, I'm over in Randall lab,
on the diag, hitting semiconductors with lasers over and over and over again
using magnetic fields, electric fields, using a whole host of physics,
things out of my physics toolbox to understand the spin physics so we
can hopefully have a,
dare I say it, faster, better, spin based future.
So that's where my research is interested, that's the 20 year goal that
we're looking at in the future. But another thing other than the Rackham
Predoctorial Fellowship that I'm grateful to Rackham for has been
opportunities to explore what my own future might be
in less than 20 years. And so one such thing has been conference
travel grants. So I've been able to travel to
the big conference for my professional society, the American Physical Society.
I've been able to go to our March meeting, which is a meeting
of over 11,000 speakers covering all sorts of physics, and that's given
me the opportunity to hear what the new up to date research is
in my field, try to establish connections with other graduate students and
researchers, and that's been great to see what that life
as a researcher might be like.
In addition, one question that I've had for all graduate school,
that's unrelated to physics, has been how do we, as researchers,
communicate our work to audiences who haven't gone through the same education
that we have?
So I've been highly involved in a group here at Michigan called RELATE,
which trains researchers in communication fundamentals. And we've been very
lucky to have the support of Rackham, as we go about the university,
being invited to give workshops on, "How do I talk about my science
with my neighbor, with my grandma, with this person down the street?"
I've been lucky enough to take a summer workshop, nine weeks,
once a week, to work on my own communication skills, and then have
had the opportunity the last two years, since the beginning of 2018,
to help train others in this same thing. And Rackham has
funded us through the Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshop Program to reach,
in the times that I've been teaching, at least 60
University of Michigan postdocs and graduate students here over the summer,
as well as hundreds of other folks both at Michigan and elsewhere through
workshops throughout the year, and we've also had the support of some great
faculty members, some of whom may have been... May be in the audience
right now. And so as I think about how communication might factor in
my future career as well, I'm really grateful for the opportunity Rackham
has given, while also getting to do cutting edge research as well.
So I'd be happy to talk about physics,
communication, or anything in between. Thank you for listening.
Hi, good morning. My name is Maribel Okiye. I'm a second year PhD Student
in the Department of Chemistry.
So I first wanted to say it's really exciting to be here.
I'm pretty new, as you hear, I'm second year, so I'm really just
starting to get in the nit and grit of my research,
so hopefully you guys find it interesting. I do. It's a little gross,
but
I'll definitely see how you feel about it later. But yeah,
I definitely wanna thank Rackham for giving me so many opportunities.
Rackham actually has funded me from the beginning of my program,
so I'm a Rackham Merit... I'm a Rackham Merit Fellow.
So they've funded me for the first two years of my program,
which has been great. I'm originally from the Virgin Islands, so
this negative 35 weather probably would not have put me in the best
mood to be teaching students in January, so I'm exceptionally happy to have
been funded for those first three... First two years.
So thank you very much, and thank you to the donors who've helped
that happen. It was fantastic.
So, a little bit about my research. So
I would define my research as natural product drug discovery,
but to say it plainly, I have two major projects. I'm a little focused on
one, but feel free later to ask me about my second project.
Just for the sake of time, I really wanna focus on one today, for at
least this panel. But my focus is on the oral microbiome.
So, why would I be interested in that?
So, recently, research has kinda discovered how
the bacteria in our body are actually pretty important for systemic diseases
that we have. I particularly focus on the oral microbiome but recently,
right now, actually, Harvard is doing this study on the gut microbiome,
particularly in stomach diseases, particularly Crohn's disease, and they're
showing how, when you have spurts or inflammation in Crohn's disease,
they're actually correlating it with certain bacteria that are proliferating
in their stomach at that time. So, it's pretty interesting
how certain bacteria can really affect your daily function and your system,
your regular system. So, what I study is how oral microbiomes also affect
our systemic diseases, as well as oral diseases as well. So,
I study natural product chemistry. So, if you guys don't know,
when you have gingivitis or other oral diseases, it's kinda caused by fluctuations
of bacteria in your mouth. So, your bacteria kinda goes through this really
interesting evolutionary system where they kinda balance each other out.
It's kind of like a fight to the death most of the time,
you can think about it that way. But they regulate each other quite
efficiently using different metabolites and signals to let one know, "Okay,
you can't grow anymore, it's enough, you're kind of taking over."
So, when we're uptaking and we're contracting these oral diseases, what's
happening is our theoretically bad bacteria is overpopulating our mouth.
It's causing this... Producing too many metabolites that's causing other
signals or down regulating the growth of the good bacteria that would kind
of keep it balanced. So, what I study is what metabolites that these
different bacteria in our mouth are producing to see how we can regulate
it ourself and
have a natural substance that we can regulate, incorporate with our body
that's not foreign but is just already naturally produced, that can also
help us balance out the bacteria that's overgrowing in our mouth and causing
these oral diseases. And that's just one component of this project.
But what's really fascinating is that they found that some of our oral microbiome
can actually be humongous biomarkers for other systemic diseases.
Right now, I'm studying how different oral... Different bacteria in your
mouth are proliferating when you have different cardiovascular diseases,
or have diabetes. So that's actually been a really big part of my
project, to see if we can actually use bacteria within your mouth as
biomarkers for disease, in general. That's like a major component of my
research.
But this is really important for me just because Rackham has definitely
funded a lot of the experiences that I've had outside. And being
a Rackham Merit Fellow, I've been introduced to a really large community
of other graduate students on campus, that have allowed me to learn a
lot more. My project is a lot... A lot of it is partially
statistic based, and I can definitely tell you I have no background in
statistics, absolutely not. And it's definitely not my strong suit, but
through these communities, I was actually able to gain a friend who has
been exceptional in my research because they have offered to help me so
much with it, doing statistical analysis, and this is a really big part
of my data, and being able to correlate these different metabolites and
exactly what they need. So, I'm really grateful for Rackham. So,
if you guys have any questions, please let me know. Hello,
everyone, good morning.
Some of you may be familiar with the genome... The Human Genome Project.
That
was completed a couple... Almost two decades ago, 2003.
The main objective of the Human Genome Project was to
pin down all the different human genes, their physical location with respect
to each other, and their function.
So this was a massive multinational collaboration that, as you can imagine,
impacted many fields in science. More particularly, it allowed us to look
at human evolution at a very different scale. So, one of the most
interesting findings that stemmed from this project and other research that
followed years after was that some populations of humans have a significant
proportion of Neanderthal genes in their genome, some of them up to 5%
of Neanderthal genes in their genome. And
an important subset of these genes have immune functions.
So, human acquire this variation through interbreeding with Neanderthals,
so this hybridization that was happening in Eurasia 60,000 to 40,000 years
ago. So, humans were interbreeding with Neanderthals. You might be aware,
we don't do that anymore. We have... Those archaic communities have been
extinct for a long time,
so it's kind of difficult to know what exactly
happened with all this hybridization and this interaction in terms of the
genes.
Well, fortunately, there are some species of primates that still do hybridize,
and I'm very lucky to work in a lab where we have one
of the few well characterized hybrid zones of primates. These are the howler...
Hybrid zone with howler monkey species, the mantled howler monkey and the
black howler money in Southeast Mexico. And this allowed us to look at
what is the effect of hybridization, this interaction of these two species,
in terms of the immune genes? Can they be passing this
favorable or advantageous genetic variants from one another? So that's mainly
the scope of my research. So, from Rackham, I've been able to travel to
the field, do all this sample collection,
with the Rackham International Research Award. Then also I've been able
to bring back my samples, process them, get all this data,
and also this has been done through
couple research grants from Rackham. And also, again, Rackham has allowed
me to present my work at different places. So the help I received from
Rackham has been tremendous.
But I think sometimes it's just... It means that it's not just
how Rackham supported students and how these helped advance science, in
particular, in our field. It also has a very deep impact meaning in people.
So,
in my program, there's a big teaching component to that. I did my
Master's here, and have taught for, I think, 12 terms now.
So without that, without your support, I wouldn't be able to tell my
students what it's like to go to the field, do
all this research, what it's like to do data, what it's like to
be a grad student here, and you know, hopefully inspire them to be
scientists. Also, I've been able to go and do these outreach programs
that go to high schools here in Ann Arbor, Detroit, or programs that
we bring in, like FEMMES, to just show high school students how science
is done and
what is the process behind it, also, some of the programs
in the museum, in the new building in central campus, that
you might know of. So, yeah, the impact is really really high also on other
people and promoting science, particularly. Now, I run into some other students
of mine, they already got students now, they already teach the programs
there in medical school. So, it's... Your help just not impacts me,
it impacts a lot of people here. And I think it's just my
little
giving back to the community here for the help I received, so I
just want to say thank you for
that. Hello? Hello, I'm
Jung Yoon. Hello? Yeah.
I'm Jung Yoon. I'm a music composer.
Okay.
I'm Jung Yoon, I'm a music composer, and I'm currently studying music composition
in the music department.
I'm currently a fourth year doctoral student, and it's typically a
three year program, but I'm very grateful to have one more year to
finish my dissertation, yeah. So, talking briefly about my background, I'm
Korean, I came to The United States when I was 16.
So, I came here for high school, and then I went to college
in Ohio. I'm still here. I'm 29, so it's been 13 years since
I've been in the States.
So, talking about my project, my project is basically
a music video for the string quartet that I wrote myself.
My string quartet is in five different movements, and it's a music video
for my string quartet that features two dancers
and a string quartet, as well as my own music. So, my string quartet
is called Han, and Han is, supposedly, a uniquely Korean concept.
Han... I don't know if you're familiar with a concept called Han, but
it's
a unique type of Korean concept that supposedly the Koreans have developed
during their experience of violence and oppression during the time
when they were colonized by Japan. And it's very interesting because it's
a passive type of emotion that is potentially very explosive,
but what I find it really interesting that it's passive.
So, it's a mixture of feelings that are contradicting to one another,
including... It's mainly a form of grief and also anger and wanting to
revenge, but then you also have passion, hope,
and there is happiness there too. So, I think that, although that concept
is a uniquely Korean concept, but it's something that
everybody can communicate with, everybody has Han in their life.
So, in this video, I'm talking about my Han and my experience as
navigating in different cultural references, and my experience as a woman
and a female composer in the field where the composers are actually still
mostly Caucasian and male.
So
my piece... Talking about my piece itself, it's in five different movements.
In the first movement, I set a Korean folk song called 'Bird, Bird,
Blue Bird'. It's...
So I set it in my first movement. And then, in the second
movement, with a string quartet instrument, I try to emulate the color of
Pansori, which is a type of Korean theater. It's usually
featuring a Korean female singer who has a very brash, breaking,
and dark
voice quality, that's also very nasally and forward, but very hushed and
breaking. And I try to emulate that color in my second movement. In my third
movement incorporates a Korean Drum called janggu, it's an hourglass drum,
and then there are two sides to it, with left hand, you use
your hand, and then on the right hand, you have a stick.
So I use janggu in my third movement, and then
try to use it together with a string quartet instrument. And my fourth
movement is called Mu, so it's a cello solo movement, featuring... Actually,
just the concept of Mu. Mu means nothing or nothingness, or I think
maybe we're more familiar with the concept of Zen or being empty. So,
in this movement, I don't have any melodies
or anything that you can relate to, but I use register,
contour, and dynamics to communicate the grief and anger in the fourth movement.
In fifth movement, it's called ma eum. "Ma eum"means heart or mind,
in Korean. And in this moment, I specifically incorporate a Buddhist chant.
So
the lyrics involve mainly repetitious calling of Amita Buddha. So
they keep going, "Namu amitabu, namu amitabu." So namu amitabu is basically
calling Amita Buddha, which symbolize cosmic energy in Buddhism. So I'm
calling the cosmic energy and I juxtapose it with the concept of ma eum,
which is... Ma eum, an individual person. So, I juxtapose between the cosmic
energy and the concept of individual ma eum there.
What else should I talk?
So that's the gist of my pieces. And I have two dancers that
are singing... Not singing, acting, and also dancing for my music video.
We recently did a video shooting at a private farm in,
in Michigan,
and this
dancer actually flew from Tokyo, Japan. He's a Butoh dancer. I don't know
if you're familiar with a Butoh dance, but
they developed Butoh dance in Japan as a reaction to creating something
of their own,
because they thought that their dances were prominently Western during that
time. So it was... This Butoh dance we used to talk about taboo
topics in Japan, as well as bizarre, and things that we cannot conceive
as human beings.
So this is
currently how my project is going, the project is almost done except a
couple more recordings and the video streamings for the musicians, and I'm
happy to share the photos, and any other things that I have during
our lunch. And I'm very grateful to have this opportunity to finish my
project. It's been really wonderful experience meeting all these artistes
from different disciplines, and this is basically a prototype for what I
want to do as a music composer in the future, and as possibly
a music faculty as well. So thank you so much for making this
happen.
Thanks very much everyone for sharing your research and your stories.
So now we have time for questions, so I would welcome
you to engage directly with our panelists with questions you might have.
We have one right here to start, and we have a microphone there. Thank
you.
If you just hold it close, it should work.
First... There we go. First, I wanna thank all of you for very
fine explanations for those of us who are not in any of these
fields, so I appreciate that. And I'm curious to know a little more
about you as human beings, where you came from, how it is you
came to choose the career path you have chosen, and what brought you
to Michigan... University of Michigan, in particular.
If a couple of you are willing to speak on that?
Yeah.
Working... Yeah. Yeah. So I'm from Mexico. I did my undergrad there.
I've lived there my whole life. I came here for my Master's program,
and are now PhD. So I chose Michigan because the university is
really good, right? It's top notch, right? So... It's not Harvard,
but.. Anyways... But, yeah, no, I was really interested...
My department, in particular, it's one of the
top... Top three in the nation now.
So we have a very diverse group of people working on many,
many things, so for me was a very easy choice when I got
the admissions... The offer to come here.
It's been... The adjusting to everything has been,
I would say, easier than what I thought, to be honest.
You have many, many resources for
any particular problem that you might face, from mental health, from
funding,
for any... Anything.
We have this great, also, benefits program.
So I was very, very lucky, very lucky to be here and continue
to do my PhD here.
I don't know, as an individual, I felt really happy,
and it's a decision that I felt
very
grateful that I took, and... Yeah, I think that's my story overall.
Cara?
I'm from Michigan originally. I grew up on the west side of the
state. Michigan just holds a special place in my heart. I went here
for undergrad and was gone for almost 13 years, and frankly,
never thought I would move back to Michigan.
I always had an interest or spark for adventure
and knowing myself more through getting to know other cultures. I lived
abroad for quite a long time, and then was based in DC,
working for an inter governmental, international agency.
And when it came time to decide to further my career...
And I also had, at that point, been adjunct lecturing at a university
in DC, and knew that I wanted to
have an opening to academics in the future,
there's really no other choice but Michigan. Out of the schools that I
was looking at, the
offer for interdisciplinary work that Michigan provides, and just the funding
mechanisms that facilitate that
gave me the push that I need to... I guess, to come back
to Michigan. I've been really, really pleased to be here. Just to give
you one example, the University has a program called Mcubed, which I'm hoping
to maybe use for a postdoc here, that facilitates
inter school collaboration
by funding their students through getting three separate schools within
the university to take on to an inter disciplinarian project.
I think just that unique
kind of... Especially... You could probably speak to this more, but...
And higher education now being a truly research based, hard money school
provides a few more unique collaborations in the field of public health
than you would otherwise, being in a school that's funded
by what we might call soft money or project based resources.
One more. Please, go ahead. So mine is a little different.
As I've said before, I'm from the Virgin Islands, but I didn't think
about graduate school until I was in my junior year of college.
I was a politics major when I started,
and I went to DC for my undergrad, to do advocacy for education.
As many of you guys know... Virgin Islands... I'm from the US Virgin Islands,
particularly Saint Thomas, so education wasn't... My education, at least
in high school, wasn't as developed as my peers' were, and I didn't
really realize that until I got into undergrad,
where my math skills were probably two years behind everybody else,
so it was really hard. I really didn't think
I really could make an impact in science as I thought,
other than through advocacy, through education, and education policy specifically.
But then I got thrusted into this research opportunity at University of
Michigan, my junior year, the summer before my senior year,
I was in the lab I'm in right now, actually, doing research as
an undergrad for the first time in my life, and I loved the
experience. I loved Michigan. I've met a lot of people, it was through the
College of Pharmacy, and they connected me through to the chemistry department,
to PIBS, different programs under Rackham, and that's how I figured out
I wanted to go to graduate school and specifically graduate school at U
of M. They kind of made a community here for me,
that made me feel comfortable enough to feel like, okay, well,
maybe I can actually do this, I can do science. Let's try a
little bit.
So it was definitely... University of Michigan definitely gives you a community
that inspires growth. I visited... After, when I started applying to grad
schools, I visited some other universities like Vanderbilt, some schools
in Florida or in Washington state, and I don't think any of them
fostered a community like University of Michigan.
It gives you the cutting edge research that you want, without feeling that
you're being pinned against your classmates regularly, and that's definitely
an environment I didn't want.
University of Michigan definitely helps create a very comfortable environment
where you learn at your own pace, you get what you get done,
then we're gonna try to make you the best scientist you can.
So that's particularly why I chose University of Michigan, they kind of
inspired me to do research in the first place,
so I stuck it for the long haul at University of Michigan. Thank
you. Another question from our audience?
Thank you, Melissa. Joe, I know you're not a device man,
but pretend you're a science fiction writer for a moment, with your background,
tell us about something that Spintronics would look like 10, 20,
50 years in the future.
I think what I like about Spintronics is the idea that it wouldn't
have to be something that looks wildly different, but that you could replace
the electronics we have now with Spintronic devices.
Certainly, the goal in the field is just to be able to take...
Oh, here's an electronic transistor, let's have a spin based transistor
instead. So you get a future that, on the surface, might not look
a whole lot different than today, but the hopes would be devices that
could be certainly more energy efficient, if not better or faster in other
device benchmarks, that I am not an expert in.
Whereas,
the future of quantum computing, which again, is not what I do,
but is something that people often think of when I talk about my
work. That could look like a very different future, but Spintronics would
hopefully look a lot like what we have today,
but better. And I realize that 'but better' isn't incredibly satisfying,
so I'm not gonna go write a science fiction novel based on that.
But the idea would be doing what we're doing now
better, in a way that wouldn't be a huge paradigm shift.
Is that... Sure. Okay, great.
Kind of directed at Yiran, but I have a follow up comment for
all of you, but... You were mentioning a lot about the students who
go to a kind of a backup college, or baseline college.
In terms of
dealing with that, you were talking about giving information to students.
Have you also looked into encouraging students that go to these schools
to continue on to higher graduate schools such as Michigan, where you can
get an amazing degree? It's just, a lot of us... I kind of speak
from personal basis that I went to a university that was comfortable for
me as well, but I also ended up coming to University of Michigan.
So I think another pathway of solving that might be trying to figure
out a way to get these students to apply to graduate school and
always apply to the best graduate schools, regardless of
what field they're in. But the other comment for the rest of the
fields, since a lot of you do fieldwork around the world,
to spend time looking at the people you're working with, who were from
that local area, to consider, "Hmm, maybe they would be a good candidate
to come to the University of Michigan or come to the United States
to do graduate work", and... 'Cause there's a lot of
wonderful people out there who'd never get an opportunity, but they're working
with you, and think it would be something that would be worthwhile to
just put in the back of your mind while you're international traveling.
Part A? I think that that's an excellent point. And I think...
Honestly speaking, I feel like providing information to the students is
relatively less important than encouraging them to realize that they have
way more potential than they think they have, because,
in this case, we are talking about many students, that they are from
underprivileged background, and their social surroundings is kind of
hard for them to open their eyes, everybody else from the high school
is just go to a nearby college, or
the students have never met anyone from the University of Michigan, then
they may feel like going to University of Michigan is such a distant idea,
that never occurred to their mind, and they will just go with the norm.
So I think, related to your point, encouraging them to go to the
best, brightest school or go to the undergraduate college is the same idea,
to help them to realize is that they have
the potential. And once they have
that idea... I mean, once we can implement... Implant that idea into their
mind, then they have a computer, they have internet, they have Google,
they can figure out relatively easy. So I think that's a really good point.
Part B was a bit of a comment and a bit of a
question. Does anybody wanna take that as a question
said? And how are you... Please. Go ahead, Rachna. I was looking at.. No,
no, no, sorry, I was looking at Rachna. You looked like you wanted to...
Oh, yes, I am I was going to say that when... So a
lot of graduate students who work at the research site that I'm at in Uganda
wanted something that...
The site is the research site of the Ugandan University, at Makerere. It's
their field station, we're sort of guests there. But there are a lot
of undergraduates from that university that are fantastic... It sort of...
It specializes more in... The research they were doing in the forest is
more ecology based, in the plants, so there tend to not be...
A lot of undergrads who are interested working in the forest are not
so obsessed with chimpanzees, and they like them, but it's kind of like,
"Oh, you're studying these fluffy creatures who are very interested in these
insects" And
yeah, there's a whole social world, with people studying different animals,
and what it means to study reptiles. Anyway... So, a lot of times,
if graduate students... If we get enough funding, we can have...
Can hire a recent undergraduate to be our research assistant, and then they
can get really direct experience in collecting data,
developing all these skills, maybe conducting an independent project, and
then they're in a really good position to apply
to the university where it would like them. I guess anywhere in the
world, 'cause these students are from different places, but that has been
something that Rackham funds can support, is a funding for an assistant.
Excellent, thank you. Innis? Yes,
very impressed with the panel again this year. Thank you, Rackham, for choosing
a diverse set of topics. Thank you, panelists, for sharing
your projects and your passion, and it shows.
I have a question for Maribel. I was interested, in terms of your
findings and your research, about the
role of diet in terms of maintaining the balance that you mention, in
terms of the oral microbes, and also is the impact of diet...
If you have found that different from... In terms of your gut microbe
system versus your oral?
In terms of maintaining health and balance?
It's hard to say. I'm really at the cusp of my research,
so it's really starting to... Natural product research is a really long
process. Extracting compounds and then characterizing it really takes a
long time, especially sometimes there's not enough of the compound.
Specifically, because my research doesn't necessarily focus on diet, I can't
particularly say much on that topic, but,
yes, from what I've studied and what I've researched so far,
of what I understand,
that's what we're trying to correlate, right? So we're trying to correlate
how your diet and what you're incorporating
into your system, how it affects the microbiome within your mouth,
and if that microbiome then affects other places, like your gut,
and affects other systematic diseases, and how it affects you, later on.
So that's what our whole end goal is.
We're hoping that we can find these correlations so then we can have
faster processes and more efficient processes of finding these biomarkers
and finding ways to see, okay, if you're having an illness,
what is it? And being able to
have a faster way of,
I guess, breaking down and figuring out what sort of diseases that you
might have or what issue you might have.
But in case, with specific diet, it does affect it.
So, right now, we have samples from
a couple of patients. We have saliva samples, and they have different variations
of health, and then we're comparing them with what we're doing in the
lab and seeing if their metabolites are the same, seeing if metabolites
are different, if certain things are being produced when you're having a
certain disease, especially, particularly, in your mouth or in your body
or your system, and seeing how we can correlate these. Are there specific
metabolites that are produced more in your mouth or in your gut
when you have a specific disease, and why is this happening?
What is producing it? Okay. Is this metabolite causing these inflammations,
is it causing something to you, or is it something that's an adverse
effect, that is this disease producing this metabolite? Can we use that
as a way to detect other diseases, or can we use this as a
way to treat it? This is the questions that we're really trying to
ask in my research, so I hope that answers your question.
Other questions?
I'm gonna jump in with the opportunity to ask one. This is actually
a question for Cara. So I understood that these... When you're thinking
about whole populations and having protection, there's these kind of...
Local groupings can be important if they aren't on board. I'm wondering,
when you talked about
when you go around the world, England, United States, and Africa,
are there... What's the same about how you think about the problems in
those different locations, and what is different?
I'm specifically a bit interested in our potential of being decertified
here in the United States, and what lessons can be learned about that
from the work across the world.
Often, starting with the same sort of demographic characteristics that you
may
include in any sort of survey design to be able to identify these
populations,
but really the reasons underlying why those clusterings of demographic characteristics
exist are going to be in place for diverse reasons.
The US, in particular, you find clustering of under, unvaccinated around
certain religious affiliation,
and that, in part, also is more present in states where there are
religious exemptions to state laws for vaccination. And so, I think there
is a policy component of revisiting that, and some states have
taken the route of
doing away with religious exemptions and sticking only with medical exemptions.
But what you actually have... Or we've observed in the US,
in the states that have gone that route is you've seen an increase
in medical exemptions. So there's a lot of, I think, just open dialogue
that needs to happen around this issue, engaging with practitioners,
and just the individual perspective that what matters here is society and
the community, not only the individual. But that's hard in a setting
where the potential risk for an adverse event following immunization is
more real to people in
eradication, elimination settings than the risk of disease acquisition.
Even in some of our care settings here, it's so rare to see
certain vaccine preventable diseases that young physicians no longer
quickly detect early signs. And so there's a whole educational component
that needs to happen.
And then, globally, I think that
there's a lot of
funding work that's been done by a few
huge philanthropic organizations to make access barriers fewer, and we see
now newer vaccines that are common in the high resource settings like pneumococcal
conjugate vaccine, rotavirus, HPV extending to more populations, but you
still want to be able to detect around certain...
Almost thinking of certain demographic characteristics or
other characteristics as risk profiling, to be able to ensure that programmatic
intervention takes into consideration those clusterings of individuals who
potentially could be under or unvaccinated, and therefore put the whole
of the community at risk. Thank you.
Last week... Oh, one last question. This will be our last question.
Thank you. Nope, all you.
I'd like to ask you about your experience as a member of the
Rackham community, the smaller community inside the larger community of
the University of Michigan, whether or not any of you knew each other
in some other context before you were assembled
as a panel, and if there has been any particular experience that
any of you would like to talk about, that has
been a significant contributor to your feeling a part of the Rackham community.
Maybe a panelist that hasn't had the chance to
speak yet?
So the question is
if I'm feeling that... If I'm gaining support from the Rackham community
and if I feel like I'm part of this community.
My department is up in the north, so I think I haven't met any
of these individuals before because I'm up in the north, sort of... I
don't know if you guys have been to the Music School,
but we're kind of on our own, and we're actually building a dance
building next to us so that we can collaborate so much more easier.
But I've always
reached out to Rackham whenever I needed help, I think, whether it was
applying for a faculty position or traveling overseas or just raising funding
for my dissertation. So I've been here a lot for those workshops that
I had, that talk about what it's like to be interviewing as a
faculty member, for a faculty member in writing diversity statements, and
all those small things, I had to travel down here to learn that.
And then I've had multiple opportunities to interact with people who all
went to the same workshops. Do you guys have any other things to
contribute to? I could speak a little bit on
different groups for Rackham. I'm actually part of two major student groups
for Rackham. It's Rackham Student government and Students of Color of Rackham.
So I'm on E Boards for both, so really busy.
I can speak more of the dynamics for, at least, what I definitely
think Rackham is definitely trying to push for graduate students here.
But at least what I've seen, being an incoming student and relatively new,
they're really trying to push the graduate student experience,
trying to get more availability for students to interact with each other.
I can definitely say, at least from my department, I don't even see
students from my department very often. We're very lab based and in our
work all the time. It's really hard to interact with other people,
especially outside of chemistry.
So, really, I think Rackham is really trying to push hard for encouraging
students to get to know each other. And I think, through those groups,
I've definitely been able to meet a lot of new people,
people I probably never would have interacted with because I'm in a really
hard science. People from School of Education, Kinesiology, things like
that, I would never have the opportunity to, just because our paths don't
cross.
We have annual events like Fall Ball, which is like our prom of graduate
school, I guess? I don't know. That's definitely something that's really
great because it's a collaboration of different schools in Rackham. So I
think they're definitely pushing to foster more community here and develop,
just because the University of Michigan, in general, is such a big campus,
is such a big population of students it is hard to feel like
we definitely settle your ground here because there's so much going on,
especially with the undergrad life, undergrads take over. I think you really
need a summer here as a graduate student to really see what campus
looks like, as a graduate student by yourself... It's true. Rather than
during the hustle and bustle, during the regular semester.
But I think Rackham is really doing a good job trying to foster
that community here, at least... Especially based off of my friends and
peers from other universities and what their comments are, I think Rackham
is doing a pretty good job so far in trying to improve that.
So good job. Thank you.
So we're at the hour, and
I think we need to close the session now, it's 11:30.
I would just like to take a brief moment
to talk... Just to mention... I think we saw
both the depth of the scholarship, but then also how the scholarship matters,
and not just matters to society and our public, but also to you,
yourselves. And specifically then how the experience of being a graduate
student is not just about the research and scholarship. There's these other
dimensions that you all were kind enough to identify for us,
and that really, I find very gratifying
because of just the experience is a long one, is a significant one.
And so just knowing about all the ways in which we can make
an impact at this point in your careers is really wonderful to see.
So, with that, let's take a moment to thank our panelists for their
time. It's been a really wonderful panel. Thank you. Thank you very much.
I know we weren't able to take all the questions, I'm sorry for
that, so maybe if you're interested in coming down to ask,
we could have that as well. So thank you.
Thank you for joining us today.
