EVENT ANNOUNCEMENT

DATE: 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesday, April 18, 2018

EVENT: Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) Annual Symposium

Nearly 1,200 University of Michigan undergraduate students will show off the research they have done on more than 1,000 projects focused on topics like grassroots protests, artificial lungs, the Flint water crisis and preservation of film art.

The UROP annual symposium allows first- and second-year students the chance to share what they have learned from working alongside faculty and staff mentors from across U-M on research in the sciences, humanities and arts.

“The annual symposium gives us an opportunity to both demonstrate and celebrate the wide-ranging research experiences that undergraduates have been engaged with all year,” said Claire Sandler, interim director of UROP.

“Anyone who is able to attend the symposium will leave with a new or renewed appreciation for the hard and meaningful work of our students, the commitment of our research mentors, the impressive scope and significance of the U-M’s research activity, and the many ways in which an undergraduate research experience extends and enhances a student’s academic experience.”

Project examples:

Party in the Street: Grassroots protests during the presidency of Donald Trump.
This project explores the ways political parties and social movements in the United States interact with one another. The two often work together through collaborations that are fraught with difficulty due to opposing end goals. Following a series of protests in 2017 on the heels of the election of Donald Trump—including Counter-Inaugural protests, the Women’s March, the March for Life, the Tax March, the March for Science, the People’s Climate March, the Equality March for Unity and Pride, and the March for Racial Justice—students conducted surveys, analyzed data and wrote findings.

Technologies for microfluidic artificial lungs
A student working with the Advanced Medical Microsystems Laboratory, co-located at the V.A. Ann Arbor Healthcare System and in the U-M Department of Surgery, had an opportunity to work on the day-to-day design and development of state-of-the-art microfluidic artificial lungs, and in the assessment of their performance and biocompatibility in test tubes and living organisms. Microfluidic artificial lungs are a class of small portable devices that show promise to help patients avoid complications from foreign bodies, and that could run on room air rather than bulky oxygen systems.

Flint water crisis and youth of Flint
This project featured a community forum series with Flint youth to determine how the city’s young people perceive the water crisis and its implications for their future. U-M students were involved with conducting a pilot study and recording and transcribing interviews with the subjects.

Ann Arbor Film Festival
The Ann Arbor Film Festival offered a student the chance to work with the Bentley Historical Library and the Ann Arbor District Library to conduct research on filmmaker alumni, making contact with festival supporters and previous participants, and to document past festivals. The student also worked with staff and interns to brainstorm the best ways to market and make use of the university’s alumni network and archives.