Arash Javanbakht, assistant professor of psychiatry at Wayne State University, wrote an article for The Conversation on the social consequences of mass gun violence.  “I am a trauma and anxiety researcher and clinician psychiatrist, and I know that the effects of such violence are far-reaching. While the immediate survivors are most affected, the rest of society suffers, too.”

Over the last month, Israeli leaders have made a string of friendly visits, gestures and statements towards Arab leaders in the Gulf, positioning Israel for what appears to be a more overt alliance with Gulf states, from Oman to Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The Palestinian struggle for statehood, meanwhile, has been "cast to the margins" by the leaders of these same Gulf countries, said Saeed Khan, a senior lecturer in Near East studies at Wayne State University. "It seems as though, among the Saudis, UAE and to a certain degree Oman, they are clearly putting their stock with the official Israeli political line. They're either turning a blind eye or seemingly not at all interested in the Palestinian issue," Khan told Middle East Eye.

Jeff Stoltman, a professor of marketing and entrepreneurship at Wayne State University's Mike Ilitch School of Business, said a lot of his students look at opening a marijuana business as a sure thing. Stoltman said he pushes his students who are interested in the pot business to dig deeper into market realities. "They’re looking at this tremendous explosive growth in the states where the cannabis business was liberated a little earlier and there is this ‘Why not here, why not me?’ They don’t dig too deep to find out who is really benefiting the most of those kind of operations and what was the path that they took and can they replicate that here.”

Marick Masters, a business professor at Wayne State University and director of its labor program, said to decrease poverty, the city needs to decrease the number of those who are not participating in the workforce. This, he said, can be expensive and requires greater outreach efforts and mentorship, better access to transportation, improving schools and changing laws to make it easier for ex-offenders to be hired. "I think there's room for improvement in Detroit," 

General Motors is a technology company that makes cars, and the skills its employees had yesterday are continuously becoming outdated. Experts say that is the underlying message of GM CEO Mary Barra's move on Oct. 31 to offer voluntary buyouts to GM's North American salaried workers with 12 or more years of experience with the company. On the surface, it's typical cost-cutting ahead of a potential dip in new-car sales and rising raw material costs. But look closer. Consider that Barra hails from a human resources background, so targeting employees with long seniority and high pay grades is strategic when a company is moving toward the development of more electric cars, fuel cells and autonomous vehicles, experts say. It means redeploying the workforce and freeing up significant capital, said Marick Masters, professor of business at Wayne State University.

U.S. midterm elections are taking place across the country Tuesday. Other than voting for candidates, voters will also be saying 'yay' or 'nay' to three proposals on the ballots. One of them is the legalization of recreational marijuana in the state. "It seems as though many in the state want to follow the example of Canada and be up to speed with that," said Saeed​ Khan, senior lecturer at Wayne State University. However, even if it becomes legal in Michigan, crossing the Canada-U.S. border with marijuana will continue to be a criminal offence under the U.S. federal law.

Flint is a majority African-American city and Democratic stronghold. But to turn out new urban voters in Flint, candidates will have to do more than hearken back to missed opportunities and old scandals, said Ronald Brown, an associate professor of political science at Wayne State University. Candidates must also speak about what they plan to accomplish in terms of improving schools and delivering clean water and safe streets, he said. "If it's just the Flint water issue, that’s not going to move those voters," Brown said. "I think it’s very difficult for any party to get out new voters, especially to get urban voters to vote, when you’ve not been able to solve your problems that have been around for a very long time," he said. 

Mitovation has licensed three patents from Wayne State University and has built a prototype device designed to stop cell damage that occurs because of a lack of blood flow after heart attacks, something called post ischemia brain injury. The device looks like a small bike helmet, and it shoots infrared light through the skull and into the brain. Most of the damage occurs after a patient is resuscitated and the blood begins flowing again, a process known as reperfusion. The goal is to improve clinical outcomes of hospital patients who suffer heart attacks during their stay, shorten the length of their stay in intensive-care units and reduce long-term disability of those affected by brain injury in the wake of a cardiac arrest.

Turning a university research project into a for-profit company typically takes a veteran of the startup ecosystem, someone familiar with defining market opportunity and figuring out how to find customers in that market and make them pay for what you have. That was true for Cardiosound LLC, which formally launched in August. The company grew from efforts by Gaurav Kapur, a physician and associate professor of pediatrics at Wayne State, to find a better way to measure blood pressure, particularly in infants, where current methods are notoriously inaccurate. Kapur reached out to some colleagues at WSU — Sean Wu, a professor of mechanical engineering; Yong Xu, a professor of electrical and computer engineering; and William Lyman, a professor of pediatrics.

“Lead is still in all these older homes in Michigan, and until it is substantially abated or these homes are removed from the housing stock, there is still a hazard to kids,” said Lyke Thompson, director of Wayne State University’s Center for Urban Housing. In Detroit, at least 10 percent of kids in eight of 27 city ZIP Codes tested positive for elevated lead levels. Many are in some of the city’s oldest and most blighted neighborhoods, such as the Virginia Park neighborhood in the city’s 48206 ZIP Code, where 19 percent of tested children had elevated levels last year. Thompson has led efforts to test children in that Detroit ZIP Code and another, 48214, where 16 percent of children had elevated lead levels last year. He said 85 percent of the 1,000 homes he’s tested in that neighborhood were positive for lead. It’s one of several initiatives in cities like Detroit and Grand Rapids, but remediation efforts are expensive.

In the next decade or two, the blood of people will very likely be full of tiny nanobots that will assist in preventing them from falling ill. When injected into our bodies, the nanobots will protect the physiological system on a molecular level to ensure a healthy and long life. Is this science fiction? No, not at all. The future is much closer than we may think. In the nanomedicine age different kinds of nanobots will increasingly be used as very accurate drug-delivery systems, cancer treatment tools or miniscule surgeons. A research team from Wayne State University has developed a nanobot that works in combination with chemo­therapeutic drugs that may reverse drug-resistance in renal cell carcinoma by releasing the payload selectively to the tissue and core of the tumor resulting in its inhibition. Successful trials with mice found their life expectancy more than doubled.

Thomas Killion, associate professor of anthropology at Wayne State, said he and his students worked for three years on the archaeological dig at the row house, one of Detroit's oldest surviving structures. The dig revealed more than 6,000 fragments and pieces of different household objects that helped paint a picture of how these workers lived in the mid-1800s. Killion said archaeologists don’t expect to find one huge item that reveals everything, but rather a lot of little things that add up to a story. “It was an interesting icon for this fairly mythical Irish neighborhood of Detroit. It had the trifecta there: (the beverages you drink in) early life, middle life and later life," he said. Krysta Ryzewski, associate professor in anthropology at Wayne State, has led the Roosevelt Park digs every other year since 2012. When plans to build the train station were announced in the early 1900s, the city wanted to forcibly remove those who lived around the station, Ryzewski said. 

Wayne State University business students will head to Detroit’s iconic Guardian Building on Nov. 2 to vie for $1,750 in scholarship money as they compete in the fourth annual Mike Ilitch School of Business Elevator Pitch Competition. The students have a roughly 80-second ride on an actual elevator to summarize who they are, what they know and what they want to do. Executives from Ally Financial, Enterprise, GM, PlanteMoran and Quicken Loans will evaluate the students on their ability to sell themselves and present a positive, professional first impression. 

Halloween marks the 92nd death anniversary of one of the most famous magicians ever. Harry Houdini performed his last show in downtown Detroit before dying at a Detroit hospital in 1926. Days before his show in Detroit, he was performing in Montreal when someone asked to punch him in the stomach. Houdini was known to be a strong man with powerful abs. "Legend has it, he wasn't ready for the punch and they hit him pretty good," Jeff Horner, a senior lecturer at Wayne State said. Horner, who is an urban planner and calls himself an amateur historian, said Houdini wasn't feeling well on the train ride down to Detroit. Houdini gave his last performance at the Garrick Theater, which stood near the corner of Griswold and Michigan Ave. in downtown Detroit.

"When presidents visit, it does appear that it increases voter turnout for their candidates, historically," said Jeffrey Grynaviski, associate professor of political science at Wayne State University. But another question is whether Trump coming would be good for Trump. Grynaviski said his visits so far have been to more red than purple states, and he's using his influence on congressional midterms, too. But a president has the most potential influence with candidates that are on the bubble and close to winning, Grynaviski said. 

At the event hosted by the Wayne State University College of Pharmacy and Health Studies, Christine Rabinak, an associate professor of pharmacy practice at the college, detailed the history of marijuana in the U.S. and the effects and characteristics of different strains. Randall Commissaris, an associate professor at Wayne State, has studied the effects of marijuana on driving ability. He told the audience Tuesday that a "yes" vote on Prop 1 will make Michigan either the ninth or tenth state to legalize recreational pot.

A professor and her 15 students have spent the semester digging it out from beneath the gravel. On site every Monday in the city's first comprehensive archaeology project, Krysta Ryzewski's class is using hand tools, imagination and analysis to uncover history, mystery and modern connections. "It's one of the challenges for us," says Ryzewski, to take fragments from the ground, match them with what's known or what's legend or what's seen on old maps, "and learn how people built and lived in the city."

The University Research Corridor (URC), a partnership between Michigan State University, the University of Michigan, and Wayne State University, has released its 2017 economic impact report. According to the report, the three universities contributed $18.7 billion to the state’s economy last year, up from $16.5 billion in 2015. The organization says that marks a 46 percent increase since 2007, the year it was formed and began benchmarking its impact on the state of Michigan. The URC also reported that it generated 78,845 jobs in 2017. Last year, the report says, the URC spent $2.3 billion on research and development, an increase of 54 percent since 2007. The URC also attracted 94 cents of every federal dollar spent on academic research in Michigan, and accounts for 92 percent of all R&D conducted at higher education institutions in the state.

Dr. Krysta Ryzewski, an associate professor of anthropology at Wayne State, is currently leading a team of Wayne State students in an excavation of the old village hall in Hamtramck to uncover any city secrets it might hold.  The village hall, which was built in 1915 and demolished decades ago, once housed the town police and fire departments, municipal buildings, and the Nut House bar that became popular following Prohibition. 

Stories like Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast are so ingrained in popular culture that it can be all too easy to overlook the damaging ideologies that they perpetuate via misogynistic characters, degrading plot lines and racial uniformity. Now, parents are imposing bans on these classic Disney tales, with Keira Knightley and Kristen Bell among those criticizing some of the key storylines, which depict women being rescued by men and kissed while they sleep. Donald Haase, author of Fairytales and Feminism, encourages parents to read these stories skeptically, so as to confront such archaisms rather than endorse them. “They can read or tell classical tales in ways that intentionally question or subvert the stereotypes,” the Wayne State University professor emeritus told The Independent.