About 1,100 students from Wayne State University and the University of Michigan teamed up for a day of service Saturday in Detroit. Volunteers of The Detroit Partnership, a student group that works to connect people from Ann Arbor and Detroit, boarded up abandoned houses, painted murals, cleaned vacant lots and prepared urban gardens. The two universities team up every year in an annual volunteer effort called DP Day. Organizers said the effort helps students build relationships with the city and its leaders. Other media mentionshttp://mms.tveyes.com/Transcript.asp?StationID=1014&DateTime=3%2F26%2F2016+11%3A14%3A32+PM&LineNumber=&MediaStationID=1014&playclip=True&RefPage=

Wayne State University Law School Associate Professor Noah Hall, an expert in environmental and water law, has been appointed special assistant attorney general for Michigan, joining the special counsel team for the Flint water investigation. The special counsel team will investigate to determine if any state laws were violated and then potentially could prosecute under civil and criminal law options. As Hall explained: Appointing the team was necessary because the Michigan attorney general must advise and ultimately defend the state and its agencies in this matter. Attorney General Bill Schuette has established an “iron-clad conflict wall” between the attorney general’s office and the special counsel team, allowing both sides to do their job properly.  

Wayne State University business students have a powerful way to start building their networks from their very first day on campus. They can join the Warriors Business Community and earn $2,000 housing scholarships offered to the first 30 newly admitted fall 2016 freshman business majors who sign up.  

Wayne State University President M. Roy Wilson has been given the 2016 Giving Back award byINSIGHT Into Diversity magazine for his work to propel underrepresented students toward science careers and increase the diversity of WSU’s campus, among other initiatives. Wilson will be featured, along with 26 other recipients, in the April 2016 Leadership Support and Giving Back issue ofINSIGHT Into Diversity, the largest and oldest diversity and inclusion publication in higher education. The award honors presidents and chancellors of colleges and universities who go above and beyond their everyday leadership duties and give back to their campuses and communities. “I am honored and humbled to receive this recognition,” said Wilson, who became Wayne State’s 12th president in August 2013. “Diversity is so important in the higher education environment. Ultimately, diversity makes for a much better educational experience of our students. It’s very important to have different perspectives and ways of thinking incorporated in the everyday life of a student. That’s how they learn. That’s how the world is.” Among Wilson’s accomplishments, he developed a strategy to improve the pipeline of underrepresented students toward science careers. As part of this, he formed a coalition in 2015 of Detroit-based universities and colleges to launch the National Institutes of Health-funded Building Infrastructure Leading to Diversity (BUILD) program at WSU. As part of a plan to increase the diversity of Wayne State’s campus, Wilson created in 2014 the position of Associate Provost for Diversity and Inclusion and Chief Diversity Officer. He also insisted that the newly-created diversity officer be elevated to a cabinet-level appointment to emphasize its importance and centrality to the university’s core leadership. In addition, Wilson created the Office of Multicultural Student Engagement to provide an inclusive environment and promote awareness initiatives that encourage academic success for underrepresented minorities and historically marginalized students.    

What do you think is the American Dream? Is that dream possible? Does any and everyone have access to making good on the pursuit of happiness? Those are some of the fundamental questions raised by Professor Robert Putnam of Harvard University, also a consultant to President Barack Obama. Putnam will be the keynote speaker at Wayne State University’s Forum on Contemporary Issues in Society (FOCIS) on Monday, March 28. The topic of his talk will be “Urban Families: The American Dream in Crisis.” Putnam told “Detroit Today” host Stephen Henderson that the ‘gap between rich kids and poor kids has widened a lot…and it’s pushing America towards a caste-based society.” Putnam added that talent is equally distributed across every class but opportunity is not. He said there has been a cultural shift in America where the focus has moved from creating opportunity for all children, to people only focusing on their own biological kids. “We now have a shriveled sense of who we are responsible for,” he said.   

Wayne State University and other educational institutions will participate today in a water policy conference held in Lansing. Topics to be explored include water supply engineering, funding needs, public trust regulation and impact on the environment and health of citizens. The goal is to get information, backed up by research, into the hands of legislators, state employees and other people with the power to use the information.  

Detroit is making a promise to every high school student: Graduate and there will be funding for the first two years of college. The city is able to make this promise because a program that already has been supporting Detroit students’ college education will get permanent funding to guarantee a tuition-free path to an associate degree for every student who graduates from a school in the city. Meanwhile, a pilot program also is being launched to give some Detroit students scholarships to earn four-year degrees. Officials announced Tuesday the two-year college scholarships for city students will be available in perpetuity through the Detroit Promise Zone, a designation created by law during the administration of former Gov. Jennifer Granholm that allows Detroit to capture a portion of state education taxes generated in the city to offer scholarships. It will be known as the Detroit Promise. The program funding four-year scholarships will be funded by the Michigan Education Excellence Foundation, the Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan, most of the state’s public universities, a few private colleges, and the Detroit Regional Chamber.  

US News & World Report just released its 2016 rankings of the best pharmacy schools in the nation. Wayne State University's pharmacy school was among the listed institutions. University's were ranked on a scale from 1 (marginal) to 5 (outstanding) based on peer assessment surveys distributed to deans, administrators, and faculty at accredited schools. These surveys were conducted in fall 2015 for the 2016 rankings. US News & World Report surveyed 125 Doctor of Pharmacy programs accredited by the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education, and the response rate was 40%.  

At noon, medical students throughout the country will open sealed envelopes and find out where they will be doing their residency and in what specialty. It’s part of national Match Day. Medical students from Wayne State University will get the news today at a celebration at the MGM Grand in Detroit.  

In Detroit, 820 students, faculty, staff and family counted down the seconds before their sons, daughters, wives, husbands and siblings opened envelopes containing their residency assignment. Minutes before the countdown to noon, envelopes were placed in the hands of the 284 senior students who make up the Class of 2016, waiting somewhat patiently as part of the 18,668 allopathic (M.D.) medical school seniors across the United States. At WSU, 95.8 percent of students matched into residencies, higher than this year’s national match rate of 93.8 percent for allopathic students and slightly lower than the overall rate for the U.S. of 96.3 percent.  

An expert in environmental and water legal matters has joined the Michigan Attorney General's team investigating whether any Michigan laws were violated in the process that created a public health crisis in Flint. "This is the worst disaster for public health I've ever seen," Noah Hall said by phone Wednesday, March 16. Hall, an environmental/water legal expert and attorney from Wayne State University is a new member of Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette's investigation team, AG spokeswoman Andrea Bitely said. Hall said he was honored when the AG's office asked him to join the investigation, which he said he is taking very seriously for the people of Michigan. "I've never seen an environmental problem affect so many people in such a concentrated way," Hall said about the crisis in Flint, which left families afraid for their health after the realization that lead-tainted water was running through water lines.           Other media mentionshttp://www.crainsdetroit.com/article/20160316/NEWS/160319883/wayne-state-expert-in-environmental-law-joins-michiganshttp://mms.tveyes.com/Transcript.asp?StationID=2980&DateTime=3%2F17%2F2016+5%3A04%3A40+AM&LineNumber=&MediaStationID=2980&playclip=True&RefPage=http://mms.tveyes.com/Transcript.asp?StationID=8255&DateTime=3%2F17%2F2016+8%3A06%3A25+AM&LineNumber=&MediaStationID=8255&playclip=True&RefPage=

Wayne Law professor Robert Sedler joined the Paul W. Smith Show to discuss President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court.    

Wayne State University today was awarded a $50,000 microgrant to expand pilot programs designed to prevent at risk, low-income college students nearing graduation from dropping out. The Association of Public and Land-grant Universities and Coalition of Urban Serving Universities awarded nine public, urban research universities nationally a total of $450,000. Each university received $50,000 to launch or expand their pilot programs. The grants are for two years and are funded by the Great Lakes Higher Education Guaranty Corporation and the Lumina Foundation. Other media mentionshttp://diverseeducation.com/article/82335/

To mark Women’s History Month this month, the Michigan Women’s Historical Center & Hall of Fame in Lansing is hosting an interactive exhibit featuring the stories of nine Michigan women who did something notable before the age of 20. “Great Girls in Michigan History” includes the stories of violinist Regina Carter; Sarah Emma Edmonds Seelye, a secret Civil War soldier; aviation pioneer Nancy Harkness Love; Dr. Marylou Olivarez Mason, an advocate for Michigan’s Hispanic communities; and “Rosie the Riveter” poster girl Geraldine Hoff Doyle. The 2015 Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame inductee plaques were also installed earlier this month to honor: Wayne State University Law School Dean Jocelyn Benson; former state Rep. Maxine Berman, an outspoken advocate for women; Sue Carter, a journalism professor at Michigan State University and longtime broadcaster; U.S. Rep. Candice Miller; consumer rights advocate Esther Shapiro, the first director of Detroit’s Consumer Affairs Department; and Linda M. Woods, an advocate for Native Americans and their culture and U.S. Air Force veteran who served during Vietnam.  

The unflappable Richard Splett approaches tasks on HBO’s “Veep” with maximum optimism and an uncertain grasp of logistics. The actor who plays the naïve White House aide to perfection is Sam Richardson. He's the same guy who'll be starring in Comedy Central's “Detroiters," a series he cocreated that will film its first season this summer in Detroit. Wayne State University is bestowing a career achievement award on Richardson. He is among this year's recipients of the 37th Arts Achievement Awards, presented by Wayne State’s College of Fine, Performing and Communication Arts. The ceremony takes place on campus March 23 (but as of press time, it wasn't known whether Richardson would be able to attend). Richardson studied theater at Wayne State, where his magnetism as a performer was obvious, according to Joe Kvoriak, the director of promotion and outreach for the university's Maggie Allesee Department of Theatre and Dance. "Sam always had a very strong presence onstage. He kind of radiated, I think," says Kvoriak.  

During Detroit’s most infamous summer, Melba Boyd was a newly graduated Detroit Pershing High School alum. The 1967 rebellion, as she labels it, had a profound effect on her. She is now chair and distinguished professor at Wayne State University’s Department of African-American Studies. Speaking on “Detroit Today” with Host Sandra Svoboda, Boyd recalls her childhood in the city and life as an adult here, where racial power is tilted toward white society at the expense of African Americans. She finds the Kerner Commission was accurate when its members’ predicted society was moving toward two societies, “one black, one white, separate and unequal.” “Certainly when the Kerner report came out,” says Boyd, “I remember very clearly that it spoke to the kind of racism [prevalent in Detroit].”  

Urban agriculture can be practiced in many places, and by people of different ages and with varied interests. That’s according to Kami Pothukuchi, a Wayne State University professor and the director of SEED Wayne. Pothukuchi says while she does not like the term “food deserts,” city farms can help improve access to fresh fruits and vegetables. But she says gardens in urban centers can do more than that. Pothukuchi says gardens create a sense of community and give people of different ages and backgrounds a chance to talk. She says it allows people a chance to learn more about other cultures. Asked about the future or urban agriculture, Pothukuchi says one of the big questions is the availability of land. She says Detroit has a lot of vacant land, but not all of it is currently accessible to potential farmers.  

After more than two decades of grueling research on a National Institutes of Health study, Children’s Hospital of Michigan Pediatrician-in-Chief and Chair of the Wayne State University School of Medicine Department of Pediatrics Steven E. Lipshultz, MD and a group of pioneering Detroit researchers have co-published a study that breaks new ground in the effort to protect children who survive two major types of blood cancer from the threat of lifelong damage to their hearts caused by chemotherapy. Published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, the clinical trial found that dexrazoxane is effective in neutralizing the toxic cardiac effects of the often used pediatric cancer-fighting drug doxorubicin. Childhood cancer patients involved in the study were all survivors of newly diagnosed (and often fatal) T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia or advanced-stage lymphoblastic non-Hodgkin lymphoma. “This is the largest dexrazoxane study ever done in children, involving nearly 600 patients who were followed for many years after receiving doxorubicin during their cancer chemotherapy,” Lipshultz said. “The results are very encouraging,” he added, “because they show that the kids who received the dexrazoxane after doxorubicin therapy for their cancer had hearts that were normal – and the children who didn’t receive dexrazoxane had significantly abnormal hearts. The publication of this study in the Journal of Clinical Oncology says a great deal about the major contributions to clinical research that are being made at the Children’s Hospital of Michigan.”   

With the three plays receiving stagings at Wayne State —  A Raisin in the Sun ran Feb.12-Feb.21, Beneatha’s Place Feb. 28-29, and Clybourne Park Feb. 26-April 2 — audiences have had the unique opportunity to see the three works play off of each other, and to note fresh resonances and contrasts. This may be the first time all three plays have been programmed together. For all their commonalities, though, each of the three plays at Wayne State had a different director, none of whom explicitly coordinated their work with the others. As WSU is located in the center of Detroit, the productions attracted a diverse audience with conflicting opinions about how each play handles the topic of race. Perhaps unsurprisingly, post-show conversations moved quickly from discussions of the plays’ fictional world to the current state of race in Detroit and the U.S.  

Detroit – His name isn’t Gilbert or Ilitch, but the president of Wayne State University is driving a redevelopment engine all his own. “A lot is happening here,” says M. Roy Wilson, the Harvard-educated eye doctor who arrived in summer 2013 to lead Wayne State. “We’ve been struggling with less state resources. We’ve been able to use our philanthropy to offset some of that.” Credit a $17.8 million unrestricted gift from Sam and Helen Hartman, owners of Hartman Appliance. Their donation enabled Wayne State to remain a player in Midtown efforts that otherwise would have been difficult for a public university to join — a $3 million commitment to help fund the M-1 rail project, an investment in the Live Midtown initiative and support for Midtown Inc., among others. “We do own a fair amount of land,” adds Wilson, “and we’re trying to be judicious how we develop it.” That includes a 1.5-acre parcel at Cass and Canfield, near the strip anchored by Shinola and the Jolly Pumpkin; historic homes being converted into student housing and a new alumni house at Ferry and Woodward; and the lot at the southwest corner of Warren and Woodward. A new $50 million business school at Woodward and Temple, made possible by a $40 million gift from Mike Ilitch, expands the university’s reach south, burnishes Wayne State’s brand in a transforming downtown, and helps anchor the Ilitchs’ 45-block Detroit District development. It doesn’t end there. The $26.5 million renovation of the Student Center Building in the heart of campus is a harbinger of a concerted push to upgrade student housing. The university is preparing to convert the Queen Anne-style Thompson House, the former home to the School of Social Work at Cass and Hancock, into student housing. It also is planning a $100 million student housing project that would demolish the Helen DeRoy apartments and build two new student apartment buildings on Anthony Wayne Drive for a net gain of 430 student beds. The 200,000-square-foot iBio center, opened last summer, features collaborative work spaces, labs and other areas that are intended to create an interdisciplinary group of experts working on common problems in behavioral health, environmental sciences and metabolic diseases.