Lance A. Gable and Noah D. Hall have been named associate deans at Wayne State University Law School. Gable, who has served as interim associate dean since June 2013, will serve as associate dean for academic affairs. Hall, a member of the law faculty since 2005, will serve as associate dean for student affairs. The positions are effective Monday, June 30. Gable will work with faculty and staff to oversee the law school's academic programs. Hall will work in collaboration with the law school's Career Services office and Admissions and Student Affairs office on mentoring, job placement, networking, recruitment and scholarship initiatives.

David Fasenfest, Wayne State University associate professor of sociology, was recently among several scholars interviewed by a journalist from Globo Networks of Brazil concerning the decline in Detroit, and the problems facing labor in the US. The story aired nationally in Brazil. (cue to 12:23 for interview segment)

Among the most-watched public universities to set tuition this season is Wayne State University, which will vote on an increase Friday afternoon but is not expected to make headlines like last year. A year ago, WSU hiked tuition 8.9 percent - the highest increase in years - but officials promised a boost like that wouldn't happen again. At the time, then-President Allan Gilmour recommended the increase to address a dramatic drop in state aid over the years and to bring in extra revenue for the university to be more competitive. Paul Massaron, a member of the WSU Board of Governors, said that students won't get hit like they did a year ago. "We will not be doing what we did last year, not at all," Massaron said. "There will be an increase but not like that." The WSU board has structured a budget that meets the needs of the university without a large tuition increase. Additionally, the state has given all universities more operating funds and it's unlikely the board will exceed the 3.2 percent tuition-hike cap set by the Legislature for schools to get incentive funding, Massaron said. Wayne State will be the last of Michigan's Big Three public universities to set tuition for 2014-15.

Writer John Quinn offers a thumbs-up review of the Hilberry Theatre's production of "Stone Soup: A Wrap Opera," running through June 29 as part of the Maggie Allesee Department of Music and Dance's offering in its second season of Summer Children's Theatre. The play, under the direction of Department Chair John Wolf, is noted by Quinn as "really a fine achievement."

Detroit's state-appointed emergency manager Kevyn Orr is going back to school to discuss the city's comeback with college students. Wayne State University says Orr will guest lecture Wednesday evening during an urban studies and planning course that covers Detroit's restructuring as it happens. The class session will focus on the city's fiscal issues. Orr has said Detroit's debt is more than $18 billion. Last summer, he made Detroit the largest U.S. city to file for bankruptcy. The petition was approved by a federal judge in December. All of the city's creditors have until July 11 to vote on Orr's restructuring plan for Detroit. A trial on the city's bankruptcy is scheduled to start in August. Orr has said he expects Detroit to emerge from bankruptcy by early fall.

The dean of Wayne State's Law School says she wants it to be a place that trains active community leaders, not just lawyers. Jocelyn Benson was named interim dean in 2012. Last week, the university made her appointment permanent. She's the second woman to head the law school, and the youngest woman to lead any law school in U.S. history. WDET's Pat Batcheller asked Benson about her vision for the law school. "We have a responsibility to train our students to lead and to serve and to use their law degrees to help others," Benson said.

Wayne State University's Hilberry Theatre is about to undergo a massive makeover in the form of the Hilberry Gateway, a three-phase new construction and renovation project. Matthew Seeger, College of Fine, Performing and Communication Arts dean, spoke with WDET's Martina Guzman about the benefits of the project not only to Wayne State's performing arts students but also to neighboring businesses in Midtown Detroit and to the artistic, cultural climate of the area.

A new report by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) states that an estimated 28 percent of adult Americans are receiving less than 6 hours of sleep per night. According to the health organization, this can lead to some serious mental and physical health complications. "[Sleep is] one of the components of a three-legged stool of wellness: nutrition, exercise and sleep," said Safwan Badr, a past president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and a sleep expert with Detroit Medical Center and Wayne State University. "The three are synergistic. It's hard to lose weight if you are sleep deprived. It's hard to eat healthy if you are sleep deprived. It is hard to exercise if you're tired." Currently, the recommended number of sleep for adults per night is anywhere between 7-9 hours a night. Certain factors related to weight, age and medical conditions may also require others to need more or less sleep.

Kami Pothukuchi, associate professor of urban planning at Wayne State University and director of SEED Wayne, a campus-community collaborative dedicated to building sustainable food systems on campus and in the community, wrote about Wayne State's Farmers Market. The WSU Farmers Market unveiled its seventh season on June 4 at its usual location, 5201 Cass Ave. One of 10 neighborhood markets in Detroit, the market offers a range of fresh vegetables, fruits, herbs, and prepared foods to eat at the market or take home. For 22 weeks, the market will host farmers and food businesses from across the region, including at least 10 from Detroit.

About a year ago, two Wayne State University urban planning majors got an idea for a project that would make the city a better place. They had seen people spending their seemingly endless waits for their bus sitting on curbs or stacks of the discarded tires that pile up on vacant lots. They wanted to make things easier for these folks, and built bus benches for all the Detroit bus stops that lacked them. Then they got another idea and made the benches from wood reclaimed from all the abandoned houses that were being disassembled by organizations like Reclaim Detroit. A third idea was building a bookshelf under the bench's seat and fill it with books so people would have something to read while they waited. With these three ideas and $50 cash, Kyle Bartell and Charlie Molnar started Sit On It Detroit. One year later they've installed 18 benches at bus stops, and this spring they moved into new studio space creating a maker space and small business incubator.

A collaborative effort between state and local colleges, governmental agencies and others to monitor Lake St. Clair water quality has been established at Lake St. Clair Metropark. The current water testing system is nearly 30-years-old and has a nearly 24-hour delay before results are released. Work at the HEART facility is expected to start July 1, and is a collaborative effort between Wayne State University, Macomb Community College, the Huron-Clinton Metropark Authority and Macomb County. Stephen Lanier, vice president for research at Wayne State University, added the facility "aims to attract scientists, educators and students from national and international institutions to conduct innovative research focusing on urban water systems and the environment."

A recently published clinical study in the Journal of the American Medical Association has answered an urgent question that long puzzled ER pediatricians: Is the drug lorazepam really safer and more effective than diazepam - the U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved medication as first line therapy most often used by emergency room doctors to control major epileptic seizures in children? The answer to that question - based on a double-blind, randomized clinical trial that compared outcomes in 273 seizure patients, about half of whom were given lorazepam - is a clear-cut "no," said Prashant V. Mahajan, M.D., M.P.H., M.B.A, one of the authors of the study. "The results of our clinical trial were very convincing, and they showed clearly that the two medications are just about equally effective and equally safe when it comes to treating status epilepticus [major epileptic brain seizures in children]," Mahajan said. "This is an important step forward for all of us who frequently treat kids in the ER for [epilepsy-related] seizures, since it answers the question about the best medication to use in ending the convulsions and getting these patients back to normal brain functioning."

The realization that Michigan's stock was falling fast drove together businesses and universities in what may be the country's most influential partnership to change higher education. Over the last three years, the Michigan Legislature has increased funding for state universities by 6 percent, reversing a steep, decade-long decline. What's more, the universities have agreed to tie their funding to performance indicators such as the number of graduates they turn out and the number of disadvantaged students they enroll. What is remarkable about this achievement is that these unlikely partners did something that the federal government and other states have not managed to accomplish. They took a well-accepted economic idea - that more college degrees from a more diverse population creates more growth - and turned it into a set of concrete benchmarks. On the higher-education side, the transformation started when the state's three biggest universities - University of Michigan, Michigan State, and Wayne State University - formed a research corridor designed to compete with other research clusters in California, North Carolina, and Texas. They wanted to combat the notion in university circles that Michigan's higher-education system was on the decline.

With over $2.4 million in new federal funding, Wayne State University researchers, regional collaborators at Henry Ford Health System, the University of Michigan and Michigan State University, and community partners will study how exposures to stressors that are prevalent in the urban industrialized environment - both chemical and non-chemical - impact human health in Detroit and beyond. The grant, Center for Urban Responses to Environmental Stressors (CURES), is one of approximately 20 select P30 Core Centers funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences of the National Institutes of Health. CURES is co-led by Wayne State faculty members Melissa Runge-Morris, M.D., director of the Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (IEHS) and professor of oncology, and Bengt Arnetz, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H., M.Sc.Epi., deputy director of IEHS and professor of family medicine and public health sciences. "We are very pleased that Wayne State University has received this important and prestigious P30 Center grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences that will be of significant benefit for the city of Detroit and the many communities that we serve," said Stephen M. Lanier, Ph.D., vice president for research at Wayne State. "The CURES team is exceptional, and this initiative will focus on nurturing healthy communities in Detroit through environmental disease prevention and creating cleaner living and working environments, all of which are important building blocks to improving this great city."

A new project at Wayne State University School of Medicine aims to reduce inpatient psychiatric admissions in area hospitals and ultimately save the state's "Healthy Michigan" newly-expanded Medicaid program $7.5 million a year. The program was developed by Wayne State faculty at WSUPG's Crisis Center inside the Detroit Medical Center's Detroit Receiving Hospital. A team looked at the effectiveness of transporting patients medically certified for psychiatric hospitalization to a central psychiatric emergency service. Upon arrival, patients were re-evaluated by psychiatrists specially trained in emergency psychiatry and a mental health team to identify the correct diagnosis and any underlying problems, such as unstable co-morbid medical illnesses, substance abuse, non-convulsive seizures and nonverbal patients with developmental disabilities expressing pain through behavior. "So patients did better, and went back to families, work and society quicker," said David Rosenberg, M.D., Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences professor and chair and the Miriam Hamburger Endowed Chair of Child Psychiatry.

Sometime in the next few years, the number of people over the age of 65 in southeast Michigan is expected to surpass the number of residents 18 and under. "I don't think that has happened before in human history," said Thomas Jankowski, associate research director at Wayne State University's Institute of Gerontology, citing population figures from the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments. "Overall population will stay relatively stable, but the number of younger folks is going to decrease as they age out of their age group, and the number of older folks is going to increase dramatically." And that means local governments will have to brace for skyrocketing expectations for accommodating larger senior populations, ranging from improvements in housing and transit options to expansion of recreation and health programming, said Jankowski.

Wayne State University lecturer Saeed Khan spoke with Craig Fahle about the current tensions building in Iraq. Khan said the situation is getting worse by the day, in large part due to violence from the militant group, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The group has a stronghold in Syria within 60 kilometers of Baghdad, and Khan explains that the gains may appear sudden but the group's recent action has been years in the making. "The pace of their advancement into Iraq has been really quick even by American standards," said Khan. The group's swift dissolution of several Iraqi military divisions and complete disregard for the border between Iraq and Syria, suggest a fluid approach to an attack that will likely grow to involve the entire region.

Wayne State University President M. Roy Wilson and the presidents of Michigan's other two research universities wrote a guest column about the University Research Corridor (URC) member institutions' water related research and service and the huge economic advantage. According to a new report commissioned by the URC from Anderson Economic Group (AEG), the three universities received nearly $300 million in awards for water-related research and outreach from 2009 to 2013, and those 2,100 awards led to innovations in a variety of areas, from dealing with invasive species to monitoring water quality and finding ways to optimize water use in agriculture. The universities together produce more than 3,400 graduates a year prepared to analyze and find solutions to water-related issues, bringing new talent and energy to the field. The AEG's analysis also showed that Michigan ranked fourth in the nation in the percentage of jobs associated with industries related to water, at 718,700, with 1 in 5 Michigan jobs tied to having good and plentiful water. The URC is making important contributions to interdisciplinary research, including work being done in the U.S. and Canada through the Council of Great Lakes Governors, the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative and the International Joint Commission. "Our universities are engaged in research on the major lakes bordering the state and the inland lakes, streams and wetlands that make up Great Lakes basin, as well as water systems around the world."

Casey Kasem, the American Top 40 radio host who crafted a long and lucrative career out of counting down to No. 1, has died. He was 82. Kasem, who hosted the syndicated weekend show for nearly four decades, died of complications from dementia at St. Anthony's Hospital in Gig Harbor, Wash. Since his first broadcast from Hollywood on seven stations on July 4, 1970, to his finale on the same holiday weekend in 2009, the peppy Kasem ended each American Top 40 show with his signature line: "Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars." Casey Kasem's career took him far from his Detroit roots, but he never forgot the place where he first cut his teeth as a deejay - and where he returned several times to celebrate Detroit radio. Growing up in the Motor City, Kasem was involved with Northwestern High School's radio club and majored in speech education at Wayne State University.

Wayne State University has named Jocelyn Benson dean of WSU's Law School. With the move, the 36-year-old Benson becomes the youngest woman ever to lead a U.S. law school. She had been interim dean since December 2012. "While serving as the law school's interim dean since December 2012, Dean Benson has improved bar passage rates, increased the law school's ranking with U.S. News & World Report and added hands-on learning opportunities for students," WSU Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs Margaret E. Winters said in a news release announcing the move. "I'm excited to see her future accomplishments in the years ahead." "I am proud to be leading Wayne Law at this historic moment," Benson said in a news release. "We strive to be the leading legal education institution in the Midwest for providing opportunities to serve the public. As Detroit's law school, we also have a responsibility to be a magnet for the next generation of advocates for justice in our region."