There was a special connection between Detroit and Buffalo Bills owner Ralph Wilson Jr. "He never lost his roots even though his business ventures through Buffalo were significant," said David Ripple, Wayne State University Foundation president. For decades, Wilson sent money back home to places like St. John Providence Hospital, the Alzheimer's Association and Wayne State University. Wilson's contributions to Wayne State include the Law School and biomedical research. Ripple said he's impacted thousands of lives here in Detroit and other places through his gifts."

Robert Thomas, a December graduate of Wayne State University Law School, says his business law studies prepared him to lead in the community - something he got a head start on while still a law student. Thomas grew up in multiple foster homes in Detroit as a ward of the state. Today, he serves as leader of Foster Care Alumni of America, Michigan chapter, an advocacy group he founded during his second year at Wayne Law. He serves on the Foster Care Review Board administered by the State Court Administrative Office of the Michigan Supreme Court. He also became a member of the Detroit Board of Zoning Appeals while a law student.

University boards are the only public bodies in Michigan that routinely meet in private. Only the formal vote has to be done in public, thanks to a university-friendly interpretation of the state Constitution by the Michigan Supreme Court 15 years ago that seemingly gives them immunity from the state's Open Meetings Act. While Wayne State's regular meetings are usually perfunctory, unlike MSU or U-M, Wayne State governors hold committee meetings in public. The committees also include a faculty representative and a student representative. At a Feb. 7 budget and finance committee meeting, CFO Rick Nork walked through a detailed review of the university's financial position. After the presentation, board member Gary Pollard, D-Detroit, asked for details on unspent bond funds, according to meeting minutes posted online. That openness can make discussions a little more messy, especially around budget time, said Debbie Dingell, D-Dearborn, chairwoman of the WSU Board of Governors. "We've tried to be transparent about what we are doing," she said. There are some personnel issues that need to be dealt with in private, she said, including the selection of a president. She said WSU would not have been able to get M. Roy Wilson, its new president, as a candidate if his name had been public throughout the entire process.

A new course, "Detroit: Metropolis in Transition," will be offered by Wayne State University's Department of Urban Studies and Planning beginning this summer. "As the story of Detroit's historic transformation continues to twist and turn through its courtrooms, boardrooms and neighborhoods, Wayne State University is set to offer the country's first course focused on the process of restructuring an urban environment with Detroit's unique economy, geography and culture," a flyer advertising the class says. The lecture will cover Detroit's history up to present day and "issues such as the city's frustrated attempts at regionalism and its persistence as the largest metro area in the United States without a comprehensive, rail-based public transit system." The course is open to non-students and runs from May 7 through July 30, Wednesdays at 6 p.m.

Wayne State University's Institute of Gerontology (IOG) is hosting the 15th annual "Art of Aging Successfully" conference, 8:30 a.m.-2 p.m., Thursday, April 3, at the Greater Grace Conference Center in Detroit. Donna MacDonald, IOG outreach director and coordinator of the conference, talked about the purpose of the conference. "It's really celebrating aging. It's not looking at the doom and gloom of aging but the positive aspects." McDonald said yesterday's grandparents are not today's seniors. "We're living a lot longer…we're living healthier lives."

Matthew Seeger, dean of the College of Fine, Performing and Communication Arts, opines about the recall of 1.62 million General Motors vehicles associated with 12 deaths and 31 crashes. He writes that GM CEO Mary Barra is facing hard questions about the safety of GM products and more broadly about its larger culture of safety. He writes: "Questions and investigations are inevitable in any major product recall and product recalls are surprisingly common. Food recalls are almost routine and involve hundreds of tons of food products. Pharmaceutical products, household products, and a wide range of consumer products are recalled each year because of previously undetected risk factors. Although we don't know what happened with GM, the research suggests that many factors, large and small, can play a part…But even more important is the expectation that organizations are transparent about problems and that they learn from their mistakes and oversights. This is the road GM is taking."

Wayne State moved up five spots to No. 45 in the Intercollegiate Tennis Association Division II women's rankings. The Warriors (21-4) have been in the top 50 all season. Two other Great Lakes Intercollegiate Athletic Conference schools are rated: Northwood (34) and Grand Valley State (46).

Wayne State University is preparing for the inauguration of school President Dr. M. Roy Wilson. Wilson is scheduled to be sworn in April 4 during a ceremony on Wayne State's campus in Detroit's Midtown. Ohio State University's incoming President Michael Drake will deliver the keynote. Wayne State's Board of Governors unanimously elected Wilson in June. He has focused on growing research at the 28,000-student school since taking the job. Pre-inauguration events are to begin April 3 and include a concert and faculty research symposium. Wilson formerly was deputy director for strategic scientific planning and program coordination at the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities of the National Institutes of Health. He also has served as dean of Creighton University's School of Medicine.

Researchers at the Wayne State University School of Medicine are among more than 250 scientists in 114 labs in more than 20 countries and regions to publish a series of coordinated papers, including landmark papers in Nature and ten other journals, revealing a definitive list of human cell states that has the potential to serve as an essential resource for regenerative medicine. Leonard Lipovich, an associate professor in both the Center for Molecular Medicine and Genetics and the Department of Neurology, is among the authors. His lab is the only contributing lab from Michigan. Lipovich is a co-author of the paper "A Promoter Level Mammalian Expression Atlas," which will appear in Nature. This work provides the first ever quantitative definition of the complete set of human and mouse gene promoters at single-base resolution.

Scientists at Wayne State University are researching how algae might help disrupt reproduction of zebra and quagga mussels in the Great Lakes. Biologist Donna Kashian says preliminary study indicates algae produce chemicals that may inhibit the invasive mussels' spawning. She and physiologist Jeffrey Ram are trying to identify chemical cues the algae release and determine how they could be used to develop a control strategy. It would be a cleaner alternative to attacking the mussels with toxic chemicals. The research eventually might help curb the destructive mussels, which have caused widespread damage to the lakes since arriving in the 1980s in ballast tanks of oceangoing ships.

The Big Data & Business Analytics Symposium, being held today, features experts coming together to share ideas and insights on how to make use of a colossal collection of data. Ratna Babu Chinnam, Wayne State University industrial and systems engineering professor, explains the potential for these "massive landfills" of data during The Craig Fahle Show.

The Michigan Strategic Fund approved a $10 million loan for the $137 million M-1 Rail streetcar project from the Michigan Business Development Program. Construction of the 3.3-mile grade-level rail loop on Woodward Avenue by the public-private M-1 effort is expected to begin this spring. Major private commitments of $3 million have been secured from Quicken Loans, the Ilitch companies, Penske Corp., Compuware, Chevrolet, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, the Detroit Medical Center, Wayne State University, Henry Ford Health System, Wayne County, the Ford Foundation and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. The Hudson-Webber Foundation has pledged $1 million. The $3 million commitments are for the display advertising rights to a station along the route. The system is expected to be in service in early 2016.

The 2008 Tony Award winner for Best Play "August: Osage County," by Tracy Letts, closes the Hilberry Theatre's 51st season in Midtown Detroit. Playing April 18 through May 10, this Pulitzer Prize-winning play arrives at the Hilberry Theatre fresh off the critically-acclaimed movie adaptation in theatres nationwide. Lavinia Hart, head of the MFA Acting Program at Wayne State University, will play the role of Violet, the drug-addled family matriarch. Director James R. Kuhl returns home to the Hilberry Theatre where he earned his MFA in acting.

Scientists at Wayne State University are researching how algae might help disrupt reproduction of zebra and quagga mussels in the Great Lakes. Biologist Donna Kashian says preliminary study indicates algae produce chemicals that may inhibit the invasive mussels' spawning. She and physiologist Jeffrey Ram are trying to identify chemical cues the algae release and determine how they could be used to develop a control strategy. It would be a cleaner alternative to attacking the mussels with toxic chemicals. The research eventually might help curb the destructive mussels, which have caused widespread damage to the lakes since arriving in the 1980s in ballast tanks of oceangoing ships. The filter feeders deprive fish of food, crowd out native mussels and clog water intake pipes.

Robert Sedler, Wayne State University law professor, was a guest on the Paul W. Smith Show talking about the ruling last Friday on same-sex marriage, and the issuance of a stay. Sedler pointed out that the people who married in Michigan on Saturday are legally married and assuming that at some time in the future - possibly by June, 2015 - the Supreme Court holds that bans on same-sex marriage are unconstitutional, Michigan will have to recognize their marriages.

Blackstone LaunchPad, a Wayne State University program funded by the New Economy Initiative and the Blackstone Charitable Foundation that offers resources and guidance to student entrepreneurs and inventors, is on a mission to spur the creation of apps. The LaunchPad is teaming up with the university's Office of Economic Development in a new competition open to students, faculty, staff, and alumni that challenges participants to create apps for iOS, Android, or the Web that are relevant to the university community. The LaunchPad will also work with interested teams to get their apps to market after the competition. Jeri Stroupe, a senior program administrator for Wayne State's Office of Economic Development, says the idea for the competition had been kicked around for at least a year as a way to solve problems and help improve campus life.

The Wayne State University School of Medicine's Class of 2014 medical students learned where they will begin their residency training during the annual Match Day ceremony held Friday at The MGM Grand in Detroit. The local event follows the protocol of the National Resident Matching Program, a private non-profit corporation established in 1952 to provide a uniform date of appointment to positions of graduate medical education in the United States. Sealed envelopes containing all U.S. medical students' graduate medical education assignments, including specialty and location of residency, are delivered and opened throughout the country simultaneously. WSU's students have a historically high match success rate, and many remain in Michigan for their residency. In 2013, 98.5 percent of WSU students matched with residencies, and nearly 53 percent of those residences were in Michigan - good news for a state with a projected physician shortage.

Foreign mussels hitchhiking to the Great Lakes in the ballast water tanks of international freighters are becoming one of the most vexing environmental problems facing the Great Lakes. A group of scientists from Wayne State University, in collaboration with the United States Geological Survey and the Environmental Protection Agency, are working together to battle this problem. This invasion of zebra mussels and quagga mussels have caused dramatic ecological effects on the Great Lakes' ecosystems, including changes in fish abundance, local extinction of native mussels and profound changes in benthic invertebrates, organisms that live on the bottom of bodies of water that are important to decomposition of organic matter and more. The research, led by Donna Kashian, assistant professor of biological sciences in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Jeffrey Ram, professor of physiology in the School of Medicine, will work to identify these chemical cues released by algae and determine how they can be used to develop an ecological-scale control strategy to disrupt reproduction.

Wayne State University hopes $5,000 in prizes will spur some creative thinking and create a mobile app that also will benefit the school. The competition, which is open to teams of four, is aimed at creating an app for iOS or Android devices. "We're reaching out to the campus community for innovative ideas that can transform the Wayne State University experience, go viral and get noticed by some of Detroit's accomplished tech entrepreneurs and investors," said Jeri Stroupe, senior project administrator at Wayne State University's Office of Economic Development. The top three entries will receive cash prizes of $2,500, $1,500 and $1,000, courtesy of Detroit Labs, Detroit Technology Exchange and the Front Door. To be eligible, teams must register online by April 4 at www.mobileapp.wayne.edu.

Author and Holocaust expert Thomas Kühne will talk about The Murderers Among Us: How We Elude and Confront Holocaust Perpetrators," on March 23 at the Holocaust Memorial Center Zekelman Family Campus in Farmington Hills. Kühne will be hosted by the Wayne State University College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and The Guy Stern Endowment in Exile and Holocaust Studies. The event runs 2-4 p.m. Kühne will discuss why the Holocaust perpetrators did what they did, what made them become mass murderers, how they could live with their deeds and misdeeds and how their friends, families, judges, the media and academia dealt with them. The event is free to the general public.