Titans of Innovation: UDM invests in the future

During the first few months of his presidency, Donald B. Taylor met with employees to hear their thoughts on how to move University of Detroit Mercy forward. A common theme emerged from these listening sessions: Employees had exciting ideas, but they had gone unvoiced due to concerns over funding or resources.

The Titan Innovation Fund was introduced at Taylor’s inauguration in March 2023 to help change that and spark innovation at UDM.

It is designed to support new, creative ideas that improve the University and student experiences by ensuring that they receive the resources and support needed to survive.

"Thanks to generous donors, we are launching this fund to provide grants that empower faculty, staff and students to try new things," Taylor said at his inauguration. "Such funds have proven to be a successful catalyst of innovation and change at campuses around the country."

Early ideas impacted by the Titan Innovation Fund include a mobile coffee cart operated by Business Administration students, a science communication art show, a program that helps mentor first-year Titans and the birth of a center that focuses on using artificial intelligence to address community healthcare challenges.

"You create a program like this because you want to spark innovation, you want to spark creativity," said Karen Lee, associate vice president of Academic Administration. "And oftentimes, when you’re stuck in your role, whether it’s a faculty, staff or administrative role, you don’t get to do things that are outside the box."

The process

At the heart of the Titan Innovation Fund is seed money, which is awarded to help ideas blossom into real, tangible projects.

The process began with a call for proposals at the start of the 2023-24 academic year.

Pre-proposals identified a problem or opportunity at UDM, along with an innovative approach to addressing it. A review team and Taylor evaluated the submissions and selected several they felt deserved a full proposal, which included details like budgets, logistics and measures of success and sustainability.

All proposals were required to align with institutional priorities outlined by Taylor, which include expanding student experiences, fostering a sense of belonging, raising UDM’s profile and strengthening community partnerships and engagement.

Twenty-five pre-proposals were submitted during the first year of the Titan Innovation Fund, with 18 full proposals receiving funding.

Taylor experienced firsthand what can come out of this type of program at other institutions. As did Lee, who facilitates the Titan Innovation Fund.

"When the president said he wanted to do it here, I was all in, because I know what happens with it," Lee said. "It’s infectious. People get inspired to do things that they normally wouldn’t do. It really makes a difference when you have that support and a little extra money.

"I love seeing that spark in someone’s eyes where the world is the limit."

Guiding new Titans through freshman year

Some of the projects supported by Titan Innovation Fund are just starting.

One of those is the Titan Mentor Program, established to improve the student experience by supporting first-year students identified as at-risk as they navigate their first year at UDM.

It consists of 50 mentees (freshmen), 10 mentors (sophomores and above) who are student leaders at UDM, a graduate assistant who operates the program and four leads (faculty and staff) who meet with and support mentors.

Sandra Alef, director of Residence Life, has seen mentor programs thrive at other institutions and thought it fit the Titan Innovation Fund’s parameters well.

“The research is out there, and it shows that mentors are so very important to a student’s persistence at a university,” Alef said. "Students are going to listen to their peers far more often than they’re going to listen to us. That’s why I think it’s so important that they have somebody to talk to, listen to and to just have as a touch point."

It’s too early for any solid data, but Alef is already seeing dividends from its peer-to-peer engagement.

The Titan Mentor Program kicked off with an icebreaker event over the summer that was only scheduled for 30 minutes, but “people stuck around for an hour, hour and a half, because they were just craving that one-on-one conversation,” Alef said.

The idea to implement a mentor program wasn’t new, but Alef said the Titan Innovation Fund kickstarted it. The seed money funds a graduate assistant who plays a big role in the program’s success, as well as book scholarships for mentors.

"Without the funding from the Titan Innovation Fund, I think this would’ve been like a 3-5 plus-year project as opposed to a full rollout that we were able to accomplish this fall," Alef said.

Alef’s dream is that every first-year student is offered a mentor because they are new at UDM. She already sees ways for the Titan Mentor Program to grow and improve after its launch, but it will require additional funding.

"We’ll have to figure out how to fund it for years to come, because the students that are participating in the program, we’re seeing good things from. Those who are involved, I think, are going to get a great deal out of it.

"If we save five students from transferring, withdrawing or canceling, it’s absolutely worth it."

An impact through expression

Other projects have already started and found ways to continue.

Maris Polanco thought about bringing science communication (SciComm) art to UDM months before the Titan Innovation Fund was established.

“At first, I was trying to figure out how to do it all with no funding,” said Polanco, a lab manager and adjunct professor in the Biology department. “But having the Titan Innovation Fund made it way more legitimate."

SciComm art is an interdisciplinary form of expression that incorporates STEM topics, art and educational content.

With the Titan Innovation Fund’s support, UDM hosted its first SciComm art exhibit, "CNXNS" (pronounced "connections"), in February 2024. It featured pieces produced by students, faculty and staff.

The seed money allowed Polanco to pay artists and workers for their labor and provide food during the exhibit’s opening event.

"It’s basically all being reinvested directly into the people involved, and that’s something that’s really high on my priority list," Polanco said.

Additional funding — a $12,000 grant from the Michigan Arts and Culture Council, matched by Polanco’s remaining Titan Innovation Fund award — led to a second art exhibit. Titled "UNREAL," it will be held in February 2025 and will focus on themes of futurism, science fiction and more.

Polanco believes that having an art show at UDM is important because it creates community by providing creative opportunities.

"It’s showing that we value creative thinking here at Detroit Mercy," she said.

Harnessing AI through innovation

Other projects supported by the Titan Innovation Fund are quite extensive and have ambitious goals.

Phillip Olla, associate professor of Health Services Administration, proposed the creation of the Center for Augmenting Intelligence in Urban Health (CAIUH). Its purpose is to use artificial intelligence to address community healthcare challenges.

"I wanted to create a culture of innovation within UDM," Olla said. "What we do is very innovative, and the students and staff have phenomenal vision, but we don’t really have a mechanism to take what we have and put it out there."

Enter CAIUH, which Olla calls a "hub of excellence and innovation." Its work can be categorized into three sections: aeroponics and hydroponics, a breath lab and AI for education.

Through hydroponics (using water-based nutrient solution rather than soil) and aeroponics (using mist or fog to deliver nutrients to roots), CAIUH is trying to train Detroiters how to grow food that they can sell.

The breath lab is attempting to identify what healthy breath looks like, which could aid in early diagnosis
of diseases. It starts by capturing the breath of UDM student-athletes and later examining that data through a partnership with Amazon Web Services.

"A lot of the big breath research institutes, they’re doing great discoveries — cancer biomarkers, TB biomarkers, COVID biomarkers — but no one's really looked at what a normal breath is supposed to look like," Olla said.

AI has been an increasingly popular technology and CAIUH hopes to teach people how to use it. There are two aspects to this project. The first is teaching students how to use it ethically to give them an edge in the workforce, and the second is creating learning modules that community members can take to teach them how to use AI in their everyday lives.

Olla has already experienced the impact from the Titan Innovation Fund’s support.

"The money we have from the Titan Innovation Fund is seed funding, which means it’s just to get things going," Olla said. It’s allowed CAIUH to get resources, such as specialized equipment to grow plants using hydroponics and aeroponics.

"It’s really helped, because without that, there’s no way we would be able to even start demonstrating what we’re doing," Olla said. "It’s a catalyst. Without it, we might be able to do 1-2 projects on the side. But it would never give us the collection of innovation that we have now."

Olla started CAIUH to help bring innovation to Detroit and UDM, but believes it allows employees, students and others to live the University’s Jesuit and Mercy mission.

"It's really important for us to live our mission. We can't just say it and teach it without doing it," he said. "This allows us to do our mission. On top of that, the health outcomes that we could achieve if we stay the course of time on this are significant."

Professor, TENN innovate to make science fun for Detroit children

Eva Nyutu has spent her entire career teaching college students. But making science fun and engaging for children in Detroit became her focus this past summer.

Nyutu, an assistant professor of Biology at University of Detroit Mercy, introduced scientific concepts to children by growing plants over the course of several weeks. Various plants were grown using hydroponics, a technique that uses a water-based nutrient solution rather than soil.

The work with children was a result of a collaboration on hydroponics between UDM’s Titan Equity Nourishment Network (TENN) and Brilliant Detroit, a nonprofit that focuses on helping children become school ready.

The goal of this collaboration was to bring science to the neighborhood surrounding UDM’s McNichols Campus and increase children’s interest in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).

“I think it’s very important for these students, because this hydroponic project is something that we’re able to bring for them in their classroom and it’s allowing them to affirm themselves as scientists,” Nyutu said.

Over the course of several weeks, she taught children from kindergarten to fourth grade all about plants during summer camp programming at Brilliant Detroit’s Martin Park location.

Children learned about the life cycle and different parts of plants and their importance in the ecosystem, all while growing their own using a hydroponics system. Occasionally, Nyutu was joined at Brilliant Detroit by her research students, Kyla Charlebois and Shirli Qushku, and Assistant Professor of Biology Nicole Najor.

“In a way, it’s helping them to develop skills that they’ll continue using as they continue on with elementary, middle and high school,” Nyutu said. “They might be having fun, but they’re still developing these skills, unknowingly or knowingly.”

Nyutu witnessed children learning firsthand when nutrients were added to the hydroponics system.

“We have to put nutrients into the hydroponics because it’s only using water to grow,” she said. “So, they tell me, ‘I see the nutrient – when it was blue, it turned green.’ That’s an observation they’re making.”

Using hydroponics to educate children was an idea sparked by TENN’s previous experience with the method.

TENN had been working with UDM’s Center for Augmenting Intelligence in Urban Healthcare on a hydroponics project focused on solving problems with food access. That led TENN — an Institute for Leadership and Service program that fosters student and community collaboration for a more food-sovereign Detroit — to think of other ways hydroponics could impact people.

“We got these systems, and then with the Ford Community Corps Partnership grant, thought it would be a wonderful learning tool for students,” said Chelsea Manning, TENN’s program manager. “This idea just came as a way to get Brilliant Detroit their own systems so that they could keep using it and as a tool for learning.”

With the way TENN works closely with groups surrounding UDM’s McNichols Campus, Manning said the program has become a “community facilitator” for proposing new ideas and projects that connect individuals and groups.

“We’re always trying to find ways to connect the resources we have on campus with the people we work with,” she said. “Obviously, we do great things with food, but there’s so many other things on campus that these groups can benefit from.

“Having that relationship already with Brilliant Detroit, we were able to help connect the people.”

While this initial hydroponic project with Brilliant Detroit spanned several weeks in the summer, Nyutu and Manning are working to continue it next summer.

If it can continue, “then I think it’s incredibly important to get our students on campus into the community,” Manning said. “Not only because they can share their gifts, but there’s so much learning that the students get when they go work with these kids.

“I think it’s just the best way for our community to support and learn from each other.”

For Nyutu, being able to introduce children to scientific concepts was a rewarding experience.

“Just impacting one or more children to understand science, to learn science, to think of themselves as a scientist, that makes my day very happy and fulfilling,” she said.