An Update from the Office of Research: June 2022

External Awards Received

The Office of Research is pleased to announce and would like to congratulate these faculty members on receipt of the following external funding:

Fred Feng, assistant professor of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering, has been awarded $549,037 by the National Science Foundation for his project entitled “CAREER: Improving bicycling safety by developing a research framework for studying driver-bicyclist interactions.” Dr. Feng’s research will advance the safety of environmentally sustainable, active, and equitable mobility modes by exploring ways to improve bicycling safety, and will develop a bicycling safety research framework that incorporates a variety of complementary methodologies and technologies. The outcome of this work will support engineers and practitioners, city planners, and policymakers and legislators by providing data-driven insights to design safer road infrastructures, bicycle facilities, traffic laws and regulations, training and education programs, and safety technologies.

Yunus Zeytuncu, CASL interim associate dean and associate professor of Mathematics, was awarded $58,297 by the National Security Agency in support of his Research Experiences for Undergraduates Program entitled “REU Site: Mathematical Analysis and Applications.” The program will host 21 students in Summer 2022 to work on spectral geometry, algebraic music theory, stochastic dynamics, and number theory projects. The goal of this program is to expose students to a rich intellectual environment where they can practice employing mathematical ideas to solve real life problems.

Sang-Hwan Kim, associate professor of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering, received $57,424 from Hyundai NGV for his project “Development of UX principles/guidelines for usability in vehicle.” To accommodate new mobility scenarios such as connected and autonomous vehicles, the user experience (UX) in vehicles must be expanded from driving-oriented human-machine interaction to more comprehensive concepts spanning a wide range of possible experiences and services. In this study, Dr. Kim will investigate applicable UX principles and designs for various mobility scenarios. The results are expected to contribute to improving customer satisfaction by applying consistent and improved UX design guidelines in vehicle and mobility service design.

Hugo Casquero, assistant professor of Mechanical Engineering, was awarded $100,000 by Ford Motor Company for his project “Benchmarking of splines with extraordinary points for crash simulations.” This project seeks to establish a workflow and methodology that takes as input a dirty .iges file from CATIA or any other major CAD software and returns as output an analysis-suitable spline model that can be used directly in the commercial FEA software LS-DYNA to perform crash simulations. This work will lead to significantly improved time savings in the design-through-analysis cycle as well as enhanced robustness and accuracy in comparison with the conventional approach.

Alireza Mohammadi, assistant professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, was awarded $8,000 from the American Society for Engineering Education for his project, “Integrating Sustainability Concepts into Robotics Engineering Curriculum at UM-Dearborn.” This project is part of the Engineering for One Planet (EOP) global initiative to equip engineers across all disciplines with the basic skills and tools for environmental sustainability. The initiative provides a roadmap for integrating fundamental sustainability principles into engineering education to support the health of the planet and the lives it sustains. Dr. Mohammadi will work to incorporate concepts such as minimization of waste and energy in autonomous systems including mobile robots and industrial robotic arms into the robotics courses taught at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.

Wencong Su, associate professor of Electrical Engineering, has received $130,956 from Ford Motor Company for his project, “Cloud-based Battery Management System (BMS).” There is a critical need for innovative, breakthrough technology that can enable quick and accurate estimation of battery health and remaining life. Dr. Su’s work will contribute to the development of techniques to cost-effectively monitor and manage important battery performance measures while predicting battery failure, as well as to substantially improve batteries’ performance and extend their service life to make batteries a safe, reliable, and cost-efficient solution.

Announcements

Congratulations to the Winter 2022 Campus Grant Award Recipients

The Office of Research is pleased to announce and would like to congratulate the award recipients of the most recent Campus Grant cycle. Additional details of the awarded projects can be found on our Previously Funded Campus Grant Projects webpage.

Thematic Research Planning Grant Recipients:

• Pam McAuslan, Sridhar Lakshmanan & Marie Waung for their project, “How various design elements communicate vehicle intent and influence people's reactions to the vehicle.”
• DeLean Tolbert Smith, Christopher Burke, Georges Ayoub & Sarah Nesbitt for their project,
  “Pre-College STEAM Teacher Professional Academy to Support Educational and Access Equity in Engineering Design.”
• Jacob Napieralski, Natalie Sampson, Ulrich Kamp, & Stuart Batterman for their project, “Dust in Detroit: Investigating Fugitive Dust Profiles to Inform Local Environmental Health Policies.”

Research Initiation & Development Grant Recipients:

• Zhi Zhang & Jie Fan for their project, “Discover novel cross-link between microglial polarization and chirality after pediatric traumatic brain injury.”
• Alan Argento, Gargi Ghosh & Wonsuk Kim for their project, “Effects of the mechanics of cerclage surgery on bone healing.”
• Zhen Hu & Youngki Kim for their project, “Unmodeled Dynamics Recovery of Coupled Dynamical Systems Under Uncertainty.”
• Bochen Jia for his project, “Integrating Art and Human Factors to Promote STEM learning via an Revolutionary Engineered Approach.”

UM-Dearborn Scholars Grant Recipients:

• Danielle DeFauw for her project, “Content Analysis of High-Quality Children's Literature Awarded the Etisalat Award for Arabic Children's Literature.”
• Dara Hill for her project, “Detroit Parents' School Choice Decisions: Middle School Perspectives.”

Research Events in June & July:

• National Science Foundation “NSF Virtual Grants Conference” - June 6 - 10, Attendance for some events may be limited
• MICHR workshop “Conducting and Obtaining Valid Informed Consent” - Tuesday, July 12, 1 - 3:30 PM

More events and announcements can be found on the UM-Dearborn Office of Research website. For regular updates and research announcements, subscribe to our Research News email list!

Resources & Tools for Researchers

Every month, the Office of Research will feature a resource and/or tool that is available for researchers!

This month we are featuring the U-M Library’s Research Guide on Alternative Metrics.

Alternative metrics (altmetrics) are public engagement indicators that measure interactions with publications in non-scholarly venues like blogs, tweets, article downloads, and shares. Altmetrics can help researchers to tell a story about how people are engaging with their research outside of traditional academic paths such as citations and conferences. Altmetrics, such as mentions of research articles in YouTube videos, Wikipedia pages, tweets, or major news outlets, provide a qualitative complement to traditional quantitative measures like citation counts.

There are many resources to track alternative metrics, such as:

• Paperbuzz: Enter a paper's DOI to see how a paper is being talked about online. Note that results are incomplete for articles published before 2017.
• ImpactStory Profiles: Track your buzz on Twitter, blogs, news outlets and more.
• Plum Analytics: Now owned by Elsevier and integrated into their platforms, Plum Analytics gathers data about usage of data sets, open access publications, presentations, blogs, and other types of scholarly communication.
• Snowball Metrics: A research metrics initiative led by research universities around the world working to establish global standards to enable institutional benchmarking. The University of Michigan is a member of the Snowball Metrics United States Working Group.
• Altmetric Explorer: Browse, search, and query "mentions" on the web of publications etc. by researchers at U-M and elsewhere.

For more information about altmetrics and how they can inform research impact, visit the U-M Library’s Alternative Metrics guide page.

Reminders & Updates

Thematic Research Planning Grants: Applications due by June 15, 5 p.m.

The Thematic Research Planning Campus Grant’s third and final cycle is accepting applications through June 15, 2022, 5 p.m. For additional details about the Campus Grants programs and eligibility, please visit our Campus Grants website.

Thematic Research Planning (TRP) Grants will support the development of collaborative cross-disciplinary research proposals that address the following priority research areas:

• Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
• Sustainability
• Mobility & Infrastructure

The program will be open to teams working closely together to solve problems that transcend the traditional boundaries associated with research programs, departments and colleges. Single PI proposals will *not* be considered- at least two different UM-Dearborn academic units should be involved, in addition to external partners. Applicants are required to identify in advance the external funding opportunity/ies of interest to them.

The TRP grants will fund planning proposals of strong multidisciplinary teams working on urgent and challenging issues, and with well-defined plans for engaging local communities (including non-profits, municipal, city and community organizations, small businesses and industry). Funding will be awarded for proposal and research planning, proposal writing, conducting preliminary research activities, and pursuing external funding to sustain the proposed research.

Budget floor: $15,000
Budget ceiling: $30,000

Applications must be submitted through InfoReady.

Upcoming Funding Opportunities

The Office of Research publishes a list of selected funding opportunities, organized by college, every month on our website under Announcements. In addition, yearly grant calendars organized by subject area provided by Hanover Research are available there as well. Contact the UM-Dearborn Office of Research if you would like more information about submitting a proposal to any of the programs.