Rick White

Rick White
"I’d much rather watch people do what they do than talk to them across a desk."
—John McPhee

Contact

  • Director of Strategic Communications, University Marketing and Communications

Biography

Rick joined Michigan Tech in 2022 after earning his MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Montana. His essays have been nominated for Best American Essays and published in LitHub, High Desert Journal, The A.V. Club and elsewhere. He also holds an MS in Environmental Studies from the University of Montana and a BA in Geography from the University of Central Arkansas. 

About Rick

  • Rick leads the UMC communications team in projects ranging from media relations to editing MTU News and Tech Magazine.
  • He has degrees in geography, environmental studies, and creative nonfiction.
  • He enjoys cooking, gardening, traveling, and exploring the Keweenaw Peninsula.

Recent Stories 

PSTLD researchers weld liquid nitrogen lines onto a custom thermal shroud

PSTDL Advances to Final Round of NASA Watts on the Moon Challenge

Next year, a team of students in Michigan Technological University’s Planetary Surface Technology Development Lab (PSTDL) will get the chance to prove their promising design for a lunar power management system to NASA engineers. On June 27, the PSTDL team was one of four teams selected to advance to Phase 2, Level 3 of the Watts on the Moon Challenge. All four teams received a $400,000 award and a chance to compete for a share of the competition’s grand prizes: $1 million for the winner and $500,000 for the runner-up. Read More

Michael Mullins smiling in front of library

Michael Mullins Recognized for University Senate Service and Leadership

On July 2, 2018, Rick Koubek met Michael Mullins for lunch, an event made noteworthy both by its timing and the rapport it initiated. It was Koubek’s second day on campus as the new president of Michigan Tech. It was Mullins’ second week as president of the University Senate.
"We had no office, no furniture, no staff people, and all of our stuff was packed up in boxes and stacked in a storage room," Mullins recalled. "Rick said, ‘Michael, just let me know what you need and we’ll make it happen, because I’m going to enthusiastically support shared governance.’" Read More

Kyle Griffin in bioprocessing lab

Q&A with Teaching Award Winner Kyle Griffin

Kyle Griffin is an assistant teaching professor of chemical engineering. He received his bachelor’s in chemical engineering and his Ph.D. in agricultural and biological engineering from the University of Florida. He specializes in bioprocess engineering (solving problems with systems involving living cells) and anaerobic digestion (breaking down organic materials with bacteria in zero-oxygen environments) and teaches courses in material and energy balances, thermodynamics and process control. Read More

Amy Marcarelli in GLRC 2023

Q&A with Teaching Award Winner Amy Marcarelli

Amy Marcarelli is a professor of biological sciences and an ecosystem ecologist with interests in energy and biogeochemical cycles in freshwater bodies. She received her bachelor’s in biology from Colgate University and her Ph.D. in ecology from Utah State. She is the director of both the Ecosystem Science Center and the Aquatic Analysis (AQUA) shared facility at Michigan Tech. Her research applies across aquatic habitats, including streams, rivers, wetlands, lake littoral zones — the sloping area where sunlight reaches from the lake’s surface all the way to the sediment, located between the shore and deeper water — and the nearshore regions of the Great Lakes. Read More

Residence hall gateway view

MTU Board of Trustees Approves Plans for New Residence Hall, Nursing Program

Michigan Tech’s new residence hall will house more than 500 second-year and upper-division students, tentatively beginning in fall 2025. It will be located at the east side of campus on Highway 41, just east of the Rozsa Center for the Performing Arts, and is slated to offer suites with both single- and double-occupancy bedrooms and semiprivate baths. Planning activities will begin this summer, and construction will start later this year. Read More

Huron Bay ice breakup

Home Ice Advantage: GLRC Hosts MIT Engineers on Huron Bay for Ice Fracturing Research

Researchers Ben Evans and Dave Whelihan from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory (MIT LL) came to Michigan Tech in March to deploy an array of sensors and other measuring equipment used to collect acoustic, seismic and weather data related to ice fracturing events. The GLRC team helped the two MIT LL researchers scout locations for their fieldwork, eventually settling on a patch of Huron Bay ice near Skanee. Read More