Lisa Fitzpatrick, a 2000 alumna of Michigan Tech, has been honored with a President’s Award for Outstanding Service by the University of Minnesota Duluth. She credited her Michigan Tech education for being instrumental in her success leading a team of five professors to build an interdisciplinary motion capture/emerging tech research lab.
Fitzpatrick, director, Viz Lab and Motion + Media Across Disciplines Lab (MMAD Lab), School of Fine Arts, University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD), fosters collaboration across disciplines, forges connections between people that might otherwise not meet, and brings faculty, staff, and students together to help them produce innovative research they could never create working alone.
She is called an ambassador for higher education. The labs she directs are considered to be the nexus of interdisciplinary and creative research on the Duluth campus. Her effort to connect outside of the University is equally as impressive.
Her support for an annual UMD IT event called Steps to the Future, a higher education college/career fair that targets the greater Duluth community, and specifically, families who might not always consider college as a possibility, is highly successful due to Fitzpatrick’s fun, eye-catching equipment, such as 3D printers and virtual reality video games that have been built and developed in her labs.
She also works to make connections between UMD and the local community through the service and resources that the MMAD Lab and Viz Lab can provide. Fitzpatrick has worked tirelessly with Duluth’s Great Lakes Aquarium and UMD students to create interactive exhibits that allow aquarium visitors to explore topics related to the various invasive and non-native aquatic species that are in the Great Lakes.
In addition, she is actively involved in projects at the Duluth Children’s Museum and the Duluth Art Institute. Because of her fluency in multiple languages, she is often instrumental in helping UMD researchers form international connections.
One person wrote, “What Lisa does in her job is impressive and represents the highest level of efficiency. But it’s how Lisa does her job that is her most impressive feat. She accomplishes all this with a smile, a sly turn of a phrase, good humor, endless patience, and a desire to make sure the faculty and students get what they need to further their work.”