May 22, 2025

On April 15, students, faculty, staff, industry sponsors and local community members witnessed firsthand the innovation and industriousness of Michigan Tech’s discovery-based education during the 25th anniversary of Design Expo. Sponsored by the Enterprise Program and the College of Engineering, more than 1,000 students participated from Enterprise, Senior Design, and Engineering Fundamentals. This year also marks the 25th anniversary of the Enterprise Program and its unique project-based curriculum.

“This year’s Design Expo was more than a showcase—it was a celebration of what happens when education meets experience,” said Nagesh Hatti, director of the Enterprise Program. “The energy, creativity, and professionalism displayed by our students left a lasting impression on everyone in the room.”

Celebrate this milestone and hear from student participants in the recent MTU News story.

Please join the Graduate School in congratulating Michigan Tech's Summer 2025 Finishing Fellows.

“I am deeply grateful to receive this Doctoral Finishing Fellowship,” writes Shiwei Ding, Ph.D. candidate in computer science. “It is both an honor and a recognition of my work over the past four years at MTU, and it motivates me to complete the final stages of my Ph.D. journey.”

Ding began his doctoral studies in 2021 under the guidance of Xiaoyong (Brain) Yuan in the Department of Computer Science. Inspired by the rapid development of artificial intelligence and machine learning, his research focuses on the security and privacy challenges in machine learning systems — particularly in protecting user privacy. During his Ph.D., Ding has concentrated on privacy risks in collaborative inference, a widely used framework for deploying large neural networks.

Read more about Ding’s journey at Michigan Tech on the Graduate School Newsblog.

Please join the Graduate School in congratulating Michigan Tech's Summer 2025 Finishing Fellows.

“I am honored to receive the Finishing Fellowship Award from the Graduate School and the Graduate Dean’s Advisory Panel. This award grants me the time and focus needed to complete my dissertation,” writes Megh Raj Subedi, Ph.D. candidate in statistics. “I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. Qiuying Sha, for her encouragement and invaluable guidance throughout this journey. Her advice and support have shaped me into an independent researcher and prepared me for new challenges. I also wish to express my gratitude to the Department of Mathematical Sciences, the departmental chair, Dr. Melissa Keranen, and the faculty and staff for their unwavering support.”

Read more about Subedi’s journey at Michigan Tech on the Graduate School Newsblog.

The CSA Dean's Office will be closed on Friday, May 23, and will re-open on Tuesday, May 27. 

From May 15-18, 26 students from Houghton High School and the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community Natural Resource Department attended the 2025 Lake Superior Youth Symposium (LSYS) at the University of Minnesota-Duluth. The purpose of the Symposium is to inspire and motivate students and teachers in grades 8-12 to become stewards of Lake Superior and the Great Lakes.

Students participated in a variety of workshops and field trips related to the Lake Superior watershed. They learned about sustainability & the Blue Economy, collected macroinvertebrates to assess stream health, toured the Duluth-Superior harbor to learn about shipping on the Great Lakes, visited a local farm to learn how biochar is used to improve soil fertility, measured estuary biodiversity, and brainstormed ways to reduce resource consumption through reuse and recycling.

Symposium registration and transportation costs were provided by donations from the Friends of the Land of Keweenaw (FOLK), Keweenaw Community Forestry, Keweenaw Outdoor Recreation Coalition, Copper Country Trout Unlimited, Lake Superior Stewardship Initiative, Nitrate Elimination Company, Upper Peninsula Environmental Coalition, and Mrs. Sally Santeford.

Students are already looking forward to the next symposium in 2027 to be hosted at Michigan Tech! MTU hosted two previous symposiums in 2001 and 2013. For more information on the 2027 Symposium, contact Erika Vye (GLRC) at ecvye@mtu.edu or Sierra Williams (CFRES) at sierraw@mtu.edu. 

Registration is open for the GSG Summer Softball League 2025!

Tentatively, the league will run every Thursday night starting from June 5 and ending on July 31, with a picnic and playoff tournament. All are welcome to play as we will have a preseason softball clinic and captain’s meeting to go over the rules and techniques of softball. Registration is now open on the GSG Softball website.

Each team member will need to fill out the registration form separately. It would be the manager's responsibility to make sure every team member registers. Team registration closes June 2 at midnight. If you do not have a team but you are interested in participating, please indicate that.

The schedule will be shared with you soon after the registration closes. For any questions/concerns, please contact Oluwatosin Oyeniran at gsg-vp@mtu.edu.

Want to do something this summer that’s hands-on, high-energy, and could shape your future? Michigan Tech’s Summer Youth Programs (SYP) still has open spots in some of our most exciting courses, and if you're a high school student in the Copper Country Intermediate School District (CCISD), scholarships may be available to help you get there.

Here’s some of what you can still sign up for:

• NEXT Scholars: Geospatial Engineering
• Women in Computer Science
• Women in Engineering (WIE)
• Engineering Scholars Program (ESP)
• ME: Design the Future (Middle School & High School)
• Design for the Environments
• Geohazards and Resource Engineering (Middle School)
• How the World Works: Law and Leadership
• Climate Futures: Building a Sustainable Keweenaw (Middle School)
• Wild World of Chemistry (High School)
• Nuclear Science
• Aviation

These aren’t your average summer classes. At SYP, you might find yourself piloting a small plane down the Keweenaw waterway, discovering the future of nuclear energy, designing solutions for climate resilience, or building something that’s never existed before. And you’ll do it all in a hands-on environment with like-minded students from around the world.
Seats and scholarships are limited—apply today on the SYP website and find out more about scholarship opportunities. 

MTU Dining Services has set a new process for requesting residential meals on-campus. This includes meals that are added to existing Husky ID cards or a paper ticket for visitors. Forms can be found on the dining website. 

Group Meal Card/ID Order Form
If you are planning to host a group in the dining halls, you would use the Dining Hall Meal Passes Group ID Order Form.

Meals requested through this form can be added one of two ways:

• Meals can be added directly to existing Husky ID cards by uploading a list of names and M#’s. This is helpful when you have a group of students who will need the option to eat meals at unscheduled times (example: student athletes, SYP Staff, RA’s or OTL’s). To use this form to request meal passes, all participants need to have an active Husky ID.
• Have meals added to a Department Dining Card for staff from your department to use as needed (IT charges a $10 fee to cover the cost of a new card or provide an existing card number to reload meals). This is a great option for faculty & staff to use for team meals or when a guest is joining you for a meal.

Visitor Group Order Form
If you are hosting a group of 10 or more in the dining halls for a meal, please use the Dining Hall Meal Passes Visitor Group Order Form at least two weeks in advance of your event to request the proper number of meal passes for your group.

These meal passes will be a physical paper ticket for attendees to use for access to the dining hall. Once the form is completed, your request will be processed by University Marketing and Communications, who will design and print the passes specific to your event. Passes can be delivered by campus mail or picked up from the University print shop. If a visit is scheduled with less than two weeks' notice, please contact Dining Services at huskyeats@mtu.edu to discuss your specific situation.

Additionally, residential dining hall meal passes may be purchased at the door with a credit card (cash not accepted and University Purchasing Cards are prohibited). lf you have any questions or special requests around residential meal passes please email huskyeats@mtu.edu.

Retail Meal Tickets
If you would like to order campus retail meal tickets for a group, this is also an option. Please contact our team directly at huskyeats@mtu.edu to coordinate the details of the paper ticket and allow at least 2 weeks for printing.

Alexandra Glover (MSE/IMP) is the principal investigator on a project that has received a $224,000 research and development contract from the University of Michigan.

The project is titled, "Project 3.A119: Development and Application of Friction-Free Bending for Assessment of Material Properties under Complex Loading Conditions."

Maine’s Rangeley Highlander mentioned Michigan Tech alum Matthew Whitfield '25 (B.S. Wildlife Ecology and Conservation) in a story about the 2025 High Peaks Recreation Ranger Corps, where he is contributing to trail maintenance and design in Maine's High Peaks Region.

No Tech Today on Monday

Tech Today will not publish on Monday, May 26, in observance of the Memorial Day holiday.

Submissions for publication in Tech Today on Tuesday, May 27, are due by noon tomorrow, May 23.

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Geophysics Seminar with Cristhian Salas Pazmiño '21

Cristhian Salas Pazmiño, Ph.D. candidate at University of California Santa Barbara, returns to Houghton today, May 22, to share his cutting-edge geophysical research.

Salas Pazmiño earned his M.S. in Geophysics from Michigan Tech in 2021, advised by Greg Waite (GMES). He joined MTU after completing his B.S. in Geology/Earth Science at Universidad Yachay Tech in 2020. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. under the guidance of UCSB's Zach Eilon.

Join us today at 1 p.m. in Dow 610 to hear about his latest work and reconnect! All are welcome.

Salas Pazmiño's presentation is titled "Inference of thermodynamic state of the upper mantle beneath Alaska by using teleseismic body-wave velocity and attenuation tomography."

From the abstract:
Tomography models of seismic attenuation and seismic velocity provide valuable and complementary information about the Earth's thermodynamic state, as these parameters possess different sensitivities to various mantle properties. Despite the potential of combining these two observations, the challenges associated with measuring attenuation have often limited its frequent integration with velocity studies at the regional scale. Alaska's complex tectonics, diverse thermodynamic conditions, and the excellent seismic coverage provided by the deployment of the Transportable Array (TA) make it an ideal natural laboratory to assess the power of using new high-resolution regional models of attenuation and velocity to provide new insights into the mantle's physical conditions. We have updated an attenuation measurement approach that simultaneously fits both the amplitude and phase components of the differential attenuation operator while testing teleseismic signals for elastic focusing and defocusing effects, known to contaminate attenuation measurements. This updated method enabled us to produce thousands of high-quality body-wave differential attenuation measurements (t*). We complemented these observations with differential travel time measurements and independently inverted the different datasets to create three-dimensional attenuation and velocity tomography models, respectively. We collected multi-frequency observations for our velocity (V) models, which were then inverted using finite-frequency tomography. Additionally, we developed a novel iterative inversion algorithm for attenuation that uses ray-based tomography. In this case, we solved for the quality factor, Q, accounting for potential order-of-magnitude gradients. Our resulting models reveal remarkably consistent large-scale regions in the mantle, such as a fast velocity, low-attenuating subducting slab, and a high-attenuating, low-velocity mantle wedge. We finally used these observations of QS and VS to establish 3-D models of the likely distribution of temperature (T), melt fraction (Ï•), and grain size (d) of the upper mantle by applying a joint Bayesian inference framework using the Very Broad Rheology calculator (VBRc). As a key part of a multidisciplinary initiative, these new results will significantly contribute to understanding the full spectrum of the Earth's rheological response.

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Broader Impacts Workshop

Thursday, May 22, 2 p.m.–3 p.m. | Memorial Union Building (MUB), Ballroom A2

In response to the uncertain funding landscape and concerns raised during the recent Vice President for Research Campus Q&A, this workshop will equip researchers with strategies to strengthen NSF proposal Broader Impacts (BI) components. Workshop Flow: Introduction: Understanding NSF's Broader Impacts expectations and philosophy Activity 1: Sharing successful approaches from past approaches Activity 2: Techniques for reframing existing work to highlight societal impact Activity 3: Collaborative brainstorming of innovative Broader Impacts ideas Join colleagues to develop approaches that align with both NSF priorities and your authentic research identity during this challenging funding environment.