A Breath of Fresh Air If you stopped by Jan Svejnar’s office on the third floor of Weill Hall this year, you would have learned he was on sabbatical. It would be easy enough to assume he spent the time doing research, which is true.
What’s slightly more unusual, however, is that he also spent a great deal of time beneath the golden chandeliers of Prague Castle, meeting with members of Parliament in his bid to become president of the Czech Republic.
Read More A Clear Signal Chances are that you’ve never heard of a city called Daqing. In fact, if the average U-M alum were to point at random to a map of China, she’d probably hit a city she’s never heard of, even if it’s one of the 102 Chinese cities that has more than 1 million residents. (In contrast, the US has nine.) Legend has it that when Napoleon Bonaparte pointed to a map of China, he famously called it a sleeping giant, and one can’t listen to the news for long today without concluding that the giant is waking up. With a sense of wonder—and oftentimes of anxiety—we hear about China’s rush into the modern era with seemingly limitless potential for development in its re-ascension to greatness. China is rising fast.
Read More NBC’s Torch Bearer Growing up, Gary Zenkel, ’83, loved the drama and excitement of the Olympic Games. “Back in the 1970s, when the Olympics happened, it was the only thing going on in the world,” he says, sitting in his office at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan. It’s a good thing he never lost that love for Olympic drama, because as the president of NBC Olympics, he manages the day-to-day operations of more than 3,000 hours of Olympic programming on the peacock network and its sister stations CNBC, MSNBC, Telemundo, Oxygen, Universal HD and NBCOlympics.com.
Read More Mining for (Data) Gold If you had asked Usama Fayyad in the late 1980s about his plans for the future, his best guess would have been an academic career. With two bachelor’s degrees, two master’s degrees and a PhD in progress (all from Michigan), he was well positioned for a career as a computer science professor at a prestigious research university.
“I always thought I would be a professor,” says Fayyad. “My adviser’s advice was ‘Go to industry for exactly five years. Then you have to have the discipline to come back to the university.’ That was very good advice,” he says with a smile. However, it was advice he did not take.
Read More Motor City Connections When Bianca Harris first heard about an architecture program for high schoolers at the Detroit Community Design Center, something instantly clicked. She already knew that architecture interested her. But avenues toward that career had been limited for the student at Martin Luther King High School in Detroit. The after-school program at the design center, a partnership of U-M’s Taubman College of Architecture + Urban Planning offered her the opportunity to learn more.
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