During the first few months of his presidency, Donald B. Taylor met with employees to hear their thoughts on how to move University of Detroit Mercy forward. A common theme emerged from these listening sessions: Employees had exciting ideas, but they had gone unvoiced due to concerns over funding or resources.
The Titan Innovation Fund was introduced at Taylor’s inauguration in March 2023 to help change that and spark innovation at UDM.
It is designed to support new, creative ideas that improve the University and student experiences by ensuring that they receive the resources and support needed to survive.
“Thanks to generous donors, we are launching this fund to provide grants that empower faculty, staff and students to try new things,” Taylor said at his inauguration. “Such funds have proven to be a successful catalyst of innovation and change at campuses around the country.”
Early ideas impacted by the Titan Innovation Fund include a mobile coffee cart operated by Business Administration students, a science communication art show, a program that helps mentor first-year Titans and the birth of a center that focuses on using artificial intelligence to address community healthcare challenges.
“You create a program like this because you want to spark innovation, you want to spark creativity,” said Karen Lee, associate vice president of Academic Administration. “And oftentimes, when you’re stuck in your role, whether it’s a faculty, staff or administrative role, you don’t get to do things that are outside the box.”
The process
At the heart of the Titan Innovation Fund is seed money, which is awarded to help ideas blossom into real, tangible projects.
The process began with a call for proposals at the start of the 2023-24 academic year.
Pre-proposals identified a problem or opportunity at UDM, along with an innovative approach to addressing it. A review team and Taylor evaluated the submissions and selected several they felt deserved a full proposal, which included details like budgets, logistics and measures of success and sustainability.
All proposals were required to align with institutional priorities outlined by Taylor, which include expanding student experiences, fostering a sense of belonging, raising UDM’s profile and strengthening community partnerships and engagement.
Twenty-five pre-proposals were submitted during the first year of the Titan Innovation Fund, with 18 full proposals receiving funding.
Taylor experienced firsthand what can come out of this type of program at other institutions. As did Lee, who facilitates the Titan Innovation Fund.
“When the president said he wanted to do it here, I was all in, because I know what happens with it,” Lee said. “It’s infectious. People get inspired to do things that they normally wouldn’t do. It really makes a difference when you have that support and a little extra money.
“I love seeing that spark in someone’s eyes where the world is the limit.”
Guiding new Titans through freshman year
Some of the projects supported by Titan Innovation Fund are just starting.
One of those is the Titan Mentor Program, established to improve the student experience by supporting first-year students identified as at-risk as they navigate their first year at UDM.
It consists of 50 mentees (freshmen), 10 mentors (sophomores and above) who are student leaders at UDM, a graduate assistant who operates the program and four leads (faculty and staff) who meet with and support mentors.
Sandra Alef, director of Residence Life, has seen mentor programs thrive at other institutions and thought it fit the Titan Innovation Fund’s parameters well.
“The research is out there, and it shows that mentors are so very important to a student’s persistence at a university,” Alef said. “Students are going to listen to their peers far more often than they’re going to listen to us. That’s why I think it’s so important that they have somebody to talk to, listen to and to just have as a touch point.”
It’s too early for any solid data, but Alef is already seeing dividends from its peer-to-peer engagement.
The Titan Mentor Program kicked off with an icebreaker event over the summer that was only scheduled for 30 minutes, but “people stuck around for an hour, hour and a half, because they were just craving that one-on-one conversation,” Alef said.
The idea to implement a mentor program wasn’t new, but Alef said the Titan Innovation Fund kickstarted it. The seed money funds a graduate assistant who plays a big role in the program’s success, as well as book scholarships for mentors.
“Without the funding from the Titan Innovation Fund, I think this would’ve been like a 3-5 plus-year project as opposed to a full rollout that we were able to accomplish this fall,” Alef said.
Alef’s dream is that every first-year student is offered a mentor because they are new at UDM. She already sees ways for the Titan Mentor Program to grow and improve after its launch, but it will require additional funding.
“We’ll have to figure out how to fund it for years to come, because the students that are participating in the program, we’re seeing good things from. Those who are involved, I think, are going to get a great deal out of it.
“If we save five students from transferring, withdrawing or canceling, it’s absolutely worth it.”
An impact through expression
Other projects have already started and found ways to continue.
Maris Polanco thought about bringing science communication (SciComm) art to UDM months before the Titan Innovation Fund was established.
“At first, I was trying to figure out how to do it all with no funding,” said Polanco, a lab manager and adjunct professor in the Biology department. “But having the Titan Innovation Fund made it way more legitimate.”
SciComm art is an interdisciplinary form of expression that incorporates STEM topics, art and educational content.
With the Titan Innovation Fund’s support, UDM hosted its first SciComm art exhibit, “CNXNS” (pronounced “connections”), in February 2024. It featured pieces produced by students, faculty and staff.
The seed money allowed Polanco to pay artists and workers for their labor and provide food during the exhibit’s opening event.
“It’s basically all being reinvested directly into the people involved, and that’s something that’s really high on my priority list,” Polanco said.
Additional funding — a $12,000 grant from the Michigan Arts and Culture Council, matched by Polanco’s remaining Titan Innovation Fund award — led to a second art exhibit. Titled “UNREAL,” it will be held in February 2025 and will focus on themes of futurism, science fiction and more.
Polanco believes that having an art show at UDM is important because it creates community by providing creative opportunities.
“It’s showing that we value creative thinking here at Detroit Mercy,” she said.
Harnessing AI through innovation
Other projects supported by the Titan Innovation Fund are quite extensive and have ambitious goals.
Phillip Olla, associate professor of Health Services Administration, proposed the creation of the Center for Augmenting Intelligence in Urban Health (CAIUH). Its purpose is to use artificial intelligence to address community healthcare challenges.
“I wanted to create a culture of innovation within UDM,” Olla said. “What we do is very innovative, and the students and staff have phenomenal vision, but we don’t really have a mechanism to take what we have and put it out there.”
Enter CAIUH, which Olla calls a “hub of excellence and innovation.” Its work can be categorized into three sections: aeroponics and hydroponics, a breath lab and AI for education.
Through hydroponics (using water-based nutrient solution rather than soil) and aeroponics (using mist or fog to deliver nutrients to roots), CAIUH is trying to train Detroiters how to grow food that they can sell.
The breath lab is attempting to identify what healthy breath looks like, which could aid in early diagnosis
of diseases. It starts by capturing the breath of UDM student-athletes and later examining that data through a partnership with Amazon Web Services.
“A lot of the big breath research institutes, they’re doing great discoveries — cancer biomarkers, TB biomarkers, COVID biomarkers — but no one’s really looked at what a normal breath is supposed to look like,” Olla said.
AI has been an increasingly popular technology and CAIUH hopes to teach people how to use it. There are two aspects to this project. The first is teaching students how to use it ethically to give them an edge in the workforce, and the second is creating learning modules that community members can take to teach them how to use AI in their everyday lives.
Olla has already experienced the impact from the Titan Innovation Fund’s support.
“The money we have from the Titan Innovation Fund is seed funding, which means it’s just to get things going,” Olla said. It’s allowed CAIUH to get resources, such as specialized equipment to grow plants using hydroponics and aeroponics.
“It’s really helped, because without that, there’s no way we would be able to even start demonstrating what we’re doing,” Olla said. “It’s a catalyst. Without it, we might be able to do 1-2 projects on the side. But it would never give us the collection of innovation that we have now.”
Olla started CAIUH to help bring innovation to Detroit and UDM, but believes it allows employees, students and others to live the University’s Jesuit and Mercy mission.
“It’s really important for us to live our mission. We can’t just say it and teach it without doing it,” he said. “This allows us to do our mission. On top of that, the health outcomes that we could achieve if we stay the course of time on this are significant.”
This article appeared in the fall 2024 edition of the University’s magazine Spiritus.
