Detroit Mercy alumni Michael Vinarcik ’04 and Susan Wellman-Smith ’04 received honors from the Engineering Society of Detroit’s Affiliate Council at the 55th annual Gold Award Reception and Recognition on March 18.<\/p>\n
Vinarcik is an adjunct professor in UDM’s Systems Engineering graduate program and received the 2026 Gold Award, the society’s second-highest honor. It is awarded to someone who has made outstanding contributions to the fields of science and engineering.<\/p>\n
Wellman-Smith, an applications engineer at Ford, received two awards: the Past Affiliate Council Chair Award for her exceptional service as chair from 2024-25, and the Consistent Contributor Award from the Detroit section of the Society of Women Engineers.<\/p>\n
Both earned a Master of Product Development from UDM. Vinarcik has 30 years of experience in automotive and defense engineering and is nationally recognized for his work, including publications on model-based engineering. Wellman-Smith has spent more than 30 years in the automotive industry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Detroit Mercy alumni Michael Vinarcik ’04 and Susan Wellman-Smith ’04 received honors from the Engineering Society of Detroit’s Affiliate Council at the 55th annual Gold …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":677,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[5],"tags":[2723,2577,186,7006,7378,6272,7379,4701],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/sbwnTV-25477","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/campusconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25477"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/campusconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/campusconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/campusconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/677"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/campusconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25477"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/campusconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25477\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25501,"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/campusconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25477\/revisions\/25501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/campusconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/campusconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/campusconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}