Since the start of the 116th Congress, the University of Michigan’s Washington, D.C. office has supported six U-M faculty members testifying before the House of Representatives and Senate in Washington, D.C. The topics of the testimonies included protecting the electric grid, the impact of climate change on infrastructure, election security, and more. Members of Congress from Michigan, as well as nationwide, recognize the value of having University of Michigan experts in the room when making important legislative decisions and debating pressing national issues. Further information about the professors and their testimonies are below:

Matthew Shapiro, the Lawrence R. Klein Collegiate Professor of Economics at U-M, before the U.S. House Committee on Small Business about the potential impact the recent partial government shutdown had on small businesses. Read more about his testimony here.

Tom Lyon, professor of business economics and public policy and of environment and sustainability testified before the U.S. House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure about ways he believes infrastructure improvement, as well as the free market, can help lessen the impacts of climate change. Read more about his testimony here.

J. Alex Halderman, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, testified before the House Appropriations Committee Subcommittee on Financial Service and General Government, urging lawmakers to approve additional funding for election cybersecurity prior to the upcoming 2020 elections. Read more about his testimony here.

Justin Kasper, an associate professor of climate and space sciences and engineering, testified before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs in March about how best to protect the country’s power grid from space weather. Read more about his testimony here.

Adam Finkel, clinical professor of environmental heal sciences, testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee Subcommittee on the Environment and Climate Change, addressing the need for the Environmental Protection Agency to better protect workers from harmful chemicals and work closer with the Occupational Health and Safety Administration. Read his testimony here.

Jeremy Kress, assistant professor of business law, testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs about proposals to de-emphasize or eliminate the designation for “systemically important non-bank financial institutions,” such as insurance and mortgage companies. He warned that such a move would be misguided and could open up the financial system to the kinds of problems that roiled the economy in 2008. Read more about his testimony here.

Tuesday, April 16, 2019

Mackinac Room, 5th Floor, Anderson House Office Bldg.
124 N. Capitol Avenue, Lansing, MI 48933
11:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.

View PDF

View Presentation PDF 1

View Presentation PDF 2

View Presentation PDF 3

Are you looking forward to driverless vehicles, robots, computers and machines that guide your life? Fasten your seatbelt, for we are headed into the AI age. Recent years have witnessed tremendous progress in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), with significant impact on the fields of medicine, education, transportation and more. Advances made in AI include everything from machines that can learn and process language, robots that have vision and human-computer interaction, to cars that drive us autonomously. As we look at the current state of AI, and all of the implications for our lives, many wonder what the future holds. Please join us as University of Michigan experts share recent progress in Artificial Intelligence, and give us a road-map to what lies ahead and what we should know.

Rada Mihalcea, Professor EECS, College of Engineering

Professor Rada Mihalcea is the Director of the University of Michigan AI Lab and the Language and Information Technologies group (LIT@UMich). Her work focuses on Natural Language Processing, Multimodal Processing, and Computational Social Sciences. Her research portfolio includes areas such as computational sociolinguistics, multimodal sensing and tracking of human behavior, joint modeling of language and vision, multilingual natural language processing, multilingual subjectivity, sentiment, and emotion analysis and computational humor.

John E. Laird, John L. Tishman Professor of Engineering, Computer Science and Engineering

Professor John E. Laird is the John L. Tishman Professor of Engineering in the Computer Science and Engineering Division of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the UM College of Engineering. He received his B.S. from the University of Michigan in 1975 and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1983. He was a member of the research staff at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center from 1984 to 1986. Since 1986, he has been on the UM faculty. He is the founder of Soar Technology, an Ann Arbor company specializing in creating autonomous AI entities.

Assistant Professor, University of Michigan
Director, CROMA Lab
Computer Science & Engineering, EECS (primary), School of Information

Walter S. Lasecki is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the UM College of Engineering where he directs the Crowds+Machines (CROMA) Lab. He and his students create interactive intelligent systems that are robust enough to be used in real-world settings by combining both human and machine intelligence to exceed the capabilities of each. These systems help people become more productive, and improve access to the world for people with disabilities. Dr. Lasecki received his Ph.D and M.S. from the University of Rochester in 2015 and a B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics from Virginia Tech in 2010. He has previously held visiting research positions at Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford, Microsoft Research, and Google[x].

Tuesday, March 19, 2019

Boji Tower, 1st Floor, Senate Hearing Room
124 W Allegan St., Lansing, MI 48933
11:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.

View PDF

From left to right: Dr. Jeff Kullgren, Dr. Erica Solway, and Dr. Veronica Wilkerson Johnson

The University of Michigan National Poll on Healthy Aging (NPHA) is a recurring, na- tionally representative household survey launched in 2017, in partnership with AARP. The NPHA taps directly into the insights, experiences, and perspectives of older adults related to their health, health care, and health-related decision-making to better inform the public, providers, and policymakers on timely issues related to policy and practice. As life expectancy increases, and healthy aging is a goal we all share, please join us as Drs. John Ayanian, Erica Solway and Jeff Kullgren highlight key findings from recent NPHA reports on important healthy aging topics, including prescription drugs, dental care, opi- oids, health insurance, and loneliness.

Featured speakers:

Senior Project Manager, Healthy Michigan Plan evaluation, and Assoc. Director, National Poll on Healthy Aging

Dr. Erica Solway is an associate director of the National Poll on Healthy Aging. She also manages the University of Michigan Institute for Healthcare Policy & Innovation’s evaluation of the Healthy Michigan Plan and other Medicaid-related projects. Before returning to U-M, Dr. Solway served as a policy advisor with the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Subcommittee on Primary Health and Aging. She received her master’s degree in social work and master’s degree in public health as well as a Specialist in Aging certificate from the University of Michigan. She has a doctoral degree in sociology from the University of California, San Francisco.

Jeffrey Kullgren, MS, MD, MPH

Dr. Jeff Kullgren is a Research Scientist in the Center for Clinical Management Research at the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System, and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School and Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation. He is also an associate director of the National Poll on Healthy Aging. Dr. Kullgren holds undergraduate and medical degrees from Michigan State University and a master of public health degree from the University of Michigan. He completed his residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania.

Alice Hamilton Collegiate Professor of Medicine; Professor of Internal Medicine; Professor of Health Management and Policy; Director for Healthcare Policy and Innovation; Professor of Public Policy

Dr. John Ayanian is the inaugural Director of the Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation which includes nearly 600 faculty members from 14 schools and colleges at the University of Michigan, where he is also the Alice Hamilton Professor of Medicine, Professor of Health Management and Policy, Professor of Public Policy, and a practicing general internist. He has led influential studies of access to care, quality of care, and health disparities related to race, ethnicity, socioeconomic factors, and insurance coverage. Dr. Ayanian earned his bachelor’s degree summa cum laude in history and political science from Duke University, medical degree from Harvard Medical School, and master of public policy degree from the Harvard Kennedy School.