Department News

Northern Michigan University students in an intro to entrepreneurship course create businesses from scratch on a tight timeline and gain experience in the associated accounting, finance, management and marketing aspects. The businesses are shut down when the class ends and all net proceeds are donated to area charitable organizations. Verdant Vessels, an environmentally friendly, passive clay pot irrigation system, was one of the new venture highlights last semester. Its $195 in proceeds benefitted the NMU Food Pantry.

The Northern Michigan University Department of Music is launching a new series titled Summer Concerts at Reynolds, which will take place on Tuesdays in June and July in Reynolds Recital Hall. This year's series will highlight the department's faculty, all of whom are highly trained professional musicians, in addition to teaching full time. One or more faculty members will be featured during each performance.

The Northern Michigan University Center for Rural Health will host an Upper Peninsula Future Health Leaders Camp this summer for regional students who will be freshmen and sophomores this coming fall. The camp is dedicated to health education and health career exploration. It is scheduled July 20-25, with options to either stay on campus for the duration or commute from home to camp each day. There will be a limit of 75 participants.

Northern Michigan University history professor Kathryn Johnson has conducted four oral history interviews with global pioneers in open, distance and digital education. They include Professor Asha Kanwar, former president of the Commonwealth of Learning,; Professor Alejandro Pisanty, a Mexican scholar and early advocate for educational technology; Dr. Tony Bates, whom she describes as one of “the godfathers of distance education in Canada”; and Professor Rosibel Vicquez Abarca, a prominent leader in the field in Costa Rica. All will soon be published in scholarly journals, including one for which Johnson serves as the oral history section editor.

A student crew from the Northern Michigan University construction management program recently built a new pavilion over the NMU Center for Native American Studies (CNAS) fire site. The CNAS describes the pavilion as “a legacy project” that they are excited to share with the campus and community.

Students from Northern Michigan University's School of Education recently traveled to Wisconsin to observe a variety of educational settings as part of a course-related field experience. The group was divided among three schools that represent a broad spectrum of student populations, offering NMU teacher candidates the opportunity to engage with diverse educational environments. They visited Danz Elementary School and Preble High School in Green Bay, and Syble Hopp School in nearby De Pere. 

Grand Ethiopian Resonance Dam (GERD), the largest hydropower dam in Africa, has caused intense energy and water conflicts between Nile River countries. Scientists from around the world have conducted research and proposed solutions to help mitigate these conflicts. Dr. Jongeun You, assistant professor from the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at Northern Michigan University, contributed to these scholarly efforts and co-authored a publication in Communications Earth & Environment, a Nature journal. It was recently selected as one of the Top 25 papers of 2024 by the journal. 

The calendar shifted to 2025 a short time ago, but it has already been a “banner year” for Northern Michigan University assistant professor of education Kristen White. She co-authored “Teaching with Literacy Programs,” which received the 2025 Gloria J. Ladson-Billings Outstanding Book Award from the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) last week. She also will be honored in March as the 2025 Michigan Reading Association Teacher Educator of the Year. It is an impressive start for a woman who said her only other award in life was “Student of the Week” in 10th grade.

Northern Michigan University offers the top accredited RN to BSN program in Michigan, based on annual rankings compiled by NursingProcess.org, and its nurse practitioner program is No. 3 in the state, according to RegisteredNursing.org.

Northern Michigan University assistant professor Jongeun You was invited to serve as the 2024 Harold Hotelling Memorial Lecturer at Lawrence Technological University. Named for the accomplished economist, the lecture series marked its 14th anniversary on Oct. 17. It addresses timely and relevant topics in the guest speaker's area of research. Dr. You, who teaches in NMU's Political Science and Public Administration Department, presented “Policy Conflict in U.S. Energy Infrastructure Siting.”