Education (Colleges & Universities)
Here's a look at documents from public, private and community colleges in the U.S.
Featured Stories
UC President Milliken Issues Statement on Academic Senate Plan to Review Admissions Policies
BERKELEY, California, June 12 -- The University of California issued the following statement on June 11, 2026, by President James B. Milliken:
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UC President Milliken statement on Academic Senate plan to review admissions policies
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University of California President James B. Milliken today (June 11) issued the following statement on the UC Academic Senate plan to review admissions policies:
"The Board of Regents and University leadership take very seriously the critical issue of college preparedness, and the UC Academic Senate has proposed a comprehensive, data-driven review to support
... Show Full Article
BERKELEY, California, June 12 -- The University of California issued the following statement on June 11, 2026, by President James B. Milliken:
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UC President Milliken statement on Academic Senate plan to review admissions policies
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University of California President James B. Milliken today (June 11) issued the following statement on the UC Academic Senate plan to review admissions policies:
"The Board of Regents and University leadership take very seriously the critical issue of college preparedness, and the UC Academic Senate has proposed a comprehensive, data-driven review to supportits recommendations to strengthen student readiness and success at UC.
"There are few things more important on our agenda. The faculty review will focus on both preparation and admissions, including whether standardized testing should be required.
"It's important that UC gets this right. The UC Board of Regents and I will receive an update on the Academic Assembly's work in July, and we look forward to considering the recommendations that emerge from this important work."
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Original text here: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/press-room/uc-president-milliken-statement-academic-senate-plan-review-admissions-policies
UC Doctoral Candidate Awarded Prestigious Doctoral Fellowship
CINCINNATI, Ohio, June 12 -- The University of Cincinnati posted the following news:
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UC doctoral candidate awarded prestigious doctoral fellowship
Amota Ataneka received one of 35 National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellowships
By Rodney Wilson, wilso4rn@ucmail.uc.edu
When Amota Ataneka first learned of the National Academy of Education (NAEd)/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship, he didn't know it was one of the most prestigious awards for emerging scholars in education research. He just knew he needed to apply.
"I heard about it from my supervisor, but I think these are
... Show Full Article
CINCINNATI, Ohio, June 12 -- The University of Cincinnati posted the following news:
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UC doctoral candidate awarded prestigious doctoral fellowship
Amota Ataneka received one of 35 National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellowships
By Rodney Wilson, wilso4rn@ucmail.uc.edu
When Amota Ataneka first learned of the National Academy of Education (NAEd)/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship, he didn't know it was one of the most prestigious awards for emerging scholars in education research. He just knew he needed to apply.
"I heard about it from my supervisor, but I think these arethe kind of things that you don't really know the significance of until you've been in the field for maybe 10 or more years," says Ataneka, a doctoral candidate in the University of Cincinnati School of Education's Educational Studies PhD program (Quantitative and Mixed Methods Research Methodologies concentration). It was only after he was announced as one of only 35 award recipients nationwide that his supervisor, professor Ben Kelcey, explained the importance of the recognition. "When it was confirmed, he told me that everyone in education knows this one is a little bit too competitive!" Ataneka laughs.
To say this level of academic success is a long way from Ataneka's origins would be an understatement. He was born in the island nation of Kiribati, in Muribenua village on Nikunau island, a coral atoll with a population of close to 2,000 that sits south of the nation's capital island, Tarawa. Kiribati is recognized as one of the least developed countries in the world by the United Nations, and life on Nikanau is defined by subsistence activities, primarily fishing and collecting coconuts. And while the capital island features some modern amenities, Ataneka wasn't exposed to many technological advancements as a kid--though what he could access made an indelible impact.
"We have a TV," says Ataneka, referring to one single television set used collectively by everyone in his village. "That's our access, our window to see the outside world. You go there, and you pay three coconuts to enter." It was on this TV that he caught his first glimpse of a life he'd eventually pursue. "I'm pretty sure it was one of the Harry Potter movies. That's where I heard [the term] 'professor.'" Ataneka couldn't totally suss out what a "professor" was, thinking the label was perhaps a certification, but he understood the term was descriptive of someone who possessed wisdom.
"I wanted to be a professor."
A global pursuit of knowledge
This drive to attain wisdom was apparent from an early age and has guided Ataneka throughout his life. He studied hard with a dream of being able to one day be accepted to the best high school in Kiribati, which was in Tawara and where he'd be exposed to a more modern way of living. When he achieved that goal, Ataneka figured he'd go on to university in Fiji, the only pathway to higher education he was aware of--Kiribati has no universities. Then, during his senior year, a teacher told him of a scholarship provided by the Australian government to one student annually to attend college Down Under.
"Typically the top student in the country would go to Australia," he explains. "The next five people go to New Zealand, and then the rest go to Fiji, funded by the local Kiribati, New Zealand and Australian governments." Ataneka noticed that the top scholarship to Australia tended to go to students who grew up in the capital, not students from the outer islands who had to navigate cultural differences alongside their rigorous studies, and made it his goal to beat the odds and win the scholarship. "So that's when I kind of started studying extra hard," he says, adding with a laugh, "I didn't enjoy high school much because I was just studying."
Scholarship winners were announced on the radio, and his whole village gathered at the maneaba (community hall) to listen as Ataneka was named the winner of the Australian scholarship. "It was a big moment for my village," he says. "They all know that's a very tough one for our outer-island kids."
Upon graduation Ataneka headed to the University of Queensland, where he received a bachelor's degree in economics, then came back to Kiribati. But after a few years working in a government job, he started thinking once again about becoming a professor. He began researching scholarships to attend graduate school in the U.S., eventually finding the U.S. South Pacific Scholarship, which provided funds for four individuals from across the Pacific islands to pursue graduate studies at the University of Hawaii. It cost him nearly a week's pay to mail in his application, but within a few months he received word he'd been awarded one of the scholarships.
While he was at the University of Hawaii studying public administration, Ataneka learned about how people fund doctoral studies in the U.S., which only one other person from Kiribati had ever done. He knew he wanted to apply his learnings in quantitative economics to the field of education, and he started looking for programs that fit his educational aspirations. He found two programs with faculty doing work he was interested in, emailed both, and when UC was the first to respond, he made the choice on the spot.
Prestigious recognition for cutting-edge research
Today Ataneka serves as a graduate assistant with Kelcey as he works on his Spencer Fellowship-winning dissertation, "Causal Machine Learning with Reflective Latent Variables: A Latent Deep & Targeted Learning (LDTL) Architecture."
"We built a new AI architecture to address two fundamental limitations of AI and machine learning models for scientific research," he explains. "First, the core architecture behind today's popular AI tools--for example ChatGPT, which is built on a deep neural network called a Transformer--is designed for prediction, not causal inference. These models are remarkable at spotting patterns: what tends to go with what. But noticing that two things go together is not the same as knowing that one causes the other, and the why is the heart of science.
"Does this new medicine actually work, or did patients improve for other reasons? Did this education program actually raise children's reading skills, or did the better-off families simply enroll first? Did this policy cause the change we see in a community, or would it have happened anyway?
"Science has other important roles but causality sits at the core. It is the difference between knowing what happened and knowing what to do about it. Answering that requires specific assumptions and study designs that must be satisfied before causal claims can be made--machinery that current AI was simply never built for."
The second limitation, says Ataneka, is that current AI architectures alone (such as Transformers) do not know the difference between what is measured directly and what is measured imperfectly.
"Some things in the world can be measured directly: your height, your weight, your age. If the scale says 70 kilograms, that number basically is the truth," he explains. "But here is the thing most people never stop to consider: Almost everything we actually study in science about people and societies is not like height or weight. Intelligence, depression, anxiety, math ability, reading skill, customer satisfaction, trust in government, quality of life, poverty, motivation--none of these can be placed on a scale or measured with a tape. We call these latent constructs: real things that exist, but that we can only see indirectly, through their shadows. We measure them with tests, surveys, questionnaires and assessments--a set of questions whose answers we combine into a score."
Every such score, he says, contains errors. He points to how a student's test score is not their true ability, but rather their ability plus the effects of a bad night's sleep, a confusing question and/or a lucky guess. Likewise, a depression questionnaire does not capture depression itself but rather captures an imperfect reflection of it. The science of measurement--psychometrics--has spent a hundred years studying exactly how large this error is and how to account for it.
"Today's AI models know none of this. To a Transformer neural net or any standard machine learning model, a number is a number," says Ataneka. "A test score is treated with the same blind confidence as a reading from a scale. The model cannot tell that one number is a direct observation and the other is a noisy shadow of something hidden.
"Why does this matter? Because it is well established in literature that when you ignore measurement error in your data, everything you compute afterward becomes unreliable. Relationships look weaker or stronger than they truly are. Effects get missed or invented. Conclusions drift away from the truth, and you have no warning that it happened. If we feed imperfectly measured data into AI models and treat the output as solid science, we are building on sand."
Working under Kelcey's supervision, Ataneka in his dissertation develops new AI-based methods that address these two limitations of AI for causal inference with latent variables. "In other words, we are building a new AI architecture that enables researchers to utilize the predictive power of machine learning models while integrating the theory-driven principles of causal inference and psychometrics."
If this sounds like potentially world-changing research to you, you're in the good company of the National Academy of Education, whose Spencer Dissertation Fellowship provided a prestigious high point for Ataneka's academic journey thus far. He's grateful for the financial component of the award, of course, but he's equally excited to travel to Washington, D.C. for two professional development retreats, where he will meet top researchers in the field and collaborate with them.
"This is the ultimate achievement of my life," he says.
Working with machine learning, Ataneka finds himself right in the heart of an exuberant industry, and his career options have expanded in a world being transformed by AI. "If I go to a conference, many people tell me You should consider industry as well," he says. "Because I'm doing machine learning work. I'm open to it, but my main aim is academia. I want to stay in that."
All these years later, in a story that spans continents and technological advancements, Amota Ataneka still wants to be a professor. And when he completes his doctoral program next year, he'll be on his way to a dream that started with a few coconuts and a shared TV screen on a tiny island in the Pacific Ocean.
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Original text here: https://www.uc.edu/news/articles/2026/06/uc-doctoral-student-awarded-prestigious-doctoral-fellowship.html
Report Co-Authored by UDC Law Professor Examines Whether AI Can Help Close the Racial Wealth Gap
WASHINGTON, June 12 (TNSxrep) -- The University of the District of Columbia issued the following news:
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New Report Co-Authored by UDC Law Professor Examines Whether AI Can Help Close the Racial Wealth Gap
Rachel Perrone
As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly embedded in decisions that affect economic opportunity, a new report co-authored by University of the District of Columbia (UDC) David A. Clarke School of Law Professor Yvette N. A. Pappoe, warns that AI-driven systems are producing cascading harms for communities of color across housing, employment and lending that together
... Show Full Article
WASHINGTON, June 12 (TNSxrep) -- The University of the District of Columbia issued the following news:
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New Report Co-Authored by UDC Law Professor Examines Whether AI Can Help Close the Racial Wealth Gap
Rachel Perrone
As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly embedded in decisions that affect economic opportunity, a new report co-authored by University of the District of Columbia (UDC) David A. Clarke School of Law Professor Yvette N. A. Pappoe, warns that AI-driven systems are producing cascading harms for communities of color across housing, employment and lending that togetherdetermine how wealth is built in America at a scale and speed that, if left unchecked, could widen the racial wealth gap faster than any policy intervention can close it.
AI in the Racial Wealth Gap was co-authored by Pappoe, University of Connecticut Law Professor Nadiyah J. Humber and Human Development and Family Sciences doctoral candidate Darlis Pantoja-Benavides, and sponsored by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights Center for Civil Rights & Technology.
The racial wealth gap -- the systematic disparity in accumulated assets and financial resources between white and Black households -- remains one of the nation's most persistent measures of economic inequality. As of 2022, the median white household held approximately $285,000 in net wealth, compared with approximately $45,000 for the median Black household. The report explored ways that AI systems trained on data shaped by historical discrimination risk widening that gap further. For example, when an algorithmic decision in one domain, such as a credit denial, leads to housing instability or job loss, the compounding effects fall hardest on the communities already most economically vulnerable.
"The problem is not inherently AI," said Pappoe. "The more precise problem is that these systems are being trained on data shaped by decades of discrimination, and the people designing, testing, deploying and adopting them are not always recognizing that. If you build on a discriminatory foundation, you get a discriminatory output, and AI technology alone cannot solve that."
Rather than arguing against the use of AI, the report calls for stronger oversight and accountability. Among its recommendations are greater transparency in algorithmic decision-making, independent audits of AI systems used in lending and housing, stronger worker protections and meaningful opportunities for marginalized communities to participate in oversight.
The report contributes to a growing national conversation about AI's role in shaping economic opportunity and underscores UDC Law's leadership in policy, civil rights and justice-centered legal scholarship.
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Original text here: https://www.udc.edu/news/2026/06/new-report-co-authored-by-udc-law-professor-examines-whether-ai-can-help-close-the-racial-wealth-gap
EIU Board of Trustees Meeting Results: Thursday, June 11
CHARLESTON, Illinois, June 12 -- Eastern Illinois University issued the following news release:
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EIU Board of Trustees meeting results: Thursday, June 11
The Eastern Illinois University Board of Trustees held its regular June meeting today, June 11, in the Doudna Fine Arts Center, located on campus at 600 Lincoln Avenue in Charleston. Immediately following the 11:30 a.m. Call to Order and Roll Call, the Board entered into executive session. The open session of the meeting began at 1 p.m. The results of the meeting included:
* A welcome and executive summary report from Board Chair Julie
... Show Full Article
CHARLESTON, Illinois, June 12 -- Eastern Illinois University issued the following news release:
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EIU Board of Trustees meeting results: Thursday, June 11
The Eastern Illinois University Board of Trustees held its regular June meeting today, June 11, in the Doudna Fine Arts Center, located on campus at 600 Lincoln Avenue in Charleston. Immediately following the 11:30 a.m. Call to Order and Roll Call, the Board entered into executive session. The open session of the meeting began at 1 p.m. The results of the meeting included:
* A welcome and executive summary report from Board Chair JulieEverett and associated committee reports from representative Trustees.
* Approval of the minutes of the regular April (2026) Board of Trustees meeting.
* An overview of the University's preliminary FY27 financial plan, which is based on a projected state appropriation of approximately $49.4 million, representing a 1% increase over FY26 levels.
* Authorizing a five-year agreement for maintenance, support and services associated with the CashNet payment system, which is used to process student billing, payments and University transactions. The system integrates with the University's enterprise platform and supports secure payment processing across campus.
* Approval of several collective bargaining agreements, including successor agreements with Plumbers and Pipefitters Local #149, University Professionals of Illinois Local #4100, the Fraternal Order of Police, and Teamsters Local #26.
* Contract extensions for head baseball coach Jason Anderson and approval of a contract for head track coach John Gilden.
* Updates on summer camps and programs that bring students, families and community members to campus throughout the summer months, highlighting the role of camps and youth programs in supporting recruitment efforts, community engagement and educational outreach.
* An overview of the University's enrollment management initiatives, fundraising activities, and campus operations. University leaders discussed ongoing enrollment strategies, scholarship initiatives, marketing efforts and opportunities to expand partnerships that support student success.
* A summary review of routine University business matters, including purchase approvals, reports from campus constituencies and updates on recent University accomplishments and achievements.
* Approval of the 2027 Board of Trustees meeting calendar.
EIU's list of 2026 regular meeting dates is publicly available at eiu.edu/trustees. Agendas, tables of contents and board reports are available in advance of upcoming meetings on the University's website at eiu.edu/trustees/documents.php. The next regular meeting of the EIU Board of Trustees is scheduled for September 10, 2026.
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Original text here: https://www.eiu.edu/media/viewstory.php?action=2026
Cal. State-San Bernardino Issues Faculty In the News Wrap Up for June 11, 2026
SAN BERNARDINO, California, June 12 -- California State University San Bernardino campus issued the following Faculty In the News wrap up:
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Faculty in the News, June 11
Meredith Conroy (political science) wrote on how language is used to question a candidate's masculinity in a U.S. Senate race in Texas, and Brian Levin (criminal justice, emeritus) was interviewed about homicides targeting the homeless and anti-immigrant violence in Northern Ireland.
* How 'feminize your opponent' emerges in the Trump era (https://open.substack.com/pub/meredithconroy/p/how-feminize-your-opponent-emerges?r=3jmvpn&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email)
Gender
... Show Full Article
SAN BERNARDINO, California, June 12 -- California State University San Bernardino campus issued the following Faculty In the News wrap up:
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Faculty in the News, June 11
Meredith Conroy (political science) wrote on how language is used to question a candidate's masculinity in a U.S. Senate race in Texas, and Brian Levin (criminal justice, emeritus) was interviewed about homicides targeting the homeless and anti-immigrant violence in Northern Ireland.
* How 'feminize your opponent' emerges in the Trump era (https://open.substack.com/pub/meredithconroy/p/how-feminize-your-opponent-emerges?r=3jmvpn&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email)
GenderGap/Substack
June 7, 2026
Meredith Conroy (political science) wrote: "In the era of Trump, schoolyard taunts that implicate gender aren't surprising. But behind them is a coherent political strategy with a much longer history than Trump, and the nicknames are only half of it. The other half? Making men feel that their masculinity threatened."
* Retired CSUSB professor comments on report that shooting deaths of homeless are disproportionately high in Los Angeles (https://laist.com/shooting-deaths-of-unhoused-people)
LAist
June 10, 2026
"Homeless people face, arguably, the highest victimization levels of virtually anyone in society," said Brian Levin, founder of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. An investigation by LAist and The LA Local found that at least 278 of the city's unhoused residents have been shot and killed since 2015, according to an analysis of data from the Los Angeles Police Department. Once rare, gunfire is now the primary means by which killers take the lives of unhoused people in the city.
* Retired CSUSB professor discusses how anti-immigrant violence in Northern Ireland can be countered (https://iqmediacorp.com/ExternalIframeMedia?mediaID=b94356e6-631b-4b27-b953-c6d5edd7026e&isRM=false&rawMediaType=TV&end=true)
CNN
June 11, 2026
Brian Levin, founding director of CSUSB's Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism and professor emeritus, criminal justice, was interviewed as part of a segment on anti-immigrant violence in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where two days of rioting targeted that city's immigrant community. He discussed what people at the grassroots level can do to combat it, as well as the impact of rhetoric of leaders and high-profile personalities surrounding the violence.
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These news clips and others may be viewed at "In the Headlines."
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Original text here: https://www.csusb.edu/inside/article/596463/faculty-news-june-11
Biotech Executives and Venture Capitalists Come to UMass Chan to Hear Faculty Start-up Pitches
WORCESTER, Massachusetts, June 12 -- The University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School issued the following news:
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Biotech executives and venture capitalists come to UMass Chan to hear faculty start-up pitches
By Jim Fessenden
UMass Chan Medical School welcomed leaders from nearly two dozen venture capital firms, corporate venture groups, biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies and other industry organizations last month to hear new company pitches from faculty members. The event was hosted by the BRIDGE Innovation and Business Development office, which facilitates new venture formations
... Show Full Article
WORCESTER, Massachusetts, June 12 -- The University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School issued the following news:
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Biotech executives and venture capitalists come to UMass Chan to hear faculty start-up pitches
By Jim Fessenden
UMass Chan Medical School welcomed leaders from nearly two dozen venture capital firms, corporate venture groups, biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies and other industry organizations last month to hear new company pitches from faculty members. The event was hosted by the BRIDGE Innovation and Business Development office, which facilitates new venture formationsbuilt on the scientific discoveries and innovation at UMass Chan.
"Bringing investors and industry leaders to the UMass Chan campus creates a forum for a new kind of dialogue," said Huseyin Mehmet, PhD, executive director of new ventures in BRIDGE. "It gives researchers the opportunity to receive feedback not only on the clinical application of their science, but also provides an important perspective into the thought processes of entrepreneurs and investors."
Nine emerging companies founded or co-founded by UMass Chan faculty pitched their novel technologies to potential investors. In the formative stages of development, these enterprises are poised to take recent biomedical discoveries made at UMass Chan into clinical development and eventually commercialization. To do that, the new companies are looking for investors and partners to provide financing, managerial experience, technical guidance and business acumen as they move forward to the market with a product.
"Academic discoveries don't create patient impact on their own," said George Xixis, JD, MA, associate vice chancellor of BRIDGE. "Events like this help bridge the gap between breakthrough science and the people, resources and partnerships needed to move technologies forward."
Since 2020, technologies and discoveries emerging from UMass Chan research have contributed to the launch of 14 new companies, including four in fiscal year 2025. BRIDGE Innovation and Business Development works closely with faculty founders, entrepreneurs and external partners to help move promising discoveries toward translation and commercialization through intellectual property protection, licensing, venture formation support and strategic partnerships. The new company pitch day event was designed to support those efforts by connecting scientific founders directly with investors, corporate venture groups and industry leaders interested in emerging therapeutic and technology platforms.
"What stands out at UMass Chan is how quickly first-class science is being developed into first-in-class science companies," said Kevin White, executive director of the Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund. "The science at UMass Chan has always been innovative, but there's a noticeable push to turn that into real, investable companies."
"This reflects a broader shift in academic translation and venture formation," said Xixis. "Faculty are increasingly exploring startup pathways as part of advancing discoveries toward impact, particularly as traditional federal funding environments become more uncertain."
Presenting companies represented a broad range of scientific areas--RNA therapeutics, gene editing, AI-enabled surgical support tools, immunology, diagnostics and oncology. Among the companies presenting were:
* Surgitas, co-founded by Neil B. Marya, MD, assistant professor of medicine, is developing AI-guided support tools for complex gastrointestinal surgery and disease diagnosis;
* ImmunoScript, co-founded by Marcus Ruscetti, PhD, associate professor of molecular, cell and cancer biology, and Chaitanya Naimesh Parikh, PhD candidate in the Ruscetti lab and CEO of the company, is using mRNA-based approaches to enhance immune system activity in pancreatic cancer;
* Sebo Therapeutics, co-founded by Yong-Xu Wang, PhD, professor of molecular, cell & cancer biology, and Richard Gregory, PhD, the Eleanor Eustis Farrington Chair in Cancer Research and chair and professor of molecular, cell & canceer biology, is developing proprietary peptide-based therapeutics for cardiometabolic diseases;
* Nefes Therapeutics, founded by Batuhan Yenilmez, PhD, assistant professor of molecular medicine, and Michael Czech, PhD, the Isadore and Fannie Foxman Chair in Medical Research and professor emeritus of molecular medicine, is advancing the use of microRNA mimics to treat fibrotic diseases;
* Emfytos Therapeutics, co-founded by Katherine A. Fitzgerald, PhD, the Worcester Foundation for Biomedical Research Chair III, professor and executive vice chair of medicine, associate vice provost for basic science research, chief of innate immunity and director of the Program in Innate Immunity, and Paul R. Thompson, PhD, the Endowed Chair in Biochemistry and Molecular Biotechnology II, professor of biochemistry & molecular biotechnology and director of the Chemical Biology Program and the Small Molecule Screening Facility, is advancing small molecule modulators of innate immunity for inflammatory diseases;
* ReTrace Therapeutics, co-founded by Craig Ceol, PhD, associate professor of molecular, cell & cancer biology, and his former post-doctoral associate Arvind Venkatesan, PhD, MBA, is targeting bone morphogenetic protein signaling pathways in cancer;
* Trinetra Therapeutics, co-founded by Claudio Punzo, PhD, associate professor of ophthalmology & visual sciences, and Julia Alterman, PhD, assistant professor of RNA therapeutics, is developing stabilized siRNA approaches for ocular diseases;
* Critical Mass Therapeutics, co-founded by Scot Wolfe, PhD, professor of molecular, cell & cancer biology, and Matthew Hanlon, PhD candidate in the Wolfe lab, is applying novel oligonucleotide approaches to target gene amplifications in cancer; and
* GapScore, co-founded by Sharon Cantor, PhD, the Gladys Smith Martin Chair in Oncology and professor of molecular, cell & cancer biology, and Jenna Whalen, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the Cantor lab, is building predictive tools to improve response rates to cancer therapeutics.
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Original text here: https://www.umassmed.edu/news/articles/2026/06/biotech-executives-and-venture-capitalists-come-to-umass-chan-to-hear-faculty-start-up-pitches/
Advanced Airliner Concept Co-designed by U-M Engineers
ANN ARBOR, Michigan, June 12 -- The University of Michigan issued the following news:
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Advanced airliner concept co-designed by U-M engineers
Key takeaways:
* The turboelectric design, led by aviation startup Electra and revealed this week at the AIAA AVIATION Forum, offers a 17% efficiency improvement.
* The wide body provides additional lift while electric fans at the rear reduce drag.
* University of Michigan Engineering researchers enabled the industry-academic team to explore a larger range of possible designs.
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A new turboelectric airliner concept, capable of delivering 17%
... Show Full Article
ANN ARBOR, Michigan, June 12 -- The University of Michigan issued the following news:
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Advanced airliner concept co-designed by U-M engineers
Key takeaways:
* The turboelectric design, led by aviation startup Electra and revealed this week at the AIAA AVIATION Forum, offers a 17% efficiency improvement.
* The wide body provides additional lift while electric fans at the rear reduce drag.
* University of Michigan Engineering researchers enabled the industry-academic team to explore a larger range of possible designs.
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A new turboelectric airliner concept, capable of delivering 17%better efficiency over 2050 projections for standard airliners, was unveiled Monday at the AIAA AVIATION Forum, and a University of Michigan Engineering team played a central role in its development. Yesterday's technical talk on the project, including work from the U-M team, was delivered to a standing-room-only crowd.
The aircraft design project, led by the hybrid-electric aviation company Electra, is part of NASA's Advanced Aircraft Concepts for Environmental Sustainability (AACES 2050) program.
The chief contribution by the U-M Aerospace Engineering team--led by Gokcin Cinar, assistant professor of aerospace engineering--was expanding the design space that the team could explore. Both she and Joaquim Martins, the Pauline M. Sherman Collegiate Professor of aerospace engineering, focus on multidisciplinary design and optimization, considering multiple aspects of the aircraft at once.
Multidisciplinary design and optimization
The aerodynamics and structure of the aircraft, as well as its propulsion and heat management systems, are deeply dependent on one another. For instance, changing the shape of the aircraft, or its weight distribution, affects where the engines should be placed and how much thrust they need to generate. Cinar and Martins coded extensions to NASA's open-source Aviary aircraft design framework, supporting the simultaneous optimization of all three of these aspects of airplanes.
Using this approach, the team evaluated 20 different aircraft architectures and optimized these designs for over 100,000 scenarios. They found low-fidelity simulations preferred highly distributed propulsion--basically, many electric propellers along the wings and in the tail. However, their more advanced high-fidelity simulations demonstrated that the weight, drag and challenges dissipating heat tipped the scales to favor a different design.
"This was one of the findings we scrutinized most carefully, because it challenges some of the assumptions that have shaped parts of the electrified aircraft design literature," Cinar said.
"Low-fidelity models and first-principles analysis remain essential for exploring large design spaces and down-selecting promising concepts early. But once the expected benefits are narrow and the modeling uncertainty is high, you need multi-fidelity analysis with greater subsystem granularity. That is what we were able to achieve together with Electra: we could move from broad concept exploration to a much more detailed understanding of when electrification actually buys its way onto the aircraft."
In addition to the aircraft's overall design, Venkat Viswanathan, professor of aerospace engineering at U-M, provided battery modeling to determine the power requirements and performance of battery packs, their size and weight, as well as heat dissipation and degradation over time. Max Li, U-M assistant professor of aerospace engineering, modeled likely future markets for aircraft, answering questions like, "When and for what routes will airline operators be looking to buy next-generation aircraft?" and "What are their requirements likely to be?"
Partially electrified for boundary-layer ingestion
Optimization pointed the Electra-led team toward a partially electrified design, with a conventional turbofan engine on each wing and electric fans near the rear of the fuselage. The concept uses a wider "double-bubble" fuselage first proposed by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology-led team, so the aircraft body itself contributes lift rather than simply carrying passengers. The electric fans accelerate the slower-moving air over the top of the aircraft, providing thrust while reducing the energy lost in the aircraft's wake. Known as fuselage boundary-layer ingestion, this advanced design reduces the thrust that the underwing engines must generate.
Three more presentations on the project will be made at AVIATION today, with a panel discussion tomorrow. Ph.D. student Sinan Abdulhak received the Neil Y. Chen Memorial Best Student Paper Award for his market-modeling research.
The collaboration also included partners from across academia and industry, including American Airlines, Honeywell Aerospace, Lockheed Martin Skunk Works, Hinetics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of California, Irvine.
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More on the Michigan Aerospace contribution to the NASA AACES 2050 project (https://aero.engin.umich.edu/2026/06/10/michigan-aerospace-team-helps-shape-nasa-backed-vision-for-efficient-airliners-of-2050/)
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Original text here: https://news.umich.edu/advanced-airliner-concept-co-designed-by-u-m-engineers/
