A new University of Michigan report provides the most detailed characterization to date of the phosphorus sources—and their relative contributions—in the complex Detroit River watershed, which is heavily urbanized on the U.S. side of the border and mainly agricultural on the Canadian side.

About a decade ago, wine expert Blake Kownacki met Claes Fornell, a retired University of Michigan business professor and expert on customer satisfaction. Their conversations blossomed into a friendship based on their mutual admiration for good wine, and they started to brainstorm how to put Detroit back on the map as a wine-centric, agri-entertainment center.

The um3detroit event on May 9 at the Gem Theater in Detroit features talks by U-M President Mark Schlissel and U-M alumni Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan and Wendy Jackson, managing director of the Detroit Program for the Kresge Foundation.

It was Jevona Watson’s dream to have a coffee shop in the Fitzgerald neighborhood in northwest Detroit, a place she calls home. A matching Motor City Match grant in 2016 helped take the first steps toward her dream. Watson began searching for support and resources as she was getting the shop ready to open. She landed on the University of Michigan’s Detroit Neighborhood Entrepreneurs Project.

The University of Michigan has inducted two new members to its Detroiter Hall of Fame — Cynthia Stephens and Charles Adams — and also recognized Dexter Mason as an emerging leader in the city plus honored Barbara Israel as a faculty member who has shown outstanding service to the community.

June Manning Thomas is Centennial Professor of Urban Planning and Regional Development at University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning today, but in the early 1990s her niece was living next to an overgrown lot in Detroit. That vacant plot got her thinking and asking questions: How had that land gone undeveloped for so long? Who had failed her niece and other black Detroiters?

Michigan Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist, a Detroit native and resident, graduated from U-M in 2005 with a BSE in computer engineering. “Like you,” he told the Kessler Scholars, “I attended the University of Michigan on scholarship. A scholarship prepares you and positions you for a new set of opportunities. Be open to those opportunities and possibilities.”

Ahmina Maxey was shocked when the incinerator closed in late March. “It was so abrupt,” she said. “The incinerator (owner) has the best poker face I’ve ever seen because… they were pretending it was going to be open for 20 more years.”

Kimberly Dowdell, a lecturer at U-M’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, decided to become an architect at a young age in an effort to repair Detroit’s disinvested building stock. Her firm, Century Partners, redevelops single-family homes in Detroit with an eye toward stabilizing and revitalizing residential neighborhoods.