HistoSonics, Inc., a U-M startup, received the Startup Innovator Award at the 2025 National Venture Capital Association Awards Dinner. This prestigious award honors startups making significant contributions to society, which HistoSonics is doing through its groundbreaking, non-invasive tumor treatment technology — histotripsy. Among those responsible for the award are CEO Mike Blue, early investor Jim Adox of Venture Investors, and U-M faculty members Zhen Xu, Timothy Hall, Jonathan Sukovich, J. Brian Fowlkes, and William Woodruff Roberts. The award is one of the highest national honors a startup can receive.

School of Information professors Erin Krupka and Yan Chen have earned prestigious awards from the Economic Science Association. The awards were announced at the annual ESA World Meetings in June. Krupka earned the ESA Prize for Exceptional Achievement, which is awarded to one researcher every year who has “overcome unusually difficult obstacles to achieve success in their research.” “I am honored and deeply touched to be recognized with this award,” said Krupka, who is also associate dean for faculty at UMSI. “Overcoming the obstacles I faced as a young scholar would not have been possible without the support of the ESA community.” Chen earned ESA’s Distinguished Service Award. The award is meant to “recognize an individual who has played an outsized role in ESA administration over their career.” Last year, Chen was an inaugural ESA Fellow, and delivered the ESA World Meeting’s keynote address. “I am honored to receive the ESA Distinguished Service Award together with one of my mentors, Catherine Eckel,” said Chen, the Daniel Kahneman Collegiate Professor of Information. “As a mentee in the inaugural NSF/AEA mentoring program for junior women in Economics, I benefited from the advice and help from my mentors and fellow teammates. Initiating the ESA mentoring program during my presidency (2015-17) and becoming its director (2018-24) was among the most meaningful experiences of my professional life.”

Zetian Mi, Pallab K. Bhattacharya Collegiate Professor of Engineering, received the 2025 American Vacuum Society Nanoscale Science and Technology Division Nanotechnology Recognition Award for his “outstanding contributions to growth of wide bandgap semiconductor materials.” Mi will give a plenary lecture and formally accept the award at the 71st annual AVS International Symposium and Exhibition, which will take place Sept. 21-26 in Charlotte, North Carolina. “I am truly honored to receive this award and sincerely thank the committee for their selection. This recognition is not only a personal honor, but a tribute to my students, team members, collaborators, and supporters. I am deeply grateful for their dedication, partnership, and the journey we’ve shared together,” Mi said. Mi was recently named Pallab K. Bhattacharya Collegiate Professor of Engineering in recognition of his outstanding contributions in the areas of research, innovation, education, and leadership. He is also professor of electrical engineering and computer science and of materials science and engineering. At U-M, he has received the Wise-Najafi Prize for Engineering Excellence in the Miniature World (2025), the Rexford E. Hall Innovation Excellence Award (2024), and the David E. Liddle Research Excellence Award (2021). 

Libo Shan, professor of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology, LSA, was named an associate member of the European Molecular Biology Organization, which promotes excellence in the life sciences. The organization announced 60 new members in Europe, along with nine associate members who work abroad. Of those nine, only four are in the U.S. and Shan is the sole American honoree outside of Massachusetts. “I am truly honored and humbled to be elected as an EMBO associate member,” Shan said. “As a plant molecular biologist, it is a tremendous privilege to be recognized by the EMBO community — world-leading life scientists committed to advancing research excellence.” Shan was also selected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science earlier this year for her studies of plant immune mechanisms. Her group studies the fundamental basis of plant sensing infections to illuminate new ways to better protect crops against disease.

David A. Wallace, clinical associate professor of information, School of Information, will be inducted as a Fellow of the Society of American Archivists on Aug. 25 during an awards ceremony at the annual meeting of SAA in Anaheim, California. The distinction of fellow is the highest honor bestowed on individuals by SAA and is awarded for outstanding contributions to the archives profession. Wallace is one of six new Fellows named in 2025. There are currently 207 Fellows of the Society of American Archivists. With a career spanning 40 years, Wallace received his bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the State University of New York at Binghamton, graduating with honors in 1984. He received his MLS from the State University of New York at Albany before going on to earn a doctorate in library science from the University of Pittsburgh in 1997. He became a clinical associate professor at UMSI in 2013 and has had a profound influence on thousands of students in the information sciences, providing them with a strong foundation in archival theory, practice, and ethics. In 2015, he was awarded for excellence in instruction by UMSI. Through UMSI, from 1998-2007, he worked with students and local archivists at the University of Fort Hare on the university’s collections of anti-apartheid liberation movement archives. From 2015-20, as part of UMSI’s Global Information Engagement Program, he supervised dozens of heritage and social justice projects in South Africa. 

Kon-Well Wang, the A. Galip Ulsoy Distinguished University Professor of Engineering and the Stephen P. Timoshenko Professor of Mechanical Engineering, College of Engineering, has been awarded Honorary Membership by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. First awarded in 1880, the founding year of ASME, Honorary Membership is one of the highest honors bestowed by the ASME Board of Governors. Up to five members of the society are selected each year for their lifetime of distinguished contributions to the engineering profession. Past awardees include Thomas Edison, Andrew Carnegie, Stephen P. Timoshenko, Vannevar Bush, J. P. Den Hartog, C. D. Mote, Jr., and Charles M. Vest. “I am extremely honored to be recognized by the mechanical engineering community for this prestigious award.” Wang said. “It is especially humbling for me to join the esteemed group of past awardees, who are some inspirational role models I try to follow in my professional career.” Wang was recognized for “lifelong distinguished contributions in achieving transformative research in structural dynamics with practical importance and establishing new fields, leading the community to advance engineering education and the engineering profession, and providing leadership that shaped the nation’s research and education.” As an internationally renowned scholar in the field of structural dynamics, vibration, and controls, his work has pioneered pathbreaking new multifunctional adaptive structural and material systems.

Alford A. Young Jr. has been elected the 118th president of the American Sociological Association. Young will serve for one year as president-elect starting September 2025 before succeeding Shelley J. Correll of Stanford University in August 2026. Young is a University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor; Arthur F. Thurnau Professor; Edgar G. Epps Collegiate Professor of Sociology, professor of Afroamerican and African studies, and associate director of the Center for Social Solutions, LSA; and professor of public policy, Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. Young is a prominent scholar specializing in race, culture, and social inequality. His extensive research spans multiple topics, including those related to “low-income, urban-based African Americans; employees at automobile manufacturing plants; African American scholars and intellectuals; and the classroom-based experiences of higher-education faculty as they pertain to diversity and multiculturalism.” In 2022, Young was also named the president of the Association of Black Sociologists.

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