Five CSE Staff recognized for their outstanding contributions

Therese Foran, Research Administration Manager

Therese manages the CSE research administration office that coordinates all pre- and post-award activities for the Division. In addition to managing the office, she provides direct research administration support for twelve faculty members and one research scientist, and the 60+ PhD students who work with them, but the impact of her work goes far beyond that. She dependably helps researchers meet tight deadlines, and does thorough work to support complex proposal submissions. She tackled large projects spanning multiple institutions and disciplines, never shying away from the many necessary interactions with research and administrative staff from these other domains. Therese’s work on the administrative side of research proposals is critical to their success and enables other stakeholders to focus on the other complexities associated with launching a new project.

Joshua Meyer, Applications Developer

Josh has made outstanding contributions to the College, to hundreds of Michigan K-5 teachers, and to thousands of Michigan students. As a lead developer of the Collabrify Roadmaps interactive learning platform, he has created a unique digital learning environment that educators, administrators, students and parents rate as excellent. Working collaboratively, Josh continually creates innovative new features to better support teaching and learning based on stakeholder input. Josh’s efforts have resulted in quantifiable increases in student achievement test scores from students in the lowest socio-economic households. Josh interacts candidly with participating teachers, administrators, students and their parents, and is committed to polishing the platform on timelines that work for the teachers while guiding them through its use.

Matthew Smith, Senior Engineer and Adjunct Asst. Professor

Matt has made numerous contributions to the embedded systems curriculum in the over 20 years that he has been with the department. In addition to running and organizing courses including EECS 270, EECS 373, and EECS 473, he has taken on significant engineering and logistical challenges that are far outside of reasonable expectations of the job. Matt also works with the instructional aides and graduate student instructors, mentoring them on their job and acting as a backup for them if they become overwhelmed. But most importantly, he spends a massive amount of one-on-one time directly with the students. During Covid, Matt was able to swiftly develop a scheme that would allow students to remotely control actual hardware, and built about 10 instances of this hardware in the lab. He modified lab assignments to support this remote scheme. Matt has continuously evolved in this way, learning new technologies and developing new solutions as needs dictate. In doing so, Matt is an engineer’s engineer and the students don’t just learn the material from him, they learn what a good engineer does.

Jasmin Stubblefield, Graduate Programs Manager

Jasmin works to make the CSE graduate program function, prosper, and evolve. She has identified areas where it can improve and helped to craft, implement, and deploy new policies. Jasmin joined CSE in a tumultuous time as it tackled central questions about climate and culture, and she has helped to move forward in important ways. She does not shy away from asking people to sit with challenging ideas and rethink their understanding of what should constitute the status quo. She promotes the success of graduate students, and encouraged a rethink of the admissions process with an emphasis on applicants’ future potential. She has been a leader in rethinking graduate policies and procedures to ensure the well-being of the CSE community, and worked to foster a climate in the graduate programs office in which new members have a voice in its governance.

Julie Tashjian, Undergraduate Advising Office Manager

Julie has been creative and innovative since taking on the leadership of the Undergraduate Advising Office in August 2021. At that time, the office was short on staff and in the process of transitioning fully to a staff advising model. After a year of hiring and training, she now supervises an office of seven staff advisors and two administrative staff to serve over 3,500 undergraduate students. Upon joining CSE, Julie stepped up immediately to make changes to the way “things were always done” in the CSE UAO. She didn’t waste any time implementing more efficient processes. Julie works with her team consistently to create a well-oiled machine to serve CSE students. She makes sure the more senior staff help the less senior staff, and she has created an environment of teaching and learning within the team.