UWM RESEARCH GRANTS HELP ADDRESS SYSTEMIC RACISM When faculty members Anika Wilson and Sara Benesh organized The Self-Care Club, their aim was to foster health and restoration for UWM students Anika Wilson of color. The workshops in the Spring and Fall 2021 semesters feature facilitators of color who lead healing and connecting activities, such as community arts programs and an in-person gardening event. It’s one of many efforts at UWM to address the needs of students who are coming off a year of emotional and financial upheaval inflicted in part by the COVID-19 pandemic. Students of color, in particular, were harder hit by the illness
and had the added stress of dealing with societal conflict over racism. “Our students of color are carrying a lot of weight, but they also care about their communities. So they can burn themselves out,” says Wilson, associate professor of African and African Diaspora Studies. “That’s not sustainable. But we can’t just say, ‘Take better care of yourselves.’” The workshops stem from one of 10 projects funded through UWM’s Toward an Anti-Racist Campus (TARC) Action Grant Program, which was launched in July 2020. The projects are sponsored through the Division of Global Inclusion and Engagement and the Office of Research, and they’re developed by UWM faculty and staff. “Creating an equitable and just campus requires ideas and action,” says Chia Youyee Vang, interim chief diversity, equity
and inclusion officer. “This grant program supports efforts that foster new solutions toward achieving racial Chia Youyee Vang equity.” In addition to the self-care workshops, the funded TARC projects include a primer course on racial equity in Milwaukee and a group story project allowing students to express what makes them feel included. There is also a collaborative that promotes the retention of faculty of color and enhances student retention in the research pipeline. For a full list of TARC projects, visit uwm.edu/global-inclusion/inclusion/ antiracist-grant-program. – Laura L. Otto
CREATING AN APP TO TREAT STUBBORN WOUNDS Photos contain a rich source of data. If you have enough of Wounds that are resistant to healing pose a challenge for health them, machine-learning algorithms running in the cloud could help care providers, who must compare photos taken at each patient health care providers precisely monitor a wound’s status. visit to track the healing trajectory. Two-dimensional pictures Gopalakrishnan and Yu participated offer limited information about the in the UWM-administered I-Corps wound, and care is interrupted when Program, which teaches academic patients skip or cannot make regular researchers how to turn discoveries appointments. in the lab into products and “When I ask colleagues who work startups. During that training, they with these patients, ‘What are the met Milwaukee physician Jeffrey tools that you use to characterize Niezgoda, a recognized wound care the wound?’ they say they collect expert at AZH Wound and Vascular wound data using a ruler and a Q-tip,” Centers. says Sandeep Gopalakrishnan, an Niezgoda suggested ways to assistant professor in the UWM expand their initial business idea, and College of Nursing. the three formed a startup company Gopalakrishnan thought clinicians called MegaPerceptron to take the could improve treatment by system to market. tapping into a resource almost Yu, a professor of computer everyone has – a smartphone. He science and biomedical engineering, and Zeyun Yu, a professor in the Zeyun Yu (left) and Sandeep Gopalakrishnan used a sizable set of different wound College of Engineering & Applied images from Niezgoda’s practice Science, teamed up to develop a to train the AI program, which supports prediction and analysis digital platform that uses photos of wounds that patients take functions. “With this amount of data to train the AI algorithm,” he themselves at home. Images taken with an app they created are says, “we are able to classify the wound types with more than then processed using artificial intelligence (AI), providing clinicians 90% accuracy.” – Laura L. Otto with accurate information on the healing characteristics. 9
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UWM ALUMNI
FALL 2021
