Faced with losing her voice box, a woman with a rare form of larynx cancer keeps her voice, thanks to U-M’s Dr. Douglas Chepeha. Using his training as a carpenter, Chepeha constructs a voice box made of cartilage from the woman’s shoulder blade and a tongue made of skin from her arm.

A group of young fashion designers in Detroit is designing clothing that will benefit many of the more than 20,000 homeless people now living on the streets. Students in the U-M Tauber Institute’s Integrated Product Development course created Treads Motor City Sandals, in which soles are made from tire treads while the straps are harvested from seatbelts found in junkyards.

While it seems like everything can be done online these days, that’s not that case when it comes to elections. U-M electrical engineering and computer science professor Alex Halderman and his students demonstrate how they hacked into a Washington, D.C., Internet voting pilot project.

New research by U-M graduate student Bridget Lavelle shows that women are more likely than men to lose heath insurance after a divorce and to go without it for at least two years.

While it may come as little surprise that happy employees are more productive, a high-performing workforce needs more than just a feeling of contentment—workers need to thrive, says U-M business professor Gretchen Spreitzer. Thriving employees perform better, have less burnout, are more committed and satisfied, and miss much less work than their peers.