U-M is joining 20 other U.S. and Canadian universities to propose research and policy priorities to help protect the Great Lakes. Dubbed the Great Lakes Futures Project of the Transborder Research University Network, the effort will use a cross-disciplinary, cross-sector approach to examine alternative Great Lakes futures. This U.S.-Canadian collaboration will address such questions as “How can this water and watershed be managed?” and “What are the environmental, social, economic, and political impacts of those management plans?”

Christopher Peterson, a respected U-M professor of psychology who made pioneering contributions to the field of positive psychology, died unexpectedly in early October. He was 62. Peterson was well recognized in his field and had worked at the University for 26 years. His popularity among students was acknowledged when he received the Golden Apple Award for outstanding teaching in 2010.

Economists at U-M expect more job growth in Michigan next year, led by manufacturing and the trade, transportation, and utilities sector. “We do see some pickup in the economy going into 2013 and continuing through 2014,” says George Fulton. He and other economists at the University expect Michigan’s economy to add 45,900 jobs this year, followed by 50,800 new positions in 2013 and 63,100 jobs in 2014. Last year the state gained 63,800 jobs.

U-M researchers will survey between 2,500 and 3,000 students in order to understand the scale and scope of body image issues and eating disorders among college students. The goal is to “inform policy and programming on our campus and at colleges and universities across the country,” says U-M doctoral student Sarah Ketchen Lipson. Two-thirds of college women have undiagnosed mild or emerging eating problems, 60 percent diet or binge, and nearly 70 percent use diet pills, purging, or fasting—or a combination of all three—to control their weight, according to research.

If you want to see how flexible your political principles can be, consider downloading a plug-in developed at U-M called The Balancer. It’s designed to track your online reading habits and then calculate your political bias. Researcher Sean Munson created The Balancer because, as he told NBC News’ Alan Boyle, he wanted to see if “having real-time feedback about your online news reading habits affects the balance of the news that you read.”

If it seems like all the university presidents and vice provosts are visiting Brazil these days, that’s because they are. In September, a delegation from U-M made the trip and, a month earlier, representatives from 66 colleges traveled to Brasilia, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro in what the U.S. Department of Commerce billed as its “largest education services trade mission ever.”

With an $11-million, five-year grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Materials Genome Initiative, U-M is putting in another $1.3 million to establish a DOE Software Innovation Center called the PRedictive Integrated Structural Materials Science Center, or PRISMS. Researchers at the center will build a set of integrated, open-source computational tools that materials researchers in academia and industry can use to simulate how proposed materials might behave in the real world. The software tools will provide a radical change from the traditional trial-and-error approach, says John Allison, U-M professor of materials science and engineering.

Cancer treatment could one day be more effective and less difficult to endure if an experimental breast cancer therapy that offers high-precision targeting of tumors proves successful. The new approach uses a unique three-pronged combination of agents that simultaneously attack cancer cells but prevent the release of chemotherapy until the drug reaches its specific target. Dr. Daniel Hayes, clinical director of the breast oncology program at U-M’s Comprehensive Cancer Center, says the question is whether this three-pronged approach will be effective with other cancers.”We don’t know yet, but it’s likely,” he says. “But people will definitely benefit from this drug.”