The University of Michigan has ranked 12th in the annual Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings. The rankings were based on responses from 17,554 academics from 137 countries. U-M is one of only four public institutions in the top 25—the others are University of California, Berkeley (5), U-C, Los Angeles (9), and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (23). Of these, only UCLA and U-M rose in the ranks, with U-M moving up from 13th last year.

The wife of billionaire real estate mogul Sam Zell has given $50 million to support the University of Michigan’s acclaimed graduate writing program. The donation is believed to be by far the largest-ever gift to such a program, and comes at a time when most major gifts to higher education are supporting science, not the humanities. Helen Zell, who earned her English degree at Michigan in 1964, has been supporting the Michigan program with smaller gifts totaling more than $10 million over more than a decade.

University of Michigan economists are predicting job growth for the region through 2015, including Genesee, Lapeer, Livingston, Macomb, Oakland, St. Clair, and Shiawassee counties. George Fulton and Don Grimes of U-M’s Institute for Research on Labor, Employment, and the Economy estimate the region will add 17,600 jobs this year, 27,200 jobs in 2014, and 31,600 jobs in 2015. That comes after a gain of nearly 75,000 jobs during the past three years.

For the first time, astronomers have found direct evidence that the universe is filled with a giant web-like structure of dark matter, arrayed in vast filaments between the galaxies. A team including Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) researchers Norbert Werner and Aurora Simionescu and led by Jorg Dietrich of the University of Michigan, has presented evidence for the first detection of the presence of a cosmic web filament.

Curtis Huntington was diagnosed nearly three years ago with stage 4, advanced-stage prostate cancer. Instead of getting treated with a conventional therapy used on most patients, Huntington participated in a research effort at the University of Michigan that uses genetic information to tailor treatment to his unique cancer. Huntington is involved in research that some say is the next frontier in medicine, known as personalized medicine. Since last year, U-M researchers have sequenced the DNA of tumors from more that 100 metastatic cancer patients who are no longer responding to usual therapies. The effort is to help doctors customize treatment based on evolving technologies and discoveries in DNA profiling.

The premise of the Innovation Corps program is simple: take smart scientists and add savvy businesspeople to make innovating scientific breakthroughs marketable. That equation is going to be tested in a different way as the brand new Michigan I-Corps program is rolled out. The program hopes to harness resources across the state to increase the economic impact of research conducted at the state’s universities and in private laboratories.

The challenge of food insecurity is a fact of life for some 50 million Americans. Researchers at the University of Michigan School of Natural Resources and Environment are taking part in a major study to probe the causes and solutions to food insecurity in Michigan. In short, their research will look into how to link up the people who are not getting enough fresh healthy food, to the producers and the sources of that safe healthy food.