Skip to content

U-M ME assistant professor awarded Anti-Racism Grant by the College of Engineering’s Office of the Vice President for Research

09/01/2022
James Holly, Jr., Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering

The Office of the Vice President for Research has awarded $450,000 in grants across eight research teams to explore persistent racial disparities embedded in systems ranging from health, education, and wealth to criminal justice and infrastructure. James Holly, Jr., Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering, has been awarded a grant for his project, Epistemic Reconstruction: Teaching Engineering Through the Lens of Urban Blackness.

Partnering with CoE’s Center for Engineering Diversity and Outreach, Michigan Engineering Zone, Detroit Area Pre-College Engineering Program, and the U-M School of Education’s Detroit P-20 Partnership, Dr. Holly, Jr.’s project will investigate how centering urban Black youth’s knowledge production can formulate new meanings and purposes for engineering study and practice. The anticipated outcomes of this study include a foundational structure of a race-conscious engineering curriculum for high-school students and a handbook for teacher-educators preparing future, pre-college engineering teachers.

“The Anti-Racism Grants program is helping to catalyze expertise and intellectual leadership in this space at U-M.”

A wide range of research projects, from examining political representation among Puerto Ricans, Indigenous people’s experiences of climate injustice, and the link between discrimination and mental health in Asian youth, are also being supported. The full list of awardees can be viewed here.

Faculty featured in this story