Gratitude to the University of Michigan faculty.

Thank you for teaching robots like Cassie and MABEL to walk, and for building Michigan Robotics into a home where feedback control and real hardware meet.

Thank you for making MRI and CT faster, safer, and clearer, and for the generous teaching that has guided a generation of imaging researchers.

Thank you for decades of foundational reinforcement learning work and for building the Michigan AI Lab into a place where agents learn to act well under uncertainty.

Thank you for TextRank and for a body of NLP work that treats language as a window into people, and for leading the Michigan AI Lab with such warmth.

Thank you for AprilTag, which quietly gives robots everywhere a place to look, and for pushing autonomy out of the lab and onto real streets.

Thank you for the Michigan Micro Mote, the world's smallest computer, and for proving that great engineering is often measured in cubic millimeters and microwatts.

Thank you for understanding how composite aircraft structures fail so we can build them to hold, and for leading Michigan Aerospace with such steadiness.

Thank you for the Arruda-Boyce model and for a career spent explaining how rubber, tendon, and living tissue stretch, and for leading ME with heart.

Thank you for shaping how machines and networks stay in control and how people and robots work together, and for leading one of the world's first Robotics departments.

Thank you for building detectors that keep the world safer by finding nuclear material, and for training the scientists who carry that mission of verification forward.

Thank you for engineering materials that coax the body to heal itself and teach the immune system tolerance, and for leading Michigan Biomedical Engineering.

Thank you for the Michigan Probes and a lifetime spent making sensors small enough to listen to a single neuron, and for the microsystems field you seeded at Michigan.

Thank you for asking how a mind builds a map of the world, and for helping found the Robotics program while modeling common sense as real, learnable knowledge.

Thank you for leading Michigan's largest college with a psychologist's care for the students and families whose resilience you have spent a career studying.

Thank you for listening for gravitational waves from neutron stars and for helping the LIGO collaboration open a whole new way of hearing the universe.

Thank you for illuminating how stars and planets are born and how the cosmos will age, and for sharing that long view of the universe so generously.

Thank you for catalysts that reshape molecules more cleanly, from carbon-hydrogen bonds to grid-scale energy storage, and for mentoring chemists with such care.

Thank you for the science of how molecules pack into crystals and porous frameworks, work that quietly improves medicines and materials we all rely on.

Thank you for wielding tight closure and the Frobenius map to reveal the structure of algebraic varieties, and for the clarity you bring to teaching hard mathematics.

Thank you for tracing how small changes in gene regulation drive the evolution of visible traits, and for teaching genetics with such evident joy.

Thank you for making economics legible and honest for millions, translating hard data into plain sense with real generosity.

Thank you for putting families, work, and human happiness at the center of economics, and for teaching a generation to think like an economist.

Thank you for revealing how children build meaning from the world, work of such care that it reshaped how we understand young minds.

Thank you for philosophy that takes ordinary working life seriously, insisting that equality and dignity belong at the center of how we live.

Thank you for reading the modern Middle East in its own languages and sharing that understanding openly with a global public.

Thank you for listening closely to the lives of working people and telling their stories with dignity and rigor.

Thank you for helping map the Higgs sector and the physics beyond the Standard Model, and for a lifetime of making deep theory feel reachable to the curious.

Thank you for the theorems that anchor modern commutative algebra and for co-inventing tight closure, ideas that keep surprising mathematicians decades later.

Thank you for a lifetime of work on how humans reason, culture, and mistake, teaching us to think more clearly about thinking itself.

Thank you for showing the world how cooperation can emerge among self-interested people, a National Medal of Science idea that still guides us.

Thank you for decades of rigorous, humane thinking about value and norms, and for the openness with which you have taught it.

Thank you for poems of luminous precision and for years of guiding writers through the Helen Zell Writers' Program.

Thank you for discovering the first recurrent gene fusion in a common solid tumor and for building translational pathology that turns genomes into better cancer care.

Thank you for decoding the molecular genetics of bleeding and clotting, work that followed basic curiosity all the way to FDA-approved treatments for patients.

Thank you for a lifetime confronting ALS, Alzheimer's, and diabetic nerve injury, and for leading the NeuroNetwork for Emerging Therapies toward real hope for patients.

Thank you for steadying Michigan and leading its 16th chapter with the calm of an engineer who earned his own doctorate on this campus.

Thank you for carrying the academic heart of Michigan, and for showing that a working scientist can also be a generous steward of nineteen schools.

Thank you for guiding Michigan Ross with a scholar's eye for how people and firms actually create value together.

Thank you for teaching the world that people and organization are where real, lasting business value is built.

Thank you for bringing a builder's optimism to Michigan Law, joining an institution 166 years deep and helping it write what comes next.

Thank you for a career that gave the law new tools to protect equality and dignity, changing how the world names harm.

Thank you for leading the Ford School with the conviction that policy is at its best when it lifts the people it too often overlooks.

Thank you for leading UMSI with real fluency in how people learn and build knowledge together online.

Thank you for pioneering the recommender and reputation systems that quietly shape the modern web, and for working to make it more honest.

Thank you for championing one of the country's great performing-arts schools, a musician leading musicians.

Thank you for the vivid, distinctly American music you compose and for mentoring the next generation of composers at Michigan.