Michigan Research

April 2026

From AI maps predicting heat risk in Nairobi to roof coatings cooling homes in São Paulo, University of Michigan researchers are working alongside global partners on the world’s hardest problems — and bringing the lessons back to Michigan, where similar questions about health, climate and opportunity shape our own communities.

Explore this edition featuring the partnerships, instruments and ideas reshaping how research gets done — including new economic evidence that migration grows the economies migrants leave behind, a starlight-splitting instrument bound for the world’s largest telescope and a case for why U-M’s expertise is only as valuable as our willingness to learn.

What’s on This Page

U-M joins MOSAIC build team to power next generation of astronomers

By Kelsey Keeves

U-M is joining the build team for the world’s largest telescope, helping design the instrument that will split starlight from hundreds of distant galaxies at once.

With a 39-meter mirror rising in Chile’s Atacama Desert, astronomers Christopher Miller and his colleagues expect to see the universe’s first stars, trace how dark matter shapes cosmic expansion and watch how the Milky Way took its present form.

Read more about U-M’s role in the Extremely Large Telescope.

ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT)

This photo, taken in April 2026, shows a drone shot of ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), under construction in Chile’s Atacama Desert. The telescope’s massive dome will house the telescope and its sensitive components, protecting them from the extreme desert environment. During the night, its two sliding doors will open to allow observations of the night sky.
Credit: ESO/G. Vecchia

ELT platform showing its first set of instruments

This rendering shows how part of ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) will look like. It showcases the telescope structure and one of its side plaftorms (called Nasmyth platforms) where the science instruments will be located.
Credit: ESO/L. Calçada

A mirror's skeleton

This image shows the inner frame of ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), the main structure of the telescope, which will contain all five mirrors of the ELT. Taken in January 2025, the skeleton is completed but still needs to receive all the segments that make up the main 39-m mirror, set on its honey-comb-shaped base and the other, smaller mirrors, which will be set inside the central tower. Once completed, the ELT will be a revolutionary optical-to-infrared telescope.
Credit: ESO/G. Vecchia

Size of the ELT

The Cerro Armazones mountain in the Chilean desert, near ESO’s Paranal Observatory, will be the site for the European Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), which, with its 39-metre diameter mirror, will be the world’s biggest eye on the sky. Here, an artist’s rendering shows a view of how the telescope will look on the mountain when it is complete.
Credit: ESO/L. Calçada

U-M’s expertise is only as valuable as our willingness to learn

By Akbar K. Waljee, MD, MS

Leslie D. Yamada and Tachi Yamada M.D. Director, University of Michigan Center for Global Health Equity

U-M likes to ask how it can bring its expertise to the world. CGHE Director Akbar Waljee argues we’re asking the wrong question — and that treating global partners as co-creators, not subjects, produces stronger science, more durable impact and better answers to the questions that matter.

Read why U-M’s expertise is only as valuable as our willingness to learn.

Researchers pose for a group photo in a garden.

Meet the researchers asking whether we’ve been looking in the wrong direction

By Bettina Senga

Center for Global Health Equity

Innovations born in places with no reliable electricity — cool roofs, community health workers, low-tech jaundice screens — may be solving problems U-M hasn’t cracked. Eight U-M researchers are partnering to find out.

Read more about the researchers asking whether we’ve been looking in the wrong direction.

Six people stand closely together posing outdoors in front of a parked dark car and a tan wall. They wear a mix of casual tops and patterned outfits; the person on the far right wears a green-and-yellow patterned outfit with a matching headwrap and a white drape.

Impact stories: Research at the University of Michigan

A row of suburban houses with porches and chimneys lines a residential street under a clear blue sky, with cars parked along the road and leafless trees visible in the background.

International migration drives long-run economic development back home

“Brain drain” gets the story backwards — international migration can grow the home economy more than the money migrants send back. U-M economist Dean Yang tracked the Philippines for 20 years to prove it. Read more about how migration builds up the places migrants leave.

By Jon Meerdink
Institute for Social Research

A row of suburban houses with porches and chimneys lines a residential street under a clear blue sky, with cars parked along the road and leafless trees visible in the background.

AI model helps predict heat risk in Kenya’s informal settlements

Heat waves hit hardest in places with the fewest defenses — Kenya’s informal settlements. Verrah Otiende, a MIDAS African Faculty Fellow at U-M, is building AI maps that show exactly who’s at risk, block by block. Read more about using AI to predict heat risk where it matters most.

By Justin Varney
The Michigan Institute for Data and AI in Society

A row of suburban houses with porches and chimneys lines a residential street under a clear blue sky, with cars parked along the road and leafless trees visible in the background.

The education journeys of migrant youth and the overlooked role of educators

Rural schools in Honduras — quietly absorbing the stress of mass emigration and deportation — may be the most overlooked piece of U.S. immigration policy. U-M researcher Michelle Bellino is listening to the teachers caught in between. Read more about the educators on the front lines of migration.

By Danielle Dimcheff
Marsal Family School of Education

About Michigan Research

Michigan Research is the University of Michigan’s flagship monthly e-newsletter, produced by the Office of the Vice President for Research. Each edition spotlights groundbreaking U-M research and scholarship that addresses critical challenges, sparks innovation and shapes the future across a range of disciplines.