Wayne State University

The Wayne State University School of Medicine is the largest single-campus medical school in the United States with more than 1,000 medical... students. In addition to undergraduate medical education, the school offers master’s degree, Ph.D., and M.D.-Ph.D. programs in 14 areas of basic science to about 400 students annually. WSUSOM has had four predecessor institutions since its founding in 1868. The Detroit College of Medicine was founded in 1868 in a building on Woodward Avenue adjacent to Harper University Hospital. The Michigan College of Medicine was incorporated in 1879 and offered classes in the former Hotel Hesse at the intersection of Gratiot Avenue, Madison Avenue and St. Antoine Street. In 1885 the two schools merged to form the Detroit College of Medicine, taking residence in the old Michigan College of Medicine building. In 1913, the college was reorganized and refinanced as the Detroit College of Medicine and Surgery. In 1918, control of the Detroit College of Medicine and Surgery was transferred to the Detroit Board of Education .
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Emmett Leith was a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Michigan and, with Juris Upatnieks of the University of Michigan, the... co-inventor of three-dimensional holography. Leith received his B.S. in physics from Wayne State University in 1949 and his M.S. in physics in 1952. He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Wayne State in 1978. Much of Leith's holographic work was an outgrowth of his research on synthetic aperture radar performed while a member of the Radar Laboratory of the University of Michigan's Willow Run Laboratory beginning in 1952. Leith joined the University of Michigan as a research assistant and was promoted to graduate research assistant in 1955, research associate in 1956, research engineer in 1960, associate professor in 1965, and full professor in 1968. Professor Leith and his coworker Juris Upatnieks at the University of Michigan displayed the world's first three-dimensional hologram at a conference of the Optical Society of America in 1964. He received the 1960 IEEE Morris N. Liebmann Memorial Award and the Ballantine Medal in 1969.
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S. Epatha Merkerson is an American film, stage, and television actress. She has won a Golden Globe, Emmy Awards, Screen Actors Guild Awards, Obie... Award and four NAACP Image Awards. She has also received two Tony Award nominations. She is best known for her role as NYPD Lieutenant Anita Van Buren from 1993 to 2010 on the long-running NBC police procedural drama series, Law & Order. She appeared in 391 episodes of the series—more than any other cast member. Merkerson, the youngest of five children, was born in Saginaw, Michigan, the daughter of Ann Merkerson, who at the time was the only female in the vehicles operation unit at the Detroit Post Office. Her father worked in a factory. Merkerson's parents separated in 1957. Merkerson is often reticent about revealing what her first name really was . On the June 11, 2005 episode of NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me!, she jokingly claimed that the initial "S," "stands for 'Sweet' [because] so many people have difficulty with Epatha, which is what I prefer to be called". She has legally changed her first name to S.
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Arthur Coleman Danto and then pursued graduate study in philosophy at Columbia University. From 1949 to 1950, Danto studied in Paris on a Fulbright... scholarship under Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and in 1951 returned to teach at Columbia, where he is currently Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy Emeritus. Danto laid the groundwork for an institutional definition of art that sought to answer the questions raised by the emerging phenomenon of twentieth century art.
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Ernest Lee "Ernie" Hudson is an American actor known for his roles as Winston Zeddemore in the Ghostbusters film series, Sergeant Albrecht in The... Crow, and Warden Leo Glynn on HBO's Oz. Hudson was born in Benton Harbor, Michigan, the son of Maggie Donald, who died of tuberculosis when Hudson was two months old; Hudson never knew his father. He was subsequently raised by his maternal grandmother, Arrana Donald. He has a half-brother, Lewis Hudson. After a short time in the Marine Corps, he moved to Detroit, where he became the resident playwright at Concept East, the oldest Black Theatre company in the US. In addition, he enrolled at Wayne State University to further develop his writing and acting skills, and found time to establish the Actors' Ensemble Theatre where he and other talented young black writers directed and appeared in their own works, before enrolling and subsequently graduating from Yale School of Drama. One of Hudson's early films was in Penitentiary II in the late 1970s starring Leon Isaac Kennedy.
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