Catching Up: Fall 2025 - Northern Magazine

Top 12 Public University in the Midwest

U.S. News & World Report recently released its Best Colleges rankings for 2025, and Northern Michigan University has moved up in three categories. Among Midwest regional universities, NMU tied for both 12th in top public schools and 49th best overall. It also tied for 22nd among best colleges for veterans.

NMU Professors In Top 2% of Highly Cited Scientists

Two Northern Michigan University professors—Dr. Maris Cinelli ’06 BS from Chemistry and Dr. Ryan Stock from Earth, Environmental and Geographical Sciences—are among the top 2% of highly cited scientists in the world, according to the most recent listing released by Stanford University and Elsevier, one of the largest publishing companies for scientific, technical and medical research. The list shows which scientists have had the biggest impact in their fields, based primarily on how often other scientists mention their work.

Cinelli is a Marquette native, 2006 NMU biology/physiology alumna, and a tenure-track assistant professor in the medicinal plant chemistry program. Her research builds on her training as a medicinal and analytical chemist. It uses mass spectrometry to profile plant metabolites, which play roles in growth/development and response to continually changing environmental conditions, and discover new natural products that can then be isolated and potentially elaborated into drug candidates. She is especially interested in alkaloids, which have been prized for centuries for their diverse medicinal uses.

"I'm also fortunate to have an amazing group of students doing such excellent research here. Some portion of success is always attributated to luck, and I think I got really lucky at NMU."

Cinelli received her doctorate in medicinal chemistry from Purdue University in 2011. Following completion of her degree, she was a Ruth S. Kirchstein NIH Post-Doctoral Fellow at Northwestern University, where she researched new Parkinson’s drugs for over four years. She returned to her home state and gradually became an analytical chemist as well while working in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Michigan State University. Cinelli joined the NMU faculty in 2021.

“It’s exciting to see that people at Northern are getting attention and making an impact,” she said, adding praise for the contributions of her research group, the “Alkaloid Hunters,” and with whom she has also started publishing papers. “I’m also fortunate to have an amazing group of students doing such excellent research here. Some portion of success is always attributable to luck, and I think I got really lucky at NMU.”

Stock began teaching at NMU in 2019. With expertise in environmental justice, he is an energy geographer and political ecologist that studies renewable energy transitions and climate change interventions from an intersectional and decolonial perspective. A strong commitment to social equity and environmental sustainability permeates his work in academia and the community.

As director of the Illume Lab, Stock maintains a global research program and collaborates with many scholars and students at NMU and worldwide. Many of his recent research investigations have examined the environmental injustices and the gender and racial politics of solar development.

Stock earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Utah, a master’s from the University of Michigan, and his doctorate from the University of Illinois. He frequently collaborates with community organizations and social movements, and has amassed a strong record of scholarship and consistently excellent ratings for teaching.

“While truly humbling to be recognized as a highly influential scientist, I am motivated by social change and not by citation metrics. In these anxious and unprecedented times, scholars must strive to dismantle systems of oppression to rapidly catalyze equitable responses to the climate crisis.”