CLEVELAND – Western Michigan’s Dr. Ashlyn Kuersten has been named the winner of the 2026 Mid-American Conference Outstanding Faculty Award for Student Success. This accolade, awarded for the seventh consecutive year, celebrates the commitment to student success demonstrated by a selected full-time faculty member from each MAC institution. Kuersten has not only stood out as a dedicated nominee from Western Michigan but has also emerged as the overall conference winner.
Dr. Ashlyn Kuersten is a Professor of Sociology at Western Michigan University. In her career as a faculty member at WMU (1997 to present), she has authored many journal articles and book contributions, and has secured over one million dollars in external funding. Although these achievements are undeniably valuable contributions, where Dr. Kuersten shines brightest is in her passion for teaching, mentoring, and supporting students. Dr. Kuersten has previously received the College of Arts and Sciences Faculty Achievement Award in Teaching and the American Political Science Association and Pi Sigma Alpha Outstanding Teacher of Political Science Award. Dr. Kuersten’s successes in student-learning are plentiful, but this narrative will focus on her most ambitious efforts in providing experiential learning and career development opportunities to undergraduate students.
One of the major efforts Dr. Kuersten launched at WMU was the Wrongful Conviction Program. Dr. Kuersten served as the project director from 2014 to 2019, with the bulk of the efforts operating under a Department of Justice grant between 2015 and 2018. Under a partnership with the Cooley Law School’s Innocence Project, the WMU Wrongful Conviction Program enabled undergraduate students to assist in screening, reviewing, and investigating claims of innocence by convicted persons in Michigan. According to a program evaluation, the project involved the review of “over 900 case files and [included] over 8,800 hours reviewing these cases. Several cases conducted evidence searches and DNA tests to obtain support for innocence claims. The efforts of the program contributed to at least one exoneration (Chlebek, 2019).
As amazing as that program was, however, Dr. Kuersten only expanded on these successes in her next major effort in student experiential learning. In 2019, Dr. Kuersten launched the Western Michigan University Cold Case Program with the Michigan State Police. The project started with a collaboration with the state police and a small team of three students in the first year, and has grown to a veritable army of 55 student participants in 2025.
In their first six years, they have worked with not only the Michigan State Police, but ten additional police agencies, multiple prosecutor offices, and crime labs across Michigan. The WMU Cold Case Program is a student-centered learning opportunity. The cases themselves, the victims, law enforcement agencies, and other stakeholders are naturally unrelated to the students themselves and external to academia. However, Dr. Kuersten has designed this program to provide educational and professional experience to its evolving team of student investigators. Dr. Kuersten built, and maintains over-time, a team of undergraduate students to work as student investigators directly assisting detectives in their work.
Dr. Kuersten’s Cold Case Program has become a tremendous success in providing experiential learning outside the classroom. At the same time, the learning is not limited to the program itself.
In spring 2025, for example, Dr. Kuersten supervised seven directed individual studies, which are registered, for-credit student learning experiences, along with several senior honors theses. This amount is far above the typical enrollment for independent studies, especially at the undergraduate level.
For more on this year’s Outstanding Faculty institutional winners, click
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