A professor in the university’s Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research is hopeful that a stolen laptop containing an invaluable amount of extremely important data on it will be returned.

“Whoever stole it can keep the computer,” said Aaron Fisk. “We won’t even press any charges, and we’re considering some sort of reward. It’s just really important that we get the data back.”

The laptop was left by a graduate student in the backseat of a car parked in a lot outside a downtown restaurant on Wednesday night. Someone broke in to the car and stole the computer, Dr. Fisk said.

Fisk is a trophic ecologist who studies the migratory patterns of a wide variety of aquatic species. The laptop contained a vast amount of experimental data collected from acoustic tracking devices that had been implanted in fish in an area pond.

“Unfortunately none of the data had been backed up yet,” said Fisk. “If we don’t get this laptop back, that data is lost forever.”

The laptop is a silver Apple Macbook Pro, with a 15.4 inch screen. It has a circular red and white sticker with a yin and yang symbol and Chinese writing over the Apple logo. It also has  a long dent down the back of it.