Month: June 2017

Award Winners

Summer is still trying to reach the UP — we’ve experienced too many days in the 60s with gray skies and rain. But the weather has not affected the recognition being earned by the faculty here in the college.

image109314-persAssociate Professor L. Syd Johnson (Humanities) works on bioethics and has explored such issues as head trauma and concussions in sports.  She was recently appointed to an advisory group at the National Institutes of Health Neuroethics Division, the BRAIN Initiative (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies). She joins the initiative’s Multi-Council Working Group. This is a very nice recognition of the respect of Syd’s colleagues.

image144299-persProfessor of Physics John Jaszczak was part of an international team that identified and unraveled the composition and make-up of a new mineral over the past two years — Merelaniite. Named for the mining town in Tanzania where the mineral was located, Merelaniite was just named the Mineral of the  Year for 2016. The account of this effort offers an inside look at the process of describing and naming a new mineral.

 

Merelaniite is the thin whiskers, which are about 5mm long and occur with stilbite and graphite crystals.
Merelaniite is the thin whiskers, which are about 5mm long and occur with stilbite and graphite crystals.

Amazing Faculty doing Amazing Things!

The summer routine has settled in here – marked – finally! – by a few days of very nice weather.  Although the black flies are also swarming, the sunshine beats the dreary drizzle!  But the summer pace also will let me catch upon recognizing a few of the wonderful accomplishments of faculty from the college’s departments. And I could go on – but I think this list offers a taste of the variety of high quality work underway here.  Great work by great people!

Screen Shot 2017-06-06 at 5.05.22 PMRichelle Winkler (Social Sciences) was recently honored with the University’s Distinguished Service Award, in recognition of her numerous outreach activities — most notably by assisting the Main Street Calumet group understand community development.  She also was involved in developing Houghton County’s entry to the Georgetown University Energy Prize.  Congratulations!

 

 

Screen Shot 2017-06-06 at 5.06.09 PMGord Paterson (Biological Sciences) joined the department in January and was recently awarded funding from the Michigan Department of Natural Resources for a project aimed at helping restore Arctic grayling to the state’s waters.

 

 

 

Screen Shot 2017-06-06 at 5.07.11 PMPhilart Jeon (Cognitive & Learning Sciences) continues to support an expanding research program related to sound and human interactions with machines and devices. His most recent award is for a 4-year study of assess techniques for take-over of control in autonomous vehicles from the Korean Automotive Testing and Research Institute. He also published a handbook, Emotions and Affect in Human Factors and Human -Computer Interaction (Elsevier) in April.

 

Screen Shot 2017-06-06 at 5.08.03 PMStephanie Carpenter (Humanities) recently received the 2017 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction for her short story collection Missing Persons. The editor-in-chief of the press selected her from 230 nominees, and concluded that he was “looking forward to sharing this collection of stories with readers everywhere.”

 

 

Screen Shot 2017-06-06 at 5.09.52 PMScreen Shot 2017-06-06 at 5.09.33 PMScott Kuhl, Keith Vertanen and James Walker (Computer Science) recently presented their research on typing in virtual reality at the ACM conference on Human Factors in Computer Systems, a major conference.  Walker lead the project as part of his dissertation project and noted that there have been few studies of this effort in virtual reality.

 

 

Screen Shot 2017-06-06 at 5.10.30 PMLinda Ott (College of Sciences and Arts) has again received support from the Google Foundation in support of the Tech summer program to support secondary school educators in the area of computer science.  While many observers are pressing for more students to gain the opportunity to code while in high school,  not all teachers in this area are formally prepared, and others need to stay up to date in this rapidly changing area. Ott is working to remedy these issues.  Teachers can still apply for the CS 4 All program which will be ion campus from August 14-16.