Day: December 15, 2009

Mining History Comes to Life at Michigan Tech Commencement

Excerpt from Michigan Tech News – read the full article online and see a picture of Cameron Hartnell wearing the hood.

In 1932, a distinguished Michigan mining engineer named Scott Turner received an honorary doctorate in engineering from Michigan Technological University, at that time called the Michigan College of Mining and Technology.  At Michigan Tech’s midyear Commencement on Dec. 12, 2009—77 years later— one of the first recipients of the University’s PhD in industrial heritage and archeology will wear Turner’s historic academic hood to accept his degree.

Climate Change Conference: Graduate Student Dispatch from Copenhagen

Two Tech students are visiting Copenhagen this week during the UN’s international climate change conference. One of them is Adam Airoldi, a graduate student in forest ecology and management. His advisor is Associate Professor Andrew Burton (SFRES). Airoldi is doing research in Norway this semester, collaborating with the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, on changes in the alpine tree line around a small copper-mining town in central Norway. Airoldi earned his bachelor’s in forestry in 2008. He is in Copenhagen on a graduate travel grant from the Ecosystem Science Center.

Read his entire report and see pictures from Copenhagen.

Physics Graduate Student Wins Awards in International Meetings

Published in Tech Today

Chee Huei Lee, a physics graduate student, has won awards in two international conferences. Lee was one of the 50 finalists in the Science as Art competition at the fall meeting of the 2009 Materials Research Society . These finalists were chosen from nearly 200 artistic entries. Lee’s entry, titled “Dandelion Parachute Ball in the Nano World,” was artificially composed of multiple scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images of boron nitride nanotubes.

After the on-site voting during the meeting, Lee won a second place in the competition. The MRS meeting was held in Boston from Nov. 29 to Dec. 4, with nearly 6,000 participants. Lee presented two talks in the Symposium K (Nanotubes and Related Nanostructures) of the meeting. Earlier, Lee also won a student travel award in the 1st Nano Today Conference held in Singapore. He is a senior graduate student in Professor Yoke Khin Yap’s research group. He is also a member of Phi Kappa Phi honor society.