Graduate School Newsblog

International Student Dies in Car Crash

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Zhang Yue, an international graduate student in electrical engineering, died Wednesday, Dec. 14, in a car accident in Ontonagon County. He leaves behind a wife and young child, currently residing in Minnesota, and family in China.

The Office of International Programs and Services is working with the Chinese Students and Scholars Association to ensure that Zhang Yue’s memory is properly honored. If you would like additional information about how you can offer your sympathy or condolences to Zhang Yue’s family, please contact Thy Yang, IPS director, at thyy@mtu.edu.

Published in Tech Today.

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2012 Sumitro Fellows Program

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Application Deadline: January 15, 2012

The United States-Indonesia Society (USINDO) is pleased to announce a call for applications for the 2012 Sumitro Fellows Program. The Sumitro Fellows Program is a $10,000 travel/study grant for postdoctoral scholars, PhD candidates, senior academics, and otherwise professionally qualified candidates to engage in field research. One Fellowship is available for a United States citizen/permanent resident for research relating to the political economy of Indonesia. One Fellowship is also available for an Indonesian citizen with a project related to the Indonesian-United States relationship.

The Sumitro Fellows program honors Dr. Sumitro Djojohadikusumo, Indonesia’s senior economist and co-founder of USINDO, who passed away in 2001. An architect of Indonesia’s modern economy, Professor Sumitro headed the faculty of economics at the University of Indonesia, and was later a Minister of Trade and Minister of State for Research.

Eligibility Requirements

American applicants for the Sumitro Fellowship must be United States citizens or permanent residents in the United States with a specific project on Indonesia’s political economy. Applications outside the scope of economics or political economy will not be considered.

Indonesian applicants for the Sumitro Fellowship must be Indonesian citizens with a specific project on any aspect of the Indonesian-U.S. bilateral relationship. Applications related to solely American topics, Indonesian topics, or to non-U.S./non-Asian themes will not be considered.

For more information, please go to:

www.usindo.org/usindo-grants/sumitro-fellows or email sumitro@usindo.org.

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IIASA Young Scientist Summer Program 2012

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Application Deadline: January 16, 2012

Each summer, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), located in Schloss Laxenburg near Vienna, Austria, hosts a selected group of graduate students, primarily doctoral, from around the world in its Young Scientists Summer Program (YSSP). These students work closely with an IIASA senior scientist mentor on a project
proposed by the student, related to his or her graduate research.

Fellows selected by IIASA will receive funding to cover travel to IIASA and a modest living allowance.

IIASA is an international institution, supported by the US and 17 other member nations, engaged in scientific research aimed at providing policy insight on issues of regional and global importance in the following fields:

Program Areas

  • Energy
  • Transitions to New Technologies
  • Advanced Systems Analysis
  • Ecosystem Services and Management
  • Mitigation of Air Pollution and Greenhouse Gases
  • Evolution and Ecology
  • World Population
  • Risk Policy and Vulnerability
  • Water

Global Program Areas

  • Energy and Climate Change
  • Food and Water
  • Poverty and Equity

Detailed information about each program is on the IIASA website: www.iiasa.ac.at/

For questions, please contact either Tanja Huber at Huber@iiasa.ac.at, or Margaret Goud in the U.S. at IIASAyssp@nas.edu.

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Board of Control Approves New Degree Programs

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At its regular meeting on Friday, Dec. 9, the Board of Control approved two new master’s degree programs, two new bachelor’s programs and a new PhD program. The new degrees–in medical informatics, biomedical engineering, biochemistry and molecular biology, physics and physics for high school teachers–now must go to the academic affairs officers of the Presidents’ Council, State Universities of Michigan, for review and approval.

The new master’s degrees reflect Michigan Tech’s commitment to providing the kind of education that industry is seeking. “The demand for master’s degrees is growing in industry,” said Provost Max Seel, “and we are trying to be proactive in meeting that need.”

The advancement of technology in the medical field, accompanied by the need to track and analyze vast amounts of data while keeping sensitive data confidential, created the need for the biomedical and medical informatics programs, he added.
The master’s degrees are professional degrees, designed to prepare students to work in the increasingly complex and demanding STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) specialties, Seel explained.

The University has also put in place an accelerated master’s degree framework, Seel noted. “We want students to know that at Michigan Tech, you can go straight through to a master’s degree,” he said.

The accelerated master’s program will enable students to complete a master’s degree in a shorter period of time than previously was possible. Biomedical engineering, the School of Technology and mechanical engineering are the first ones planning to offer an accelerated master’s degree.

The new PhD is a nondepartmental program in biochemistry and molecular biology, drawing on existing faculty and existing courses, Seel said.

The two new physics degrees are a Bachelor of Arts in Physics and a Bachelor of Arts in Physics with a concentration in secondary education.

“The motivation for offering a BA degree in physics is to give students who are not planning to study physics in graduate school a strong foundation in physics but significantly fewer physics course requirements than our current BS programs,” Seel explained. “The resulting flexibility will allow students to pursue other scholarly interests and career goals in the arts, humanities, social sciences, business, entrepreneurship, medicine and law. Physics can provide an excellent foundation for interdisciplinary endeavors in all of these fields.”

Seel said the University is also following a recommendation of the Gender Equity report of the American Physical Society to increase participation of women in physics. The recommendation reads: “Make it easier to enter a physics program after the first year to allow for late starters or those with lower initial preparation in mathematics. Create flexible tracks for physics majors to allow interdisciplinary studies or to pursue an education degree.”

The BA in Physics with a concentration in secondary education is designed to prepare more students to become high school physics teachers.

“The preparation of teaching professionals in the sciences has become an issue of national concern,” President Glenn Mroz said. “We are very fortunate in our local school districts to have excellent high school teachers with strong science credentials, but this is simply not true nationally. And if students don’t have good science teachers in K-12, they will not be prepared to pursue the math and science-related degrees in college that are in the highest demand for jobs.”

by Jennifer Donovan, director, public relations
Published in Tech Today

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Christmas for the Needy

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The MBA Student Association is leading the “Adopting a Family” program this holiday season.

Help collect unused clothing, toys and other items for a local family with four boys aged 5, 9, 11 and 12 who love hockey, floor hockey and LEGOs. The boys wear medium T-shirts and sizes 12, 12 slim, 10 husky, and 5T pants.

Place items in the “Adopt a Family” box in the lobby of the AOB. Feel free to wrap your donations, but attach a note telling what’s inside.

As well, cash donations will be accepted in the office of the School of Business and Economics and will be used to purchase food and other necessities for the family’s holiday celebration.

Donations will be accepted until Wednesday, Dec. 21.  For more information please contact the MBA Association President Zachary Hitt at zthitt@mtu.edu.

Posted in Tech Today.

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Over 400 Michigan Tech Grads to be Honored at Midyear Commencement

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Michigan Tech will hold Midyear Commencement at 10:30 a.m., Saturday, Dec. 10, in the Wood Gymnasium at the SDC.
At the ceremony, the University will honor the achievements of more than 400 graduating students, including 336 students receiving undergraduate degrees, 107 master’s degree candidates, and 27 PhD recipients.

Chang K. Park ’73, founder, president and CEO of Universal Remote Control Inc., will give the commencement address as well as receive an Honorary Doctorate in Philosophy. His Harrison, N.Y.-based company is a world leader in technology and innovation and has supplied more than 80 million remote controls and home automation devices in the past 10 years alone.

Born and raised in South Korea, Park came to the US as a teenager. He soon developed an interest in mathematics–the only language he could understand. After enrolling at Michigan Tech, he received bachelor’s degrees in electrical engineering and engineering administration and went on to earn an MBA at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He began his career with an engineering consulting firm specializing in mass transit and for several years was employed in corporate finance. Then he started a business in his sister’s garage and steadily expanded it to market and develop remote controls and related devices.

He chairs the Chang K. Park Foundation, an organization that supports human rights, the elimination of poverty and hunger, political reform and economic justice. He is also a member of the board of Common Cause.

Written by Marcia Goodrich, senior writer

Published in Tech Today.

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Archives’ Historical Collections Now Searchable

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A group of new online search tools has enhanced the search and discovery of historical records in the collections of the Archives.  The improved access is the result of a two-year project to improve description of the Archives’ extensive holdings of regional manuscript material. The initiative was funded through a $167,600 grant from the National Historical Records and Publications Commission, a division of the National Archives and Records Administration.

During the project, Archives’ staff conducted a box-by-box survey of its entire collection, totaling more than 7,000 cubic feet and including personal papers, diaries, organizational records, business materials, mining company records, maps, newspapers and other historical documents.  The project identified more than 700 discrete collections and created standardized descriptions, providing information about the size, content and dates of coverage for each collection. These descriptions have been revealed to potential researchers throughout the world via a number of online tools.

A full listing of the collections, including collection number, title and brief description, is now available on the Michigan Tech Archives blog. See Collections.

Catalog records for each collection are also available in the Van Pelt and Opie Library catalog. See Catalog.

Researchers may limit their searches by the location “Archives Manuscript Collection.” These records allow searching of collection names, keywords in their brief descriptions and histories, as well as standardized subject headings. Versions of these catalog records are also searchable through WorldCat, an international bibliographic database maintained by the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), a global cooperative of libraries, archives and museums.

To search the main WorldCat catalog, see WorldCat.

As an OCLC member, Michigan Tech community members may also search these records through the FirstSearch version of WorldCat. See FirstSearch.

This allows researchers to limit type to “Archival Materials” and limit availability to library code “EZT” for Michigan Tech archival collection records. For further information, contact the Archives at 487-2505 or at copper@mtu.edu.

Published in Tech Today.

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Geology Graduate Student Helps National Geographic Talk About African Rifts

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When National Geographic needed some explanation about the Albertine Rift, a geological formation in Africa, they came to a Michigan Tech graduate student. Again.

It’s the second time that Alex Guth, a PhD student in geology, has been tapped by the world-famous magazine to offer geological expertise in Kenya and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

National Geographic sought an answer to why such a geological rift exists and its impact on the local people–a people in crisis–and the delicate ecosystem that coexists. Guth’s expertise includes the rift valley and its extremes in topography caused by the East African Rift System, where the Nubian plate is moving west away from the Somalian plate.

“There are mountain ranges with a mountain forest and a rain forest extremely close by,” she says. “The extreme topography, caused by the rift, impacts the animals. They can’t move, since the area around them won’t sustain them.” The same can be said of the people, many of whom live in a densely populated region near the city of Goma and Lake Kivu, which is poisoned by volcanic gasses.  “And the fishing in nearby Lake Albert can’t sustain the population, which helps fuel conflict,” Guth says.

That conflict, between the Bashali people, in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and invading Tutsi, Hutu, and Hunde, has become so intense that other research teams have left early. “They were murdering women, specifically,” Guth says, “and recent elections have made the future ‘iffy’ at best. Intertribal conflicts, and now terrorism–there was a bombing in Nairobi Monday–make the work there even more dangerous.” The people initially moved to the valley because of the fertile land, but they have over-logged it, and the subsequent population boom created a land shortage, according to the National Geographic article, “Africa’s Albertine Rift,” which appeared in the November 2011 issue.

The magazine came to Guth for the geologic story, and she chose to tell them about the evolution of the rift valley and the “intense area,” replete with volcanoes, one of which destroyed great parts of Goma. “Working with them was interesting,” she says. “My research actually appears on a poster that is in the magazine, and they also wanted me to look at definitions they had used for a children’s edition of the magazine, for quality control.” She also had to do a little educating of the National Geographic writers. “They kept saying the mantle was ‘fluid,’ which is not accurate,” she says.

Guth hopes to return to do more research for her dissertation, opting for Kenya, where the real focus of her work exists.

Written by by Dennis Walikainen, senior editor

Published in Tech Today.

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Nominations open for MAGS Excellence in Teaching Award

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Nominations are now open for the Midwestern Association of Graduate Schools (MAGS) Excellence in Teaching Awards.  Michigan Tech may nominate one student at the MS and PhD level.  Nominations are due to Debra Charlesworth no later than 4pm, January 18 2012.

Eligible students

  • will be enrolled at Michigan Tech for spring 2012 and have a teaching appointment
  • will have earned the Michigan Tech Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award
  • will have an excellent teaching portfolio and student evaluations

See the application page for complete details on what is required for a nomination.  Note that a new requirement this year is a 10 minute video showing the nominee’s “Teaching in Action.”  Note that the deadline for the video only has been extended to February 6, 2012.

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