Graduate School Newsblog

Nominations for Dean’s Fellowships Open

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Nominations for the Dean’s Fellowship are now open. Nominations are due no later than March 1st by 4pm.

These fellowships are available to assist with the recruitment of highly talented applicants to Michigan Tech’s PhD programs. The Dean’s Fellowship is intended to contribute to the development of a diverse academic community, which includes future faculty and others who will be leaders throughout their professional careers.

Dean’s Fellowships provide partial support for the recipient’s first year in a PhD program. The support includes a stipend of $2,000 per academic-year semester (fall and spring) as well as full summer support (stipend plus minimum full-time tuition and fees).

Please see our web page for complete details on eligibility and the nomination procedure.  Direct any questions about the program to Debra Charlesworth.

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Library Hosts “Wilson Web” Workshop

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The library offers weekly workshops all semester on resources that lend an academic edge and save time. Workshops take place at 1 p.m. on alternate Tuesdays and Wednesdays in Library 244. Each workshop is offered twice to accommodate class schedules.

The third workshop, at 1 p.m., Tuesday, Feb. 8, repeated Wednesday, Feb. 16, will address important changes to the H. W. Wilson databases.

Long considered the breadbasket of the General Education curriculum, these databases are migrating from FirstSearch to the WilsonWeb platform.

Wilson Web is a new, easy-to-use way of searching across the library’s Wilson databases that cover business, education, humanities, biological and agricultural sciences, and more using a single search. Searches link you to full-text publications and allow refinements, including “peer reviewed only.” The workshop will demonstrate this new user interface with enhancements, including text-to-speech.

This spring’s workshops will focus on resume building, material science resources, managing citations and many more. The library welcomes feedback and ideas for future workshops. Email them at library@mtu.edu.

Published in Tech Today.

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Summer 2011 Finishing Fellowship Nominations Open

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Nominations for summer Finishing Fellowships are now open. Applications must be submitted to the Graduate School no later than 4pm on February 24th.

Students are eligible if all of the following criteria are met:

  1. Must be a PhD student.
  2. Must expect to finish in summer.
  3. Must have submitted no more than one previous request for funding.
  4. Must be eligible for Research Only Mode in the summer session.

Previous recipients of a Finishing Fellowship are not eligible.

Please see our application page for details on the application procedure. Please direct any questions you have about the application or review process to Debra Charlesworth.

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Alumni Gifts Underwrite New Computing Research Center

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The new Paul and Susan Williams Center for Computer Systems Research will soon provide a space where Michigan Tech’s computer scientists and engineers can put their heads together.

Equipment and furnishings for the 10,000-square-foot center are made possible by a gift from Paul Williams, a 1961 electrical engineering graduate. Williams, of Torrance, Calif., is a retired engineer who spent nearly all of his career with Hughes Aircraft.

Donations from other alumni are underwriting the costs of remodeling the fifth floor of the Electrical Energy Resources Center, which will house the new facility. The space was formerly occupied by the Seaman Mineral Museum. The construction project is funded by gifts from the James Fugere Foundation and the Dave House Family Foundation, along with numerous other donations alumni have made over the last several years.

The Williams Center will support research on real-time, high-performance computing and information processing; computer-aided design of digital systems; and embedded and distributed computer systems.

“Our aim is to bring together people from all parts of campus with a common interest in computing systems research,” said Dan Fuhrmann, chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “The Williams Center will be for faculty and students alike, for graduate students and undergraduates. It represents a huge leap forward in realizing Paul Williams’ vision of state-of-the-art facilities in electrical engineering, computer engineering and computer science, that were simply not available at Michigan Tech in 1961.”

Williams is also supporting Tech’s Paul and Susan Williams Endowed Scholarship, to be awarded annually to a graduate of his other alma mater, Negaunee High School. Preference will be given to electrical engineering majors.

The center has been a cooperative effort. “We’re excited about working with the Department of Computer Science on this,” said Fuhrmann. “We’ll be looking at experimental architectures, new applications and new ways of doing computing.”

Steven Carr, interim chair of computer science, is equally enthusiastic. “It’s a really neat opportunity for our departments to collaborate in a much more defined way,” he said. “We have always worked well together, and there are faculty in both departments who have the potential to cooperate closely on large projects. The center will play a big role in making that happen.”

The Williams Center concept grew from the Strategic Faculty Hiring Initiative in computational discovery and innovation. “It’s helping realize the goals of the SFHI, to raise the level of computing studies campus wide,” Fuhrmann said. “As we develop the resources made possible with this gift, we’ll be reaching out to others on campus for interesting computational problems.”

A grand opening for the center is expected in August. The facility will house 10 faculty offices, a conference room, a seminar room, two small meeting rooms, common areas for graduate student desks and lab space and a social area overlooking the Keweenaw Waterway. “It was designed to draw people together,” Fuhrmann said. “And the fact that it was made possible entirely through alumni donations is just phenomenal.”

Published in Tech Today.

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Seventh Annual Student Research Forum Seeks Applicants

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The Ecosystem Science Center, Biotechnology Research Center and School of Forest Resources and Environmental Science invites graduate students conducting research related to ecology, the environment or biotechnology to submit titles and abstracts for poster presentation at the seventh annual ESC/BRC Student Research Forum.

New this year, undergraduate researchers who are advised by BRC or ESC members are also welcome to participate in a separate division.

The forum will be held on the afternoon of Friday, March 25, in the atrium of the Noblet. Abstracts are due electronically by noon, Friday, Feb. 25, to esc@mtu.edu.

The forum allows graduate and undergraduate students an opportunity to present their research to peers and faculty. This will provide a valuable experience for students preparing for poster sessions at regional or national meetings, give students well-deserved recognition for their work and serve as an excellent setting for students to showcase new results and see what others are doing.

We invite student participants to present their research findings as a research poster. Students are welcome to present advanced or preliminary research (proposals or preliminary data). Prizes will include one grand prize and up to four merit awards for each center. Each student may present only one paper but may be included as a coauthor on others. For details, see http://ecosystem.mtu.edu/2011%20guidelines.pdf.

For questions, contact Jill Fisher (SFRES) at 487-3564 or jhfisher@mtu.edu.

Published in Tech Today.

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How to use a preflight profile

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Preflight profiles in Adobe Acrobat® Pro can be used to check properties of a PDF document, as well as make some automatic fixes to them.  In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to use preflight profiles developed by the Graduate School to check the image quality in a PDF file.

To begin, download a preflight profile and save it to your computer. Depending on your browser settings, you might need to right click on the link to save the file to your computer as a *.kfp (or*.xml) file. The Graduate School has created the four below:

  1. Graduate School All Items will show you all items that have errors (red “x”) or should be examined (yellow exclamation point).  It includes checking page size (red “x”), embedded fonts (red “x”), type 3 fonts (red “x”), image quality (yellow exclamation point), and color images (only important if saving printing costs is a concern for you).  This is the same checker that the Graduate School uses.
  2. Graduate School Embedded Fonts will show you all of the fonts that aren’t embedded and where type 3 fonts are used.
  3. Graduate School Images will show you which images have a resolution below 300ppi.
  4. Graduate School Color Pages will show you which pages are in color.

First, you need to open the preflight tool.  In Adobe Acrobat® XI Pro, the preflight tool is located in the “Print Production” section of the “Tools.”

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GSG – Abstract submission and award nominations open

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Graduate Research Colloquium

Graduate Student Government is pleased to announce that abstract submission for the annual Graduate Research Colloquium Poster and Presentation Competition is now open.

This years colloquium will be held on March 3rd and 4th in the Memorial Union Building. The closing date for abstract submission will be February 25th at 5 PM. Submit abstracts to Abdul A. Koroma via email at aakoroma@mtu.edu. Please specify if your abstract is for the presentation session, poster session or both. Cash prizes are awarded for first, second, and third place in both categories.

Outstanding Merit Awards

Nominations for Graduate Student Recognition Awards and Outstanding Graduate Faculty Mentor Award are due Friday, February 18th by 5pm.  Nominations are open for the following awards:

  • Exceptional Graduate Student Scholar
  • Exceptional Graduate Student Leader
  • Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award

The nomination materials should be sent to GSG representative Ali Mirchi at amirchi@mtu.edu or by campus mail to Graduate Student Government, (405 Admin) by February 18th at 5pm.  See the GSG web page for more details on materials needed in a nomination packet.

The winners will receive recognition and the student winners will be awarded a cash prize presented at the annual GSG Research Colloquium Banquet on March 4th, 2011 in the MUB Ballroom.

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John Ball Zoo Society Wildlife Conservation Fund Invites Grant Applications

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The John Ball Zoo Society’s Wildlife Conservation Fund in Grand Rapids, Michigan, helps to fund projects working to conserve wildlife and wild places around the world.

Many projects funded by the fund have been education-based, with an eye to helping communities learn about the wildlife around them. In addition, the fund has lent support to help conserve some of the lesser known taxa such as endangered reptiles and amphibians.

The fund gives special attention to projects involving animals native to Michigan.

Grants are awarded every year for one or more of the following purposes: to enhance or assist wild animal preservation, native and exotic, threatened and endangered, and their habitat management; to enhance or improve captive animal management, including environmental design; and to assist in the development of education programming in concert with the above purposes.

Grants generally range from $500 to $2,500.

Visit the Wildlife Conservation Fund Web site for complete application guidelines and information on previous grantees and their projects.

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