The Graduate School has announced PhD Candidate in Physics Kamal Dhungana has received a Doctoral Finishing Fellowship for Summer 2015.
From left to right: Andrea Lappi, John Jaszczak, Ranjit Pati, Don Beck, Bob Weidman, Wil Slough, Ramy El-Ganainy, Brian Fick, Claudio Mazzoleni, Bryan Suits, Miguel Levy, Alex Kostinski, Debbie Linn, Kimberly Oldt, Ravi Pandey, Will Cantrell, Yoke Khin Yap, Ray Shaw, Petra Huentemeyer, Bob Nemiroff, Jacek Borysow, and Max Seel.
Find all of the faculty and staff of the Department of Physics.
Yoke Khin Yap (Physics) was awarded by Osaka University in Japan with the title of Global Alumni Fellow. The newly established award is granted to alumni who are academically active overseas. Yap is among the first few honorees joining alumni from Purdue, Pennsylvania, Columbia, The National Institute of Health, Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Cambridge and others.
Yap has been an active alumni of Osaka University. He is one of the founding members and board of directors of the Osaka University North American Alumni Association (OU-NAAA) created in January 2006. OU-NAAA helps alumni in North America connect with the university, students and faculty through social and academic networking activities.
Mike Meyer gave the keynote address on Wednesday, June 17, 2015, for the Student Technology Conference held in Houghton this week. The conference concerns content-rich academic, computing, and telecommunications technologies in student living areas. The keynote address was entitled “The Transition to Teaching 24:7.”
Meyer is a Senior Lecturer in Physics and the director of the Center for Teaching and Learning on campus.
The conference is a ResNet activity. ResNet is an international organization providing a forum for discussion, collaboration, and development for IT professionals in higher education. The conference runs June 16-19, 2015.
Michael Meyer, director of Michigan Tech’s William G. Jackson Center for Teaching and Learning, was quoted in an article in Inside Higher Education about how a professor should regain control of a class (or not lose control in the first place).
How Not to Lose Control of a Class
“I haven’t seen anywhere near somebody losing control to the extent we saw at Texas A&M as it’s been reported, but I have seen cases on different campuses where it’s very clear that the learning is done,” said Michael R. Meyer, a professor of physics and director of Michigan Technological University’s William G. Jackson Center for Teaching and Learning. “That happens when somebody says or does something that fractures the relationship with at least a significant proportion of the students, and there really isn’t a trust anymore.”
At that point, Meyer said, professors and students alike tend to go into “survival” mode, where the goal is simply getting through the end of the course. A common cause of such friction? Students feeling like they’re being held accountable for behavioral expectations that weren’t made clear to them, Meyer said. These expectations go beyond which assignments are due when. Rather, they address such behaviors as cell phone, computer and social media use in class, how to ask questions and what happens when someone shows up late.
“If you don’t address them, or talk about them with students, there’s bound to be bad feelings on both sides,” Meyer said.
Michigan Tech Employee Service Recognition Event
On Wednesday, May 6th, faculty and staff members, along with their guests, gathered at the Memorial Union Ballroom for an awards dinner recognizing 25, 30, 35, and 40 years of service to Michigan Tech.
Among those recognized for 25 years of service were Jacek Borysow and Alex Kostinski.
Dr. Swarup China former graduate student in the Atmospheric Sciences program at MTU, has been accepted to participate in ACCESS XIII, to be convened at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) (July 31 – August 2, 2015), and to attend the Gordon Research Conference (GRC) in Atmospheric Chemistry. Participation to ACCESS is highly competitive and it is an honor to be accepted.
Information about the conference can be found here.
Assistant Professor of Physics Ramy El-Ganainy is a co-guest editor for an upcoming “focus on” issue article in the New Journal of Physics (NJP). The focus is entitled “Parity-Time Symmetry in Optics and Photonics.” Focus issue articles are invited-only contributions from experts in the field. They provide an overview of the current status of this research field and serve as a guiding compass for future developments.
NJP articles are open access and completely free to read. NJP offers the unusual opportunity for authors to submit video abstracts as a new content stream. Video media enable authors to go beyond the constraints of the written article and to further increase the visibility of the authors and their work.
NJP “focus on” articles are published incrementally during their windows for submissions. For “Parity-Time Symmetry in Optics and Photonics,” the window for submissions is August 1, 2015 to February 15, 2016.
The Graduate School is pleased to announce that Amanda Shaw was awarded Honorable Mention for the Midwestern Association of Graduate Schools (MAGS) Excellence in Teaching Award at the master’s level. Shaw was awarded the Outstanding Teaching Award at Michigan Tech in the spring of 2014.
One of her most notable accomplishments as an instructor has been redesigning how Introduction to Astronomy is taught on campus and online. In the classroom, she utilizes many active learning techniques, including astronomy playing cards, manual clicker cards, in-class projects and mini-lectures. Shaw adopts a similar format online, involving students in mini-lectures created with Camtasia and embedded with rich video content from NASA and quizzes. She plans to publish a paper comparing and contrasting the student learning outcomes in the on campus and online version of the identical course.
Shaw was nominated by Ravi Pandey (Physics) and is advised by Alexander Kostinski (Physics). She is pursuing a Masters in Physics.
Physics major Colin Scheidler is a recipient of the 2015 Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Award for his project “Growth of Molybdenum Disulfide Monolayer Films by Chemical Vapor Deposition.” Colin’s advisor is Dr. Yoke Khin Yap.
Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship Recipients Announced
This summer, the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) program will fund 23 students from across the University with funds from the Vice President for Research and the Honors Institute. Some matching funds were provided by the Biotechnology Research Center and PI Adrienne Minerick. The total funding for the program this year is $92,000.
Since 2002, the SURF program has funded 270 students. In that time, SURF recipients have co-authored 60 peer reviewed publications.