Category: Alumni

The Western UP Center has posted results and photos of the 2014 science fair held at the Memorial Union on March 25, 2014.

View Results, Project Pictures, Festival Pictures, and News

Science comes to life
Fourth- through eighth-graders attend science fair

From whether water concentration varies with snow depth to whether colored overlays improve readability, students asked questions and showed their answers Tuesday night at the Western U.P. Science Fair and Science and Engineering Festival.

Additionally, students, their families and the public attended the Science & Engineering Festival downstairs in the Memorial Union Building. Exhibits ranged from 3-D printers to how to clean oil spills. Unlike previous years, the festival was also open to children not participating in the fair.

Read more at the Mining Gazette, by Garrett Neese.

Copper Country students show off their work at regional science fair

The Memorial Union Building at Michgian Tech was filled with student from grades four through eight for the annual Western U.P. Science Fair yesterday…not a bad turnout for an event that started off with six students participating in its first year.

And the activities were wide-ranging, from making silly putty using glue to making ice cream using liquid nitrogen. One demo that caught the eye of many involved a vaccuum and a ball. Physics lab associate Scott Rutterbush explained what happens.

“When we take a ball and we place it in the stream of air, what you actually get is, the air around it pushes up on the ball slightly, allowing it to spin and holds it in the air,” he said.

Read more and watch the video at ABC 10 WBUP WBKP, by Mike Hoey.

15th Annual Western UP Science Fair and Festival Tuesday

The 15th Annual UP Science and Engineering Festival will be held 4:30-7:30 pm, Tuesday, March 25.

From 4:30-7:30 pm, K-8 students and their families may participate in the Science and Engineering Festival that will offer more than two dozen fun, hands-on engineering, physics, biological sciences, chemistry activities conducted by fifty Michigan Tech students in the Memorial Union Building Commons (ground floor).

Activities are facilitated by Biomedical Engineering students, Society of Physics Students, Dept of Chemistry students, Biological Sciences students, Engineers Without Borders, and more!

Read more at Tech Today.

Matthew Davenport ’06 is a PhD physicist turned science writer. If you are interested in such a career, view some of Matt’s writing and visualization samples on his website.

Matt also co-authored an article for Nature Nanotechnology in 2010. It is entitled “Graphene opens up to DNA,” published online 06 October 2010. doi:10.1038/nnano.2010.198 The work concerns the threading of pores in 2D graphene sheets by DNA strands.

While a student at Michigan Tech, Matt received the Ian W. Shepherd Award for most outstanding senior.

Professor Raymond Shaw’s (Physics) efforts to explain why so much snow falls in the Arctic, despite the paucity of nuclei for ice crystals, was described in the NBCNews.com story “Let it Snow: How White Stuff Comes Down Days on End.”

From Tech Today.

Let it snow: How the white stuff comes down for days on end in the Arctic

Researchers at Michigan Technological University in Houghton set out to investigate the mystery of where snow in the Arctic comes from, and how it can fall so persistently in the region.

“Within a few hours, you basically purge the atmosphere of all those particles,” Raymond Shaw, a physicist at Michigan Technological University, said in a statement. “So how can it snow for days on end?”

Read more at NBC News Science, by Denise Chow.

In the News

CBS Detroit ran a news story about the origin of snowflakes, based on Professor Raymond Shaw’s (Physics) research. See CBS Detroit.

From Tech Today.

Robert Nemiroff has been invited to speak in New York City at the American Museum of Natural History on Friday, 2014 January 3 at 6:15 pm at the invitation of the Amateur Astronomers Association of New York. Lectures are held in the Kaufmann Theater on Central Park West.

This year he will be primarily presenting and describing the best astronomy videos featured on Astronomy Picture of the Day during the past two years: 2012 and 2013.

The science behind snow at Tech

According to Dr. Cantrell, associate professor of Physics and member of the Atmospheric Sciences interdepartmental PhD program, there are three reasons Tech gets so much snow.

The first reason is that it gets cold.

Read more at the Michigan Tech Lode, by Rand Silvers.

Three physics alumni reunited at the New Faculty Workshop, sponsored by the AAPT (American Association of Physics Teachers), the AAS (American Astronomical Society), APS Physics, the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, and NSF (National Science Foundation). Changgong Zhou, ’06, Lin Pan, ’08, and Haiying He, ’09, were the only cohorts that originated from the same school and knew each other personally.

Zhou, now at Lawrence Tech University, was a student of Edward Nadgorny working on aperture assisted laser direct write. Pan, now at Cedarville University, studied atomic physics with Donald Beck. He, now at Valparaiso University, did research on electron transport in molecular systems with Ravi Pandey.

The Workshop for New Physics and Astronomy Faculty was held on November 7-10, 2013, in the American Center for Physics, College Park, MD. AAPT sponsors programs to help new faculty become more effective educators and support their quest to gain tenure.