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.
Physics Colloquium
Michigan Technological University
Tuesday, May 19, 2015
2:00 pm
Room 101, Fisher Hall
Nucleation of ice and hydrates: Moving beyond direct molecular simulations
Tianshu Li
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
George Washington University
The Vice President for Research Office announces the Research Execellence Fund Awards. Thanks to the volunteer review committees, as well as the deans and department chairs, for their time spent on this important internal research award process.
Will Cantrell, EPSSI/Physics, received an Infrastructure Enhancement Grant for “Acquisition of a Cloud Condensation Nucleus Counter.”
Science Helps Students Master Skiing
Skiing and snowboarding involve more than just sliding down a hill. There is a unique science to it all, but how often do you think about it? Last winter, the Keweenaw Bay Ojibwa Community College (KBOCC), its Youth STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) Academy and the staff at Mont Ripley created a program to get kids to do just that.
Chiumun Michelle Hui, a Michigan Tech postdoctoral research fellow in physics, and Dustin Winslow, a physics laboratory assistant, taught “The Physics of Skiing” to the students. “Michigan Tech did a awesome job with the physics instructors that helped,” says Karen Colbert, program coordinator for KBOCC Youth STEM Academy. “Learning about physics in skiing got the students to think about how science really impacts how they perform.”
One of the students, Annalynn Griffin, 11, says that the physic instructors also taught them about gravity, friction and the different types of skis. “I didn’t know there were so many types!”
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.
Professor Yoke Khin Yap served the Department of Energy (DOE) as an onsite reviewer for the triennial review of the research program supported by the Division of Materials Sciences and Engineering (DMSE), Office of Basic Energy Sciences (BES) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) Tuesday thru Thursday, April 28-30, 2015.
All research projects supported by BES undergo regular peer review and merit evaluation. For the DOE national laboratory programs, onsite reviews with a panel of external reviewers are required every three years.
The reviews were attended by the division director and program managers from the DOE, BES, DMSE, as well as reviewers from national laboratories and universities such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, and Yale.
The review schedule included oral presentations, poster presentations, and a facility tour.
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.
