College of Sciences and Arts Newsblog

This will be my inaugural communication as the new Dean of the College of Sciences and Arts. I join Michigan Technological University after eleven years in the mathematics department at the University at Buffalo, SUNY; the last six as department chair. I am joined by my wife of 18 years, Ginny, and our children Meghan (13), Benjamin (9), and Adam (7).

I marveled from afar in June at the resiliency of the Copper Country residents pulling together to recover from the disastrous Father’s Day flood. We were fortunate that our new house, high up on Agate Hill, escaped unscathed. Our new friends and neighbors have been so very welcoming to our family.

This is an exhilarating time to arrive at Michigan Tech. We have a new president and four of the five colleges/schools have new deans. Everyone is full of ideas on how to maintain and build on the great momentum the departing leaders built.  Four of our 10 departments will be searching for new chairs this year.

I have been touring the CSA departments and am so impressed by the commitment of our faculty to excellence in both teaching and scholarship. I visited our beautifully renovated chemistry teaching labs. I hope we will secure the funds to renovate the remaining labs. I toured the sleep center where Professor Jason Carter of our Kinesiology and Integrative Physiology department is supported by Michigan Tech’s only NIH R01 grant, studying “Alcohol and Neurovascular Control in Humans”.

I attended a beautiful performance of the opera “Carmen” in front of a packed house at the Rosza center. Visual and Performing Arts Chair Jared Anderson directed the chorus and his colleague Joel Neves conducted the orchestra.

I want to thank outgoing Dean Bruce Seely for his dedicated 10 years of service and to wish him all the best in retirement. Bruce has been extremely generous sharing with me his time and wisdom, both before I arrived and since I started.

Summer is still trying to reach the UP — we’ve experienced too many days in the 60s with gray skies and rain. But the weather has not affected the recognition being earned by the faculty here in the college.

Associate Professor L. Syd Johnson (Humanities) works on bioethics and has explored such issues as head trauma and concussions in sports.  She was recently appointed to an advisory group at the National Institutes of Health Neuroethics Division, the BRAIN Initiative (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies). She joins the initiative’s Multi-Council Working Group. This is a very nice recognition of the respect of Syd’s colleagues.

Professor of Physics John Jaszczak was part of an international team that identified and unraveled the composition and make-up of a new mineral over the past two years — Merelaniite. Named for the mining town in Tanzania where the mineral was located, Merelaniite was just named the Mineral of the  Year for 2016. The account of this effort offers an inside look at the process of describing and naming a new mineral.

The summer routine has settled in here – marked – finally! – by a few days of very nice weather.  Although the black flies are also swarming, the sunshine beats the dreary drizzle!  But the summer pace also will let me catch upon recognizing a few of the wonderful accomplishments of faculty from the college’s departments. And I could go on – but I think this list offers a taste of the variety of high quality work underway here.  Great work by great people!

Richelle Winkler (Social Sciences) was recently honored with the University’s Distinguished Service Award, in recognition of her numerous outreach activities — most notably by assisting the Main Street Calumet group understand community development.  She also was involved in developing Houghton County’s entry to the Georgetown University Energy Prize.  Congratulations!

Gord Paterson (Biological Sciences) joined the department in January and was recently awarded funding from the Michigan Department of Natural Resources for a project aimed at helping restore Arctic grayling to the state’s waters.

Philart Jeon (Cognitive & Learning Sciences) continues to support an expanding research program related to sound and human interactions with machines and devices. His most recent award is for a 4-year study of assess techniques for take-over of control in autonomous vehicles from the Korean Automotive Testing and Research Institute. He also published a handbook, Emotions and Affect in Human Factors and Human -Computer Interaction (Elsevier) in April.

Stephanie Carpenter (Humanities) recently received the 2017 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction for her short story collection Missing Persons. The editor-in-chief of the press selected her from 230 nominees, and concluded that he was “looking forward to sharing this collection of stories with readers everywhere.”

Scott Kuhl, Keith Vertanen and James Walker (Computer Science) recently presented their research on typing in virtual reality at the ACM conference on Human Factors in Computer Systems, a major conference.  Walker lead the project as part of his dissertation project and noted that there have been few studies of this effort in virtual reality.

Linda Ott (College of Sciences and Arts) has again received support from the Google Foundation in support of the Tech summer program to support secondary school educators in the area of computer science.  While many observers are pressing for more students to gain the opportunity to code while in high school,  not all teachers in this area are formally prepared, and others need to stay up to date in this rapidly changing area. Ott is working to remedy these issues.  Teachers can still apply for the CS 4 All program which will be ion campus from August 14-16.

In recent years, a distinguishing feature of academic research has been its deep interdisciplinarity. This pattern has been growing since World War II, an event that spawned scholarly attention to developments in materials, nuclear power, rockets, jet aviation, computers and the medical field, among others. A good signal of the trend was the emergence of hybrid fields of specialization whose very titles signaled the difference, such as biochemistry, biophysics, geophysics, biostatistics and later biogeochemistry and biogeophysics. Importantly, much of the research in ALL fields was taking place at the boundaries between fields rather than at the core.

One of the more important arenas for the growth of this approach to science and research at Michigan Tech has been in the domain of Atmospheric Sciences. Faculty involved in this research hail from physics, chemistry, environmental engineering, and geological sciences. And the program has just marked its 10th year, during which time the group has become visible and respected among their peers. A key step came in 2010, when the National Science Foundation provided funds to construct the apparatus that allows investigators to create the conditions for atmospheric clouds in the laboratory – a cloud chamber.

This grant of more than $1 million proved pivotal in advancing the research program and reputation of Michigan Tech’s atmospheric scientists. Studies conducted with the unique equipment have since illuminated the nature of rain droplets, the formation of snow particles and crystals, and the the behavior of aerosols in the turbulent upper atmosphere, among other subjects. In short, this is a very successful research group!

That success is affirmed by a recent note that the group’s current director, Raymond Shaw, shared with his colleagues to remind them of this anniversary. He chose to reflect a bit on the origin of the effort.

“When Richard Honrath and I submitted the Atmospheric Sciences program proposal, 7 names were listed as participating faculty, and that has now grown to 12. The program started with two students. We now have 8 alumni at various universities and labs around the US, 8 current students, and 2 or 3 more students starting in the fall.

 

Many excellent research papers have been written over that time and a sustained level of external funding for atmospheric research is firmly in place (as recognized, for example, by the recent NSF ranking of federal funds by discipline). Michigan Tech is now widely known and respected in the atmospheric sciences community.

 

We can be happy about what we’ve accomplished, and I’d like to thank administrators and department chairs who allowed a small group of faculty spread across campus start an interdepartmental program – a relatively novel idea at that time – and fostered it over the years with a graduate research assistant line from the grad school, availability of faculty time for teaching courses, hiring efforts, etc.

 

Thanks to all of you for the way you have contributed to the program over the years.”

Richard Honrath was very much the founding spirit as the initial director of the atmospheric sciences program.

Tragically, he passed away in 2009 in a kayaking accident. But the current cloud chamber lab and the team of atmospheric researchers keep his spirit very much alive.

So happy birthday, cloud chamber!  Keep up the good work!

Most academics expect to move and change universities on occasion, as part of the normal pattern of life.  But some of us – including yours truly – find a place we want to be and stay awhile. On May 9, Michigan Tech recognized those staff and faculty who had 25, 30, 35, and 40 years of service.  Several people from the college were on that list, and I want to recognize them reaching these important milestones.  A university pays attention to teaching and learning and to research — two labor-intensive activities.  In other words, we cannot be successful without the dedicated efforts of the people who lead those efforts in education and knowledge generation. Each of the people on this list make a difference in all they do, and we are most thankful for it.  Even more importantly, the students depend up on them.  To be excellent for a long time is a difficult thing to do, but this group has done exactly that.

25 years:  Michael Irish (VPA), John Jaszczak (PHY), Donald Kreher (MA), Sylvia Matthews (CSA), Ravindra Pandey (PHY),  Lorri Reilly (CH), Kelley Smith (CH), Allan Struthers (MA), Vladimir Tonchev (MA)

35 years: Andrea Lappi (PHY) Karen Salo (CSA)

Both of the 35-year recipients are pivotal staff for CSA. Andy manages the day-to-day tasks as department coordinator in Physics, while Karen is the heart and sole of administration in the college. But everyone here contributes to making the college work.  I want to congratulate everyone for their contributions and for their efforts – and for making it to 25 or 35 years! Thanks to each and every person!

FYI – for truth in advertising purposes, that’s me in the picture with Karen Salo – as I now have 30 years of service to Michigan Tech. The other picture shows Ravi Pandey and Andy Lappi from Physics.