Dr. Debra Burris, associate professor of physics and astronomy, and students Matt Hankins, Jacob Teffs and Tristan Odekirk presented results of their research at the 219th meeting of the American Astronomical Society held in Austin on Jan. 9-12. Hankins presented preliminary findings on an archaeoastronomy project looking for astronomical alignments at the Point Remove Mound Complex outside of Morrilton. He is conducting this work as part of his Honors College thesis. Teffs and Odekirk presented results of correlations of light to heavy neutron capture elements including implications of the trends they found on the potential sites for the proposed secondary rapid n-capture process. While at the meeting, the group was also able to spend time working with their research collaborator, Chris Sneden, who is on faculty at the University of Texas in Austin.
Dr. Andrew Mason, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, recently had a paper published in Physical Review – Special Topics: Physics Education Research, in collaboration with Chandralekha Singh of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pittsburgh. The paper is titled “Assessing expertise in introductory physics using categorization task” and was published Oct. 21, 2011.
UCA Receives Grant to Recruit Women to Technology Field
The National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT) and Microsoft Research announced the winners of the most recent NCWIT Academic Alliance Seed Fund awards on Jan. 10, which provide U.S. academic institutions with start-up funds to develop and implement initiatives that recruit and retain women in computing and technology fields of study. UCA is among the five winners together with Claremont Graduate University, Fisk University, Union College and the University of Virginia. This round of the NCWIT Academic Alliance Seed Fund will provide $10,000 to each of the five institutions. This project was proposed by Karen Thessing, Yu Sun and Chenyi Hu, faculty of the Department of Computer Science. The project will build a female friendly environment for computing majors by recruiting a first-year cohort of women and retaining them with opportunities for learning, research, service and leadership.
Data-Tronics Corporation Donates $500 to the Computer Science Scholarship Fund
Fort Smith based Data-Tronics Corporation has continued its generous support of computer science students through a $500 contribution to the Computer Science Scholarship fund for the spring semester of 2012. Data-Tronics has continuously employed graduates from the UCA Computer Science Department. In his letter, Lee Easley, Manager of Information Systems of Data-Tronics Corp., wrote: “We appreciate your work at UCA.”