Kudos to these faculty and staff
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The Viola Awards, a celebration of arts and sciences in the Flagstaff community, recognized a number of NAU alumni and students this weekend. The Viola Legacy Award honored Nando Schellen, former director of NAU Opera Theatre, while the leadership award went to Michael Vincent, who retired as dean of the College of Arts and Letters in May and now teaches French. The Viola Award for Excellence in the Performing Arts went to Janice Chen-Ju Chiang of the NAU School of Music and artist Shawn Skabelund for Composition for Forests, a piano concert and art installation that was part of NAU’s Horizon Concerts Series. Award recipients are pictured left.- Mark Neumann, a professor of creative media and film in the School of Communication, is a featured video artist at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art. His film, “Everywhere West,” is part of the Electron Salon group exhibition that runs through April 1. “Everywhere West is an experimental film that blends moving images and poetry in a high-speed visual journey across the American landscape. The film is a collaboration with Chicago poet Chris Green.
- Bruce M. Sullivan, a professor of comparative study of religions and Asian studies, was interviewed for a podcast sponsored by the international organization Religious Studies project while in Edinburgh, Scotland, recently. The topic of the interview was Sullivan’s research on the recently developed trend of conducting yoga classes in museum galleries.
- Marc Burdiss, the director of emergency management for NAU, was selected to attend the FEMA National Emergency Management Executive Academy, which begins March 27 and meets several times in the next year. Participation in this conference is limited to 40 people per year and is designed to hone strategic leadership and critical thinking for executives involves with large national and international homeland security and emergency management policy development and decision-making.
- Biology professor George Koch had a paper published in the American Journal of Botany that looked at the distribution and diversity of microorganisms, specifically fungi, that live within the leaves of forest trees. The study demonstrated leaves in the same trees but at different heights had different fungal communities, as well as leaves from the same types of trees but in different geographic locations. The results reinforced the view that nearly everything in nature is incredibly diverse.
- NAU’s online master’s degree in instructional technology is ranked in the top 20 programs according to OnlineSchoolsCenter.com. The organization looked at cost, program accreditations, admission requirements, acceptance rate, program options and degree outcomes to include NAU in its list.
