In the Spotlight: Oct. 23, 2020

Kudos to these faculty, staff and programs

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• Northern Arizona University was included in the recent report of The Princeton Review Guide to Green Colleges: 2021 Edition. Schools chosen for the guide received a score of 80 or higher on a scale of 60 to 99. NAU was one of 416 colleges profiled.
• Benjamin Ruddell, director of the School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems (SICCS); Caryn Potter, alumna in climate science solutions; and Richard Rushforth, assistant research professor of SICCS co-authored the article, “Guidance on the usability-privacy tradeoff for utility customer data aggregation” published in Utilities Policy. The article presents a statistical analysis of the tradeoff between usability and privacy for utility customer data in Los Angeles.
• Logan Berner, assistant research professor of SICCS, and Scott Goetz, professor of SICCS, co-authored the article, “A narrow window of summer temperatures associated with shrub growth in Arctic Alaska” published in Environmental Research Letters. The study analyzed a shrub ring-width network of 18 sites across the North Slope of Alaska to assess shrub temperature sensitivity and to compare radial growth patterns with satellite normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) data since 1982.
  • Berner also co-authored the article, “Periglacial vegetation dynamics in Arctic Russia: decadal analysis of tundra regeneration on landslides with time series satellite imagery” published in Environmental Research Letters. The study applies a novel satellite-based NDVI analysis to investigate the vegetation regeneration patterns of active-layer detachments following a major landslide event in West Siberia in 1989.
• Associate professor Matthew Bowker, assistant research professor Anita Antoninka, Regents’ professor Pete Fulé and graduate student Henry Grover, all from the School of Forestry, were awarded a $484,829 grant from the United States Deparment of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture. The project is titled “Pelletized fire mosses to enhance soil health after high severity forest fire.”
• Abolfazl Razi, assistant professor of SICCS; Fatemeh Afghah, associate professor of SICCS; and Fulé co-authored the article, “Wildfire Spread Modeling with Aerial Image Processing” published with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. The article proposes a new data-driven model for fire expansion which uses reference-based image segmentation for vegetation density estimation and incorporates it into fire heat conduction modeling.
• The Department of Astronomy and Planetary Science has had several faculty members publish papers, among other notable achievements.
  • Associate professor Joshua Emery co-authored the article, “Evidence for sulfur-bearing species on Callisto’s leading hemisphere: Sourced from Jupiter’s irregular satellites or Io?” published in Earth and Planetary Astrophysics. The study investigates whether sulfur-bearing species are present on the icy Galilean moon Callisto by analyzing eight near-infrared reflectance spectra collected over a wide range of sub-observer longitudes.
  • Associate chair and assistant professor Mark Salvatore has had multiple publications since the beginning of the year with various collaborators. Check out his work below.
    • Remote characterization of photosynthetic communities in the Fryxell basin of Taylor Valley, Antarctica (co-authored with graduate student Schuyler Borges)
    • Mineralogy of Vera Rubin Ridge from the Mars Science Laboratory CheMin Instrument
    • The McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica: A geological, environmental, and ecological analog to the martian surface and near-surface. In Mars Geological Enigmas: From the Late Noachian Epoch to the Present Day
    • The Chemostratigraphy of the Murray Formation and Role of Diagenesis at Vera Rubin Ridge in Gale Crater, Mars, as Observed by the ChemCam Instrument
    • Synergistic Ground and Orbital Observations of Iron Oxides on Mt. Sharp and Vera Rubin Ridge
    • Evidence for a Diagenetic Origin of Vera Rubin Ridge, Gale Crater, Mars: Summary and Synthesis of Curiosity’s Exploration Campaign
    • Iron Mobility during Diagenesis at Vera Rubin Ridge, Gale Crater, Mars
    • Analyses of High-Iron Sedimentary Bedrock and Diagenetic Features Observed with ChemCam at Vera Rubin Ridge, Gale Crater, Mars: Calibration and Characterization
    • Evaluating Alternative Metacommunity Hypotheses for Diatoms in the McMurdo Dry Valleys Using Simulations and Remote Sensing Data
  • David Trilling, interim chair and professor, virtually presented at a conference held in Germany entitled, “Ground-based thermal infrared astronomy – past, present and future.” The conference had nine speakers from all over the world who spoke their own native languages. Trilling presented work titled, “Asteroids in the Solar System as seen by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope.”
  • Assistant professor Cristina Thomas presented some of her work at Caltech as a speaker for its Latinx Heritage Month: STEMinar series. Thomas was also quoted in the article, “How to Build a Spacecraft to Save the World,” speaking about the asteroid Didymos and its system.
• Frederick DeMicco, executive director of the School of Hotel and Restaurant Management, published the article, “The Strategic Value for Having an Onsite Medical Clinic at Hotels” on Hospitality Net. The article discusses the benefits of having a medical clinic located within a resort or hotel property.
• Assistant professor in the W.A. Franke College of Business Charn McAllister published the chapter, “A Guide for Conducting Curvilinear Meta-Analyses” in the book, “Advancing Methodological Thought and Practice.” The technique described in the chapter was originally used to publish the article, “Leaders and followers behaving badly: A meta-analytic examination of curvilinear relationships between destructive leadership and followers’ workplace behaviors” in Personnel Psychology.
• Amirhossein Arzani, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, co-authored two papers, “Data-driven blood flow modeling with sparse representation” and “Hemodynamic data assimilation using model order reduction and Kalman filter” published in the Bulletin of the American Physical Society and will be presented at the 73^rd Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society Division (APS) of Fluid Dynamics in November. APS is a nonprofit membership organization that works to advance and diffuse knowledge of physics through its research journals, scientific meetings and education, outreach, advocacy and international activities.
• Ryan Behunin, assistant professor of applied physics and materials science, published the article, “Optomechanical cooling in an optical fiber” in the Bulletin of the American Physical Society. The paper will be presented at the virtual 2020 Annual Meeting of the APS Four Corners Section.
• Assistant professor of SICCS Igor Steinmacher co-authored the summary titled, “Summary of the 1^st ICSSP-ICGSE Joint Event” in ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes. The article discusses the inability of bringing together the International Conference on Software and System Processes and the International Conference on Global Software Engineering in a virtual format.
• Carol Chambers, professor of forestry and president of The Wildlife Society, participated in presentations and discussions at The Wildlife Society’s 2020 Annual Conference. She led a panel discussion, “Women of Wildlife in the Field,” was part of another panel titled, “Dismantling Systemic Racism in the Wildlife Profession” and conducted a virtual networking event to develop relationships among women.
• T. Mark Montoya, associate professor of ethnic studies, authored the chapter, “Navigating Institutional Borderlands: An Inside Perspective from the Outside” for the forthcoming volume of Amplified Voices, Intersecting Identities: First-Gen PhDs Navigating Institutional Power. The chapter focuses on the challenges and opportunities first-generation students of color face when navigating academia, particularly graduate students, and specifically centers border-crossing experiences of racism, survivor’s guilt and impostor syndrome as hierarchies of power in academia.
• William Crawford, academic director of the Program in Intensive English, was selected by the U.S. State Department for a position with the English Language Specialist Program, a two-day program focusing on internationalization and English as a medium of instruction in Brazil for the Association of Brazilian English Teachers. This program is an opportunity for leaders in the field of teaching English and speakers of other languages to enact meaningful and sustainable changes in the way that English is taught abroad.
• Kerry Thompson, chair of the Department of Anthropology, and Ora Marek-Martinez, executive director of the Native American Cultural Center and assistant professor of anthropology, co-authored the chapter, “Engaging Archaeology as Social Justice for Navajo Communities” to be published in the forthcoming book Trowels in the Trenches: Archaeology as Social Activism. The book will demonstrate the plethora of ways archaeology can be used to contest social injustice by presenting examples from the fields of critical race studies, cultural resource management, digital archaeology, environmental studies and heritage studies.
• Professor of anthropology Kelley Hays-Gilpin worked with Marit Munson of Trent University to publish the book, “Color in the Ancestral Pueblo Southwest.” The authors researched museum collections and more than a century’s worth of archaeological research to create the first systematic understanding of the many ways Ancestral Pueblo people chose specific colors through time and space to add meaning and visual appeal to their lives.
• Nataša Garić-Humphrey, lecturer of anthropology, published the article, “Negotiating “True” Politics: Intergenerational Dynamics During Social Uprising in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina” in Political and Legal Anthropology Review. The article analyzes the complex intergenerational dynamics of the 2014 uprising in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina.
• Michelle Parsons, assistant professor of anthropology, co-edited a special issue of the journal Transcultural Psychiatry titled, “Toward an anthropology of loneliness.” The issue includes an introduction and several articles that explore loneliness in Japan, Kenya, Mexico, North Africa, Palestine, Russia and the United States.
• Professor of forestry Richard Hofstetter, undergraduate student Brennan Copp and postdoc Ivan Lukic co-authored the article, “Acoustic noise of refrigerators promote increased growth rate of the gray mold Botrytis cinerea” published in the Journal of Food Safety. The article describes how sound can affect the growth of fungi and found that sounds produced by a refrigerator can increase the growth of fungus.
• Professor of biological sciences Catherine Propper, associate professor of anthropology Lisa Hardy and alumna Brittni Howard co-authored the article, “Role of Farmer Knowledge in Agroecosystem Science: Rice Farming and Amphibians in the Philippines” published in Human-Wildlife Interactions. The study used focus groups and interviews to engage 22 individuals involved in rice agriculture operations in Laguna, Philippines, to learn more about farmer perceptions and knowledge of amphibians in their rice fields.