Spotlight

In the Spotlight: June 27 to July 1, 2022

Kudos to these faculty, staff, students and programs. 

Do you have a spotlight item to share with the NAU community? 

E-mail your announcements to Inside@nau.edu, or use our online submission form. 

  • Rising junior Ekaterina Malakhova rose back to the top at the Russian Amateur Championship, posting her fourth career win at the tournament on Friday with a four-round score of 1-over par 289. NAU was well represented at the Russian Amateur Championships, placing three golfers in the top five overall with graduate student Aleksandra Chekalina and incoming freshman Nina Lukyanenko tying for third and fifth respectively. 
  • NAU Communications and NAU Social won Gold awards at the 2022 CASE Gold Circle of Excellence awards. Communications manager Carly Banks and assistant manager McKenzie McLoughlin were recognized for the Fit it in a Minute on Sara Maltinsky’s research, and social media manager Maria Decabooter and senior coordinator Austin Young won for the campaign Let’s Axe Covid Together. The Circle of Excellence Awards celebrates the creative, resourceful and innovative ways advancement professionals around the globe champion their institutions’ success. 
  • School of Forestry undergraduate students Addie Jones, Steven Longbons, Cole Brant and Austin Cash and grad students Noah Haarmann and Scott Franz from the Student Association for Fire Ecology Club went to Georgia to learn how to burn safely. 
  • Regents’ professor Yiqi Luo and research scientist Lifen Jiang of the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society are part of an international team that published the paper, “Matrix approach to unify land carbon cycle models,” in the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Science this week. The result of 10 years developing the approach, Luo and the team describe how the matrix framework brings simplicity and consistency to the complex models that predict earth’s future climate and ecosystem changes, accelerates model spin-up time, and offers a way to integrate big data sets and improve model accuracy.
  • Students in history professor Michael Amundson’s public history class created online tours of several historical sites throughout the Intermountain West as part of the Intermountain Histories project. The collaborative projects features carefully researched histories developed by students and professors from throughout the region.