In the Spotlight: April 17, 2015

Kudos to these faculty, staff and students

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  • BEA_StudentWinners[1]
    School of Communication students Xavier Rangel and Holly Switay pose with their award received at the Broadcast Education Association conference.
    Four undergraduates in the School of Communication received awards at the Broadcast Education Association conference in Las Vegas. Xavier RangelHolly Switay and David Pearson took first-place in the TV Sports Story category for “Logging Sports” and Emani Payne won an Honorable Mention in the TV Hard News Reporting category for “Ebola Potentially Reaches Arizona.” Both features were broadcast on NAZ Today, a live, nightly newscast produced in the School of Communication.
  • Two faculty members from the School of Communication were presenters and moderators at the annual conference of the Western Social Science Association in Portland, Ore., April 8-11. Jonathan L. Torn, associate professor of creative media and film, presented, “If You Build It, Will They Come? Wandering Through Academic Ghost Towns on Second Life” and moderated the panel “Teaching the Communication Classroom.” Martin D. Sommerness, professor of journalism, presented,”Where Deans Fear to Tread: Lessons Learned from Deploying Adaptive Learning Technologies in the Basic Grammar, Introductory Survey and Senior Law Courses” and moderated “Advancement of Communication Technology: Challenges or Opportunities.”
  • Tobias Kreidl, academic computing team lead in Information Technology Services, will participate in a case study by Citrix, Inc., regarding the virtualization of servers and clients within various areas of NAU’s ITS department. The push towards both server and client virtualization embraces NAU’s energy philosophy while providing more efficient management, flexibility and high-availability.
  • Northern Arizona University’s Center for Science Teaching and Learning and Geospatial Research and Information Laboratory have been selected to receive a Special Achievement in GIS award at the 2015 Esri User Conference. The award is given to user sites around the world to recognize outstanding work with GIS technology.
  • Mark Montoya, ethnic studies lecturer, presented, “Illegal- and Other- Americans: Negotiating the Hyphen in Arizona,” at the annual meeting of the Association for Borderlands Studies in Portland.
  • Two School of Forestry faculty members were recently featured in Forestry Source, the monthly news magazine published by the Society of American Foresters. In March, assistant professor Andrew Sánchez Meador discussed the impacts of diameter caps on forest health and wildfire risk reduction. In April, a talk by executive director James Allen on the subject of trends in forestry education was highlighted.