Kudos to these faculty, staff, students and programs
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- The Zeta Omicron Chapter of the Sigma Chi fraternity organized a call-a-thon event that raised $58,165 for the Huntsman Cancer Institute in Salt Lake City, Utah. This was the first event the chapter held for their philanthropy week, which features a variety of fundraising initiatives and activities.
- Aliandrea Upshaw was named the Big Sky’s Women’s Track Athlete of the Week following her school record-breaking 10,000-meter performance at the Stanford Invitational with a time of 32:53.65.
- The NAU men’s track & field team was named the Big Sky Commissioner’s Team of the Month following its fourth-place finish at the NCAA Indoor Track & Field National Championships, where it scored 31 points, the most scored by an NAU team in school history.
- A team of six NAU nutrition and foods students—Mariah Pierre, Allison Willett-Pishkin, Emily Houle Breanna Hisquierdo, Lanna Fisk and Gabby Siros—competed against students from dietetics programs at UArizona, ASU and GCU at a trivia-style competition in Phoenix. NAU was the only team to win each of its matches and took home the Arizona Nutrition College Bowl Trophy. NAU will host the tournament in 2025.
- Students Josh Perez, Jozie Ashleson, Jami Smith, Nylee Zale, Hailey Chamberlain, Bailyn Arkin, Aubrey Michels and Lauren Valentine in the Department of Physician Assistant Studies won the state Challenge Bowl at the Arizona State Association of Physician Assistants Conference.
- Samuel Navarro-Meza, David Trilling and Michael Mommert co-authored the paper “Taxonomy of Subkilometer Near-Earth Objects from Multiwavelength Photometry with RATIR.” The research discusses 238 near-Earth objects observed through a 1.5m robotic telescope at San Pedro Martir’s National Observatory in Mexico.
- Will Oldroyd and Will Grundy co-authored “Beyond Point Masses. III. Detecting Haumea’s Nonspherical Gravitational Field,” which discussed satellite orbits and interactions with the dwarf planet Haumea’s gravitational field.
- Colin Chandler, Will Oldroyd, Chad Trujillo, Will Burris, Jay Kueny, Kennedy Farrell and Jarod DeSpain co-authored four papers: “Cometary Activity Discovered on Vacationing Centaur 2019 OE31,” “New Active Jupiter Family Comet 2008 QZ44: a Discovery with Citizen Science,” “Mars-Crossing Minor Planet 2018 VL10: a Jupiter-family Comet Discovery via Citizen Science,” and “Activity Discovered on Mars-Crossing Jupiter Family Comet 2018 OR by Citizen Scientist.” Chandler was firstauthor for the first three articles and Farrell made her first-author debut with the latter. The papers discuss comet discoveries made through the Active Asteroids citizen science program in partnership with NASA.
- Recent doctoral degree graduate Oriel Humes, professor Cristina Thomas and postdoctoral scholar Lauren McGraw co-authored “The Distribution of Highly Red-sloped Asteroids in the Middle and Outer Main Belt.” The researchers used the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility and the Lowell Discovery Telescope to survey the slopes of asteroids orbiting Jupiter.
- Assistant research professor Jean-François Smekens co-authored “SO2 emission rates and incorporation into the air pollution dispersion forecast during the 2021 eruption of Fagradalsfjall, Iceland,” a recently published article that discusses research findings on gas emissions during the first Icelandic eruption on the Reykjanes peninsula.