In the Spotlight: Feb. 24, 2012

Kudos to these faculty, staff and students

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

E-mail your announcements to Inside@nau.edu.

  • Paul Beier, professor of conservation biology in NAU’s School of Forestry and president of the Society for Conservation Biology, appeared on two Auckland, New Zealand, television news segments in December during the society’s International Congress of Conservation Biology. Beier appeared on TVNZ discussing biodiversity, the conference and what has been done in 25 years of conservation work. He also appeared on TV3 to talk about conservation and New Zealand politics.
  • Twenty seniors from the Orme School in Orme, Ariz., toured sustainability features on the NAU campus last week and met with undergraduate and graduate engineering students to learn about their research. The students are performing a senior capstone project at Orme to design a sustainable building for their school and learned about NAU’s renewable energy installations, including an off-grid teaching lab, a Skystream turbine at the Applied Research and Development building and photovoltaic and solar thermal installations on several LEED-certified buildings on campus. They also saw campus energy and transportation efficiency improvements and dined at the Green Scene Café, a student-led sustainability initiative in the Health and Learning Center. The Orme School is a partner in the Arizona Wind for Schools project, which installed a 2.4-kilowatt-hour wind turbine on the Orme campus and taught wind-energy lessons and activities in each of the school’s science classes.
  • German ClubAs part of Discover Languages Month, members of the German Club, along with German faculty and German study abroad students, recently posed in front of a piece of the Berlin Wall on display at NAU. Discover Languages Month is a national campaign developed by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages to raise awareness about the cognitive, academic, social, cultural and economic benefits that language learning provides. Find out what the research shows about the benefits of language learning.