Kudos to these faculty, staff and programs.
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- Fred DeMicco, professor in the School of Hotel and Restaurant Management, co-planned and was a keynote speaker at The Medical Tourism and Hospitality Bridging Healthcare (H2H) Seminar held at the Fondazione Campus in Lucca, Italy, on May 24. The seminar covered a variety of topics related to the future of medical tourism, including the importance of patient-centric healthcare, the role of marketing in medical tourism and innovations in healthcare models.
- Astronomy and planetary science graduate student Andy Lopez-Oquendo joined associate professor Mark J. Loeffler and professor David E. Trilling, both in the Department of Astronomy and Planetary Science (DAPS), to publish “Laser Irradiation of Carbonaceous Chondrite Simulants: Space-weathering Implications for C-complex Asteroids” in The Planetary Science Journal. In the paper, the team performed laser irradiation experiments to simulate the effects of space weathering on rocks similar to those found on certain asteroids.
- Associate computer science professor Michael Gowanlock, Trilling, recent graduate Daniel Kramer, doctoral student Maria Chernyavskaya and former postdoctoral scholar Andrew McNeill co-authored “The Solar System Notification Alert Processing System (SNAPS): Asteroid Population Outlier Detection,” which uses the SNAPShot1 dataset to identify outlier asteroids in the solar system.
- Trilling also presented at the recent “Hotwiring the Transient Universe VII” conference in Toronto on May 14 and the “Rare Gems in Big Data” conference in Tucson on May 21, covering exoplanets and SNAPS data. Chernyavskaya also presented at the latter, discussing SNAPS data outliers.
- NAU/NASA Space Grant AIMER Program coordinator Mary Lara and Ed Anderson, the DAPS laboratory and research facility administration manager, played substantial roles in DeMiguel Elementary School’s first Space Week from May 6-10, an event designed to get the elementary school’s students and faculty involved in space exploration and astronomy. As the director of the on-site Walker Observatory, Lara led tours of the facility and helped students witness sun flares using the observatory’s 14-inch Newtonian reflector telescope.
- The 2024 Center for World University Rankings (CWUR) placed NAU in the top 4% of institutions worldwide. These rankings are awarded based on publicly available data collected by CWUR.