In the Spotlight: June 2026
Kudos to these faculty, staff and programs.
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- Recent philosophy, politics and law graduate Ethan Ward was awarded a Fulbright to study security and diplomacy at Tel Aviv University. Before graduating this spring, Ward was a peer mentor in the Honors College and an Honors Ambassador. He was the president of Mock Trial club and the founder of the Pickleball Club at NAU. Read more about his time at NAU and his career aspirations on the NAU Foundation website.
- NAU’s Ecological Restoration Institute received the Interactive Ingenuity award at the 2026 Esri Federal GIS Conference, a national recognition for TWIG, a wildfire mapping tool developed in partnership with NAU’s sister institutes in Colorado and New Mexico.
- David Trilling, chair of the Department of Astronomy and Planetary Science, co-authored the article “Taxonomic Distribution of the Small Near-Earth Asteroid Population” recently published in The Planetary Science Journal. His other publication, “You Only Stack Once (YOSO): A Motion-Filtered, Deep-Learning Framework for Detecting Faint Moving Sources” was accepted by the Astronomical Society Journal.
- Gerard van Belle, research professor in the Department of Astronomy and Planetary Science, participated in the Flagstaff Leadership Program’s Science Leadership Education Day hosted by USGS, presenting to groups on the business of science for the fourth consecutive year.
- The article “Triaxial shapes and densities of G!kún||’hòmdímà, Haumea, and Varda from stellar occultations” by Will Grundy, research professor in the Department of Astronomy and Planetary Science, was accepted for publication by the Astronomical Society Journal.