Kudos to these faculty, staff, students and programs
Do you have a spotlight item to share with the NAU community?
E-mail your announcements to Inside@nau.edu, or use our online submission form.
- Stephani Williams, associate chair in the Department of Criminology & Criminal Justice, was elected vice president for the Society for the Study of Social Problems. This is a leading professional organization in the field, and Williams’ signals her contributions to the field and to addressing social problems nationally.
- Muhittin Cavusoglu, an assistant professor in the School of Hotel and Restaurant Management, and Burak Turten, a visiting HRM scholar from Turkey, won the International Hospitality Information Technology Association’s Best Research Methods Award for their article, “The Use of Neural Text to Speech Technology in Hotel Promotional Videos.” The award was presented at the 29th annual iHITA Research Conference in Orlando in June.
- John Heick, program director of NAU’s Doctor of Physical Therapy program at the Phoenix Bioscience Core, achieved national recognition through completion of the American Physical Therapy Association Fellowship in Higher Education last week in Washington, D.C.
- Josh Emery, a professor in the Department of Astronomy and Planetary Sciences (DAPS), and Ph.D. student Lucas McClure co-authored a new paper in Planetary Science Journal. The paper examines a large survey of new spectra, along with previously published spectra, of a divide in the 3-μm spectral properties of the low-albedo asteroid population.
- DAPS data scientist Kezman Saboi is a co-author on a paper that presents a uniform retrieval analysis of the spectra of a sample of 50 T dwarfs. This analysis more than quadruples the sample of T dwarfs with retrieved temperature profiles and abundances.
- Fourth-year Ph.D. student Andy López-Oquendo authored his first first-author paper, along with co-authors David Trilling, a DAPS professor, and alumni Annika Gustafsson and Colin Orion Chandler. The article, “Physical Characterization of 2015 JD1: A Possibly Inhomogenous Near-Earth Asteroid,” looked at the physical characterizations of a potentially hazardous asteroid.
- For the first time in program history, the NAU volleyball team earned Honor Roll distinction by the American Volleyball Coaches Association (AVCA) following a spectacular 2021-22 academic year. Compiling a qualifying cumulative grade point average of 3.72, the Lumberjacks were among an elite group of Division I women’s volleyball programs across the country. Furthermore, NAU also garnered the USMC/AVCA Team Academic Award for the 10th time in program history, and fourth in the last five years.