Kudos to these faculty, staff and programs
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- Northern Arizona University has retained its top 5 percent ranking in the 2021-22 Center for World University Rankings (CWUR). CWUR is the largest academic ranking system of global universities, evaluating 20,000 institutions.
- Paul Keim, executive director of the Pathogen and Microbiome Institute, was quoted in the podcast, “Slow Burn: The Road to the Iraq War” published by Slate. The episode discussed the anthrax attacks of 2001.
- Five NAU faculty were ranked on The Reuters Hot List. The list was built from a system that ranked 1,000 climate academics by how influential they were on climate change. NAU was represented by the following individuals:
- Scott Goetz, professor in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems (SICCS)
- Kevin Gurney, professor of SICCS
- Yiqi Luo, professor of biological sciences
- Ted Schuur, professor of biological sciences
- Robert Anderson, professor in the School of Earth and Sustainability
- Archaeologist and lab adviser Leszek Pawlowicz and anthropology professor Chris Downum co-authored the article, “Applications of deep learning to decorated ceramic typology and classification: A case study using Tusayan White Ware from Northeast Arizona” published in the Journal of Archaeological Science. The study and continuing work of the authors is focused on sorting thousands of ancient pottery designs into stylistic categories using machine learning called Convolutional Neural Networks, a computerized method that emulates the thought processes of the human mind analyzing visual information.
- Chun-Hsing (Jun) Ho, associate professor in the Department of Civil Engineering, Construction Management, and Environmental Engineering, co-authored the article, “Crushed rocks stabilized with organosilane and lignosulfonate in pavement unbound layers: Repeated load triaxial tests” published in Metrics. The study assessed the beneficial effects of the additives organosilane and lignosulfonate on rock used to build highways by performing repeated load triaxial tests.
- Drew Peltier, postdoctoral scholar with the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society, and Regents’ professor Andrew Richardson co-authored the article, “Quantifying whole tree non-structural carbon dynamics under long-term experimental drought using radiocarbon” published in EGU General Assembly 2021. The study used radiocarbon to quantify the age of non-structural carbon (NSC) stored and used by piñon pine trees exposed to drought stress, which will allow an inference on storage history and alterations of NSC pools caused by drought.
- Assistant professor of mechanical engineering Amirhossein Arzani co-authored the article, “Uncovering near-wall blood flow from sparse data with physics-informed neural networks” published in Fluid Dynamics. The study evaluates how physics-informed neural networks could be used to improve wall shear stress quantification in diseased arterial flows.
- Assistant research professor Logan Berner, postdoctoral research scholar Richard Massey and Goetz co-authored the article, “Landsat tundra greenness and summer air temperatures, Arctic tundra biome” in Arctic Data Center. The study provides a dataset on annual tundra greenness and summer air temperatures from 1985 to 2016 across the Arctic tundra biome.
- Gurney and postdoctoral scholars Bhaskar Mitra, Geoffrey Roest, Pawlok Dass, and Yang Song co-authored the article, “United States fossil fuel carbon dioxide emissions and the COVID-19 pandemic: the implications of near-real-time fuel consumption data” forthcoming in Environmental Research Letters. The study reports on U.S. fossil fuel carbon dioxide emissions when lockdowns were put in place for many states and after lockdowns were lifted.