In the Student Spotlight: April 30, 2021

Kudos to these students

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  • The NAU golf team finished No. 2 in the Big Sky Championship, the highest they have placed at a conference tournament in the last six years. Freshman Ekaterina Malakhova finished individually in a four-way tie for No. 2, while graduate student Klara Kucharova tied for No. 5. Both student-athletes were named to the All-Tournament Team.
  • The NAU Speech and Debate team competed in The Regents’ Cup, where students from the three Arizona universities debated the merits of free speech through Oxford-style debate or persuasive storytelling. Two student teams of Whitney Holeva-Eklund and Alisha LaBuda, and Cameron Baird and Alyssa Layne, won Round 1 of the Oxford debate. Baird and Layne advanced to the quarter finals. In the persuasive storytelling rounds, Riley Smelkinson was No. 2 and Marjorie Nguyen was No. 3.
  • Junior football player Anthony Sweeney and senior runner Jessa Hanson earned the NAU Golden Eagle Top Male and Female Scholar-Athlete Award. First presented in 1979, the award honors Lumberjacks who hold a cumulative GPA of 3.0 or higher, and who have made significant contributions in athletics as well as in the classroom.
  • Two students presented work at the Annual Convention of the Western Psychological Association. Graduate student Gabrielle Burchett presented, “Concussion: Quantitative Electroencephalogram and the Comparison with Established Diagnostic Measures” and senior undergraduate student Scott Janetsky presented, “Compassion in the Cartesian Theatre: Associations Between Visual Images and Compassionate Responses.” Both students study with psychology professor Larry Stevens.
  • Graduate student Viet-Anh Le and assistant professor Truong Nghiem, from the School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems, had their article, “A Receding Horizon Approach for Simultaneous Active Learning and Control using Gaussian Processes,” accepted for publication at the 2021 IEEE Conference on Control Technology and Applications. The study proposes a receding horizon active learning and control problem for dynamical systems in which Gaussian Processes are utilized to model the system dynamics.
  • David Lemcke, sophomore in civil and environmental engineering, was selected as the Pacific Southwest Region 9 PSR UTC Undergraduate of the Year during the Pacific Southwest Region 9 Annual Congress. Lemcke also presented on work he had been studying as a researcher for assistant professor Brendan Russo and professor Edward Smaglik from the Department of Civil Engineering, Construction Management, and Environmental Engineering.