There are a lot of great stories to tell about Mines these days. Here we share some top news; you can read many of these in more detail at newsroom.mines.edu.
Kirsten Volpi was welcomed back to Mines in July after serving two years as chief administrative officer for the United States Olympic Committee. Volpi, who served for four-and-a-half years as senior vice president for finance and administration at Mines (2007-2011), returned to campus to the roles of executive vice president for finance and administration, chief financial officer, and treasurer for the board of trustees.
Priscilla Nelson is to become the first ever woman to head the Department of Mining Engineering at Colorado School of Mines. Nelson, who joins Mines for the spring semester, was professor of civil and environmental engineering and provost at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. She was formerly a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and also spent 11 years at the National Science Foundation, where her experience includes senior advisor to the director. She takes over from Hugh Miller, who agreed to lead the mining department on an interim basis during the search.
Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Marcelo Simoes is one of three co-authors of the book,��Power Electronics for Renewable and Distributed Energy Systems.�
Marc Rubin, an electrical engineering and computer science graduate student, was selected as one of 25 winners in the 2013 Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) Video and Poster Competition with his entry, “Wireless Sensor Network Technology for Avalanche Monitoring.”
Physics Professor�Jeff Squier��84, MS �86 served as an�Abbe Scholar Professor at the Abbe School of Photonics�in Jena, Germany, during summer 2013.
A team led by graduate student�Lauren Aberle �13 was chosen for an honorable mention for its entry in the 2013 International Women’s Hackathon. The International Women’s Hackathon was a crowdsourcing event to empower young women leaders in computer science.
Chet Van Tyne received a token of appreciation from the Forging Industry Educational and Research Foundation Board for 25 years of outstanding service as the FIERF Professor. Mines has been working with FIERF since 1979.
Adele Tamboli, managing director of the Center for Revolutionary Solar Conversion, and Rueben Collins, associate director of the Renewable Energy Materials Research Science and Engineering Center and CRSP distinguished colleague, were part of a Colorado trade mission to Japan organized in conjunction with the inaugural Boeing 787 Dreamliner direct flight last June. Their principal activity involved stimulating research partnerships in energy science and technology between scientists and high tech companies in Japan and CRSP in Colorado. They executed a Memorandum of Understanding between CRSP and the University of Tokyo Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology.
Liberal Arts and International Studies faculty members�Jessica Smith Rolston and Juan Lucena were awarded a National Science Foundation grant for their project, �Invisible Innovators: How the knowledge and experiences of low-income and first-generation students (LIFGs) can contribute to U.S. engineering problem definition and solving.�
Warren Hamilton, distinguished senior scientist in the Department of Geophysics, recently published an invited review paper in the geoscience journal, �Tectonophysics,� rejecting the long-dogmatized standard model for evolution and internal behavior of the Earth and terrestrial planets, and proposing a drastically different new alternative.
Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering students swept the podium at the graduate student poster competition at the Rocky Mountain AVS Symposium. 1st:�Sanket Kelkar,�Modeling and Fabrication of Asymmetric Nanopores”; 2nd: Christopher Sentman,��Self-limiting Deposition of Pyrite Solar Absorbers”; 3rd: Daniel Meysing,��>14% Efficient CdTe Solar Cells Fabricated with Sputtered CdS:O.�
Professor Emeritus of Geology and Geological Engineering John Curtis was the featured speaker at the 2013 Energy Policy & Future of Passenger Transportation conference held in Oklahoma City in September. His presentation was titled, “U.S. Natural Gas Resources and Reserves: A View from the Potential Gas Committee.”
Chemical and Biological Engineering Professor John Dorgan has been awarded The Jim Hammar Memorial Award by the international BioEnvironmental Polymer Society. This is the highest professional award given by this society.
C.H. Green Professor of Exploration Geophysics Dave Hale�will be an SEG/AAPG Distinguished Lecturer in fall 2014.
Paul Constantine, the Ben L. Fryrear Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, is featured in a video produced by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics regarding social media and communicating science.
The Student Recreation Center hosted a tour to more than 130 campus recreation directors, facility operations professionals and other campus recreation professionals who were attending the 2013 National Intramural Recreational Sports Association Facilities Institute in Denver.
Rob Thompson has been named the assistant director of athletics/director of the Student Recreation Center. Rob has been at Mines for the past nine years as the director of the Outdoor Recreation Center.
Chemistry and Geochemistry Assistant Professor Jenifer Braley was selected to receive the Nuclear Forensics Junior Faculty Award by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Domestic Nuclear Detection Office.
Professor Keith Neeves and Department Head David Marr from the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering received National Institutes of Health funding to develop microbots to ablate blood clots in patients with acute ischemic stroke.
Professors Ning Wu and Keith Neeves from chemical and biological engineering and Professor Xiaolong Yin in the Petroleum Engineering Department were awarded a grant from the Department of Energy�s Nuclear Energy University Program to use physical and computer models to predict how radionuclides that escape from nuclear waste sites travel through the environment.
Keith Neeves�also recently received the �Educator of the Year� award from the�Colorado BioScience Association. His education program focuses on cardiovascular diagnostics and disease. He has developed several K-12 outreach activities, including one on controlled drug delivery that was piloted by more than 500 middle and high school students in Jefferson County Public Schools.
Kaitlyn Martin, a junior majoring in mechanical engineering, won a USRA Education Scholarship. The Universities Space Research Association Scholarship Award Program is an annual award program that provides college scholarships to outstanding students who have a career interest in the sciences or engineering with an emphasis on space research or space science education.
Erdal Ozkan, professor of petroleum engineering, received the Lester C. Uren Award of the Society of Petroleum Engineers during the SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition in New Orleans on October 1, 2013. Given annually since 1963, the Lester C. Uren Award is one of the top three International Technical Awards of the SPE, which recognizes distinguished achievement in the technology of petroleum engineering by a member who made the contribution before age 45. Ozkan began his professorial career at Istanbul Technical University in 1989. After serving as a research associate at TU during 1997-1998, he joined Mines in 1998. The author or coauthor of three books and more than 90 technical papers, his technical expertise includes reservoir engineering, modeling unsteady flows in porous media, pressure-transient analysis, horizontal and multilateral well technology, and unconventional oil and gas reservoirs.
The�Renewable Energy Materials Research Science and Engineering Center�(REMRSEC) held an open house last month to celebrate the opening of a new shared research facility. The facility is part of an effort to expand shared research space on campus to accommodate the increase of large-scale interdisciplinary work.
Chip Durfee, associate professor in the Department of Physics, has been elected Fellow of the Optical Society of America. OSA Fellows are selected based on their overall impact on optics, as gauged through factors such as specific scientific, engineering, and technological contributions, a record of significant publications or patents related to optics, technical leadership in the field, and service to OSA and the global optics community. This process is highly competitive, as the number of OSA Members recommended for election to Fellow each year is limited to less than 0.5 percent of the total OSA membership.
The Colorado School of Mines Material Advantage Chapter�received one of the �Chapters of Excellence� awards at the Material Science and Technology Conference October 27-31, 2013, in Montreal. The award is presented to chapters that have displayed exemplary success as an organization.
