homenews

Humans of the U: Ramón Barthelemy

January 2, 2024

“Ideas of social justice, inclusion and equity have always been at the forefront of my mind.

I’m a first-generation in an immigrant family and this has given me a perspective that most other people in physics don’t have. I noticed that there was a trend in who was in the field, with fewer underrepresented and minoritized students and faculty, and this trend had been confirmed by the data. This is something that caught my attention and I got really excited about how we can change this trend to make physics more inclusive. So, when I started my Ph.D. program, I actually switched from nuclear physics to physics education research and started pursuing this line of inquiry. The reason why this work is needed is that physics is incredibly challenged with representation and the experiences of individuals in the community.

I believe my presence adds to the field of physics scholarship. I don’t use deficit language and I don’t use comparisons when talking about marginalized groups. Making these comparisons is inequitable because you’re defining what is ‘normal’ in one group and saying that the other group should be compared to that normal. Instead, we should talk directly to the people being impacted and learn from their experiences to craft policy in order to make a change in the field.

One of the biggest findings that we’ve had is that inclusivity in physics is much more predictive of people staying in the field than exclusivity is predictive of people leaving. What that tells us is that inclusion is a more powerful experience than discrimination. When we think about the climate of physics, a neutral climate is not enough. We have to create an actively inclusive climate if we want to make a change in this field and make sure that everybody is fully included.

I would love to see a physics community that anybody can come to and participate in. I want them to be able to bring their background, their unique perspective and their full self to physics.”

– Ramón Barthelemy, assistant professor, Department of Physics & Astronomy

This story originally appeared in @TheU.

Humans of the U: Sadie Dunn

January 2, 2024

“I am currently majoring in atmospheric sciences. I just love weather. I’ve loved it since I was probably in kindergarten. So growing up, I always knew that was what I was going to study in college. When I was looking at colleges, I was kind of shocked that the University of Utah is the only school in Utah that offers an atmospheric sciences degree. So that’s how I ended up here.

The For Utah Scholarship has been an amazing opportunity for me because honestly, I would not have been able to afford college on my own. This scholarship offered me the amazing opportunity to come and study here in the department I want to be in.

I am from Chicago and I grew up with really severe summer storms in the Midwest, so I guess that’s what really fostered my love for weather. Then I moved to Utah when I was 13 and just kept loving weather. There’s a ton of snow out here and crazy windstorms which sparked my curiosity.

All throughout junior high and high school, I knew studying weather was my goal. So when I was a senior in high school, we had an internship class and I got to intern at ABC 4 news in their weather department, which was cool. That was definitely the moment when I was like, ‘This is real. I’m working towards this and this is the goal.’ So it’s really exciting to take this love I’ve had since I was little and turn it into a career.

While interning at a broadcast station was fun, it’s not something that interests me as a career. But my atmospheric sciences degree can take me a bunch of different places. It offers research opportunities with organizations like the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). You can also work with private organizations. There are serious meteorologists in every field, which I think is one of the coolest parts about this job.

I’m still kind of feeling out what I want to do. It’s a STEM major and it’s very math- and physics- and chemistry-heavy. I consider myself to be smart, but I am not a natural in those courses. So I don’t think research is something I will do. I am really passionate about climate change, so I’m looking more into the field of sustainability.

Since I grew up with a love of severe weather, I would also love to be able to get a career that helps with the effects of those disasters, because it’s hard with hurricanes and tornadoes. You can’t stop them. They are going to hit and destroy everything. So I would love to find ways to lessen the effects of those or find better ways to prepare the communities.”

—Sadie Dunn, recipient of the For Utah Scholarship

This story originally appeared in @TheU.

Remembering Geologist Hellmut Doelling

January 2, 2024

Geology alumnus and generous donor, Hellmut Hans Doelling, worked as a core laboratory curator, draftsman, and assistant geologist with the Utah Geological and Mineral Survey (UGMS) before returning to the U to earn his PhD in geology. 

He was born on 25 July 1930 in Richmond Hill, Queensborough, New York City, the only son of Otto Johannes Doelling and Emma Camilla Hartmann.  The family moved to Salt Lake City in 1943 and crossed “the plains” on a Greyhound bus in 5 days due to a 35 mph speed limit during WWII.

Doelling graduated from West High School in 1948, lettering in track and field. He attended the U from 1948 to 1950, then received a letter from Harry Truman and served in the U.S. Army from 1951 to 1953 during the Korean War, returning to the U in 1953 where he graduated with a B.S. in Geology. He was then called on a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint to the East German Mission, where he served in Neumünster, Brake/Weser, Uelzen, and Berlin, under Presidents Gregory and Robbins. Work experiences up to this time included fruit picker, farmhand, paper delivery boy, newspaper inserter, copy boy, and photo lab assistant (Salt Lake Telegram and Tribune).

After earning his PhD, Doelling first taught at Midwestern University in Wichita Falls, Texas, 1964 to 1966, keeping ties with the UGMS in the summertime and was later recruited as the first chief of the Energy and Minerals Section. In 1983 he became the first chief of the Geologic Mapping program, a position he held until 1995. He then continued as a senior geologist until his formal retirement in 2003. 

Highlights of his profession include the publication of more than 200 books, maps, and articles about the geology of Utah. He also served as president of the Utah Geological Association in 1990 and received the Governors Medal for Science and Technology in 1993.  He also did consulting work, mostly in the western states: in Colorado, Nevada, Arizona, Oregon, California, and New Mexico. He also worked in Arkansas, Mexico, and Canada. 

Doelling also did consulting work, mostly in the West. He also worked in Arkansas, Mexico, and Canada. A gifted musician on the accordion, piano, harmonium, and organ, he died 29 November 2023 in Centerville, Utah at the age of 93. He was born  survived by his wife, Gerda and their seven children.

The Doelling Endowed Scholarship  in the U’s Department of Geology & Geophysics, is named in his honor. 

Read Dr. Doelling’s obituary here. 

Presidential Scholar Award

January 2, 2024

Presidential Scholar Award

Associate Professor of biology Sophie Caron is a 2023 awardee. The University of Utah Presidential Scholar Award supports the work of exceptionally promising mid-career faculty in academic units across campus by providing $10,000 in funding each year for three years to the award winners.

 

In addition to Caron, an internationally prominent neuroscientist, other awardees include a top researcher in prosthetics, an expert in environmental health and public health challenges and a distinguished leader in the field of chronic diseases in vulnerable populations have been selected as the 2023 cohort of Presidential Scholars. The associate professors will receive this designation for three years.

The Presidential Scholar award supports the work of exceptionally promising mid-career faculty in academic units across campus by providing $10,000 in funding each year for three years to the award winners. The funds — made possible by support from a private donor — may be used to support scholarly, teaching and outreach activities. Up to four new Presidential Scholar Awards are made each year.

Former Mario Capecchi Endowed Chair, Caron uses cutting-edge techniques to tackle fundamental questions about perception. In order to understand how brains are built to learn, she uses the Drosophila mushroom body as a model system. She built an interdisciplinary research program by drawing on computational models, species-comparative studies and various anatomical, functional and behavioral techniques to elucidate the structural, functional and evolutionary pressures that shape the mushroom’s learning function. For her work, Caron has received an NSF CAREER award and two NIH R01 awards, totaling $4.5 million. In addition to her research, Caron designed and regularly teaches the popular cellular neurobiology class (BIOL 3240) which regularly attracts nearly 100 enrollments per semester. Her work has been described as “stunning” and “breathtaking” by colleagues at outside institutions.

In addition to Caron, the 2023 winners include Nancy Allen, associate professor in the College of Nursing; Tommaso Lenzi, associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering in the John and Marcia Price College of Engineering; and Neng Wan, associate professor in the Department of Geography in the College of Social and Behavioral Science.

“These educators represent the cutting-edge work on this campus that can impact our world for the better,” said Mitzi Montoya, senior vice president for academic affairs. “I’m grateful for their contributions and pleased to recognize their research.”

 

Read the full article about all four awardees in @TheU. 

Holiday Greetings from Dean Trapa

December 20, 2023

HOLIDAY GREETINGS FROM DEAN TRAPA

 

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

As the fall semester draws to a close, I want to take a moment to wish you and your loved ones a happy and restful holiday season.  This time of year invites reflection on all that we have to be thankful for.

Here at the College of Science, I am grateful to our exceptional students, faculty and staff, whose passion for discovery and commitment to excellence make the College a vibrant place of learning and innovation.   I also want to thank our alumni and donors for their steadfast support, making possible transformative educational opportunities and enabling us to pioneer new research directions.  I am deeply grateful for all of you and for your involvement and investment in our mission.

Warmest thoughts and best wishes for a joyful holiday season and a wonderful New Year!

Sincerely,


Dean Peter Trapa
College of Science
University of Utah

Lightning, camera, gamma ray!

December 18, 2023

lightning, camera, gamma ray!

In September 2021, an unprecedented thunderstorm blew across Utah’s West Desert. Lightning from this storm produced at least six gamma ray flashes that beamed downward to Earth’s surface and activated detectors at the University of Utah-led Telescope Array. The storm was noteworthy on its own—the array usually clocks one or two of the lightning-triggered gamma rays per year—but recent upgrades led to a new observation by the Telescope Array scientists and their lightning collaborators.

 

“The ability of the Telescope Array Surface Detector to detect downward TGFs is a great example of serendipity in science,” said John Belz, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Utah and co-author of the study. “The TASD was designed to do astroparticle physics, by studying the particle showers produced by energetic atomic nuclei from deep space. Purely by happenchance, the astroparticle showers share many properties—including energy, duration, and size—with the gamma ray showers known as downward TGFs. So in a sense, we are able to operate two groundbreaking science facilities for the price of one.”

Telescope Array collaborators from the University of Utah, Loyola University Chicago, the Langmuir Laboratory for Atmospheric Research at New Mexico Tech and the National Institute for Space Research-Brazil (INPE), have installed a suite of lighting instrumentation to the existing Telescope Array, a ground-based grid of surface detectors primarily designed to observe ultra-high energy cosmic rays.

Read the full article by Lisa Potter in @TheU. 

PHOTO CREDIT: RASHA ABBASI Lightning captured with the highspeed camera at 40,000 frames per second.

Snowflakes Falling

December 18, 2023

The science behind snowflakes

In a study that could enhance weather forecasting, Utah researchers discover that how snowflakes move is astonishingly predictable.

 

Tim Garrett

Tim Garrett has devoted his scientific career to characterizing snowflakes, the protean particles of ice that form in clouds and dramatically change as they fall to Earth.

Now the University of Utah atmospheric scientist is unlocking the mystery of how snowflakes move in response to air turbulence that accompanies snowfall using novel instrumentation developed on campus. And after analyzing more than half a million snowflakes, what his team has discovered has left him astonished.

Rather than something incomprehensibly complicated, predicting how snowflakes move proved to be surprisingly simple, they found.

“How snowflakes fall has attracted a lot of interest for many decades because it is a critical parameter for predicting weather and climate change,” Garrett said. “This is related to the speed of the water cycle. How fast moisture falls out of the sky determines the lifetime of storms.”

“Letters sent from Heaven”

The famed Japanese physicist Ukichiro Nakaya termed snow crystals “letters sent from heaven” because their delicate structures carry information about temperature and humidity fluctuations in the clouds where crystal basal and prism facets competed for water vapor deposition.

While every snowflake is believed to be unique, how these frosty particles fall through the air—as they accelerate, drift and swirl—follows patterns, according to new research by Garrett and colleagues in the College of Engineering. Snowflake movement has important implications for weather forecasting and climate change, even in the tropics.

“Most precipitation starts as snow. How the question of how fast it falls affects predictions of where on the ground precipitation lands, and how long clouds last to reflect radiation to outer space,” Garrett said. “It can even affect forecasts of a hurricane trajectory.”

Read the full article by Brian Maffly in @TheU.
Read additional coverage of this article in Earth.com  and Science News.

Cosmic Ray on SciFri

December 18, 2023

Sci Fri: Cosmic Ray Burst

Around 30 years ago, scientists in Utah were monitoring the skies for cosmic rays when they detected a surprising particle. It struck the atmosphere with much more energy than they had previously seen—enough energy to cause the researchers to dub it the “Oh My God Particle.”

 

John N. Matthews of the U's Department of Astronomy and Physics, standing beside large telescope mirrors at the Telescope Array Project's florescence detector station just outside the Drum Mountains, Millard County, Utah. Photo by Joe Bauman, May 25, 2013. Banner Photo above: The surface detector array of the Telescope Array experiment, deployed by helicopter. Credit: Institute For Cosmic Ray Research, University Of Tokyo

Over the years, a collaboration of researchers in Utah and Japan has detected other powerful rays—about 30 a year—but none that rival the OMG. In 2021, however, a second particle was detected. It was only slightly less powerful than OMG, but still many times more powerful than can be created on Earth. That 2021 particle was named “Amaterasu,” after a sun goddess from the Japanese Shinto religion. The researchers described their observations in a recent issue of the journal Science.

The researchers believe the particle must have come from relatively nearby, cosmically speaking, as otherwise it would likely have collided with something in space and lost its energy. However, when they tried to trace the particle back to its origin in space, they were unsuccessful. Both the OMG particle and the new Amaterasu particle seem to have come from empty regions of space, with no violent events or massive structures to create them.

Dr. John Matthews, a research professor in physics and astronomy and manager of the Cosmic Ray Physics Program at the University of Utah, joins Ira to talk about cosmic rays, how they’re detected, and the challenges of finding the origin of particles like Amaterasu.

Listen to the podcast here.

Revisiting the Coast Salish Woolly Dog

December 15, 2023

Revisiting the Coast Salish Woolly Dog

Researchers and Coast Salish people are analyzing a 160-year-old Indigenous dog pelt in the Smithsonian’s collection to pinpoint the origin and sudden disappearance of the culturally significant Coast Salish Woolly Dog.

 

Chris Stantis. Banner photo above: The reconstructed woolly dog shown at scale with Arctic dogs and spitz breeds in the background to compare scale and appearance; the portrayal does not imply a genetic relationship. Credit: Karen Carr.

Researchers from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History led a new analysis that sheds light on the ancestry and genetics of woolly dogs, a now extinct breed of dog that was a fixture of Indigenous Coast Salishcommunities in the Pacific Northwest for millennia. A team of researchers analyzed genetic clues preserved in the pelt of “Mutton,” the only known woolly dog fleece in the world, to pinpoint the genes responsible for their highly sought-after woolly fur.

The study’s findings, published Dec. 14, in the journal Science, include interviews contributed by several Coast Salish co-authors, including Elders, Knowledge Keepers and Master Weavers, who provided crucial context about the role woolly dogs played in Coast Salish society.

“This was one of the most exciting projects in my career as an archeologist and an isotopes expert because of the way that we were able to weave together these different types of knowledge,” said Chris Stantis, postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Geology & Geophysics at the University of Utah and co-author of the study.  “To work with geneticists, historians, and Indigenous Knowledge Keepers just makes better research to bring it all together.”

Read the full article by Lisa Potter in @TheU. 

2023 Catalyst Magazine

December 13, 2023

2023 Catalyst Magazine

 

Catalyst is the official magazine of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Utah


Read the full issue here

Dear Friends of Chemistry:

It has been a while since we published our last issue of the Catalyst. Many things have changed since then–we have new colleagues, lost some of our friends, weathered the complexity of the pandemic, and continued to build the department. What has remained the same is the underlying passion, drive, and excellence that I observe day to day in our faculty, staff, graduate and undergraduate students, and postdoctoral researchers. I see this while advising and mentoring my own research team and working with my colleagues and our staff to address challenges.

Perhaps the clearest view of our culture was on display in October as we recognized our four 2023 Distinguished Alumni Awardees

(who will be highlighted in detail in the next issue!). Their message to our current faculty and students was the same: you are providing and receiving an outstanding education that will allow you to lead the next generation of scientists, managers, and students. Their message was inspiring and a grand reminder of why we do what we do every day.

In this issue we feature the culture of our department and bring you up to date on several highlights from the last two years. This includes some descriptions of our successful alumni, including the 2020 Distinguished Alumni–Rik Tykwinski, Carrie Wager, and Raymond Price. In addition, a previous Chemistry Distinguished Alumnus, Clifton Sanders, has been recognized in several Universitywide honors, including the 2023 U

Distinguished Alumni Award and the 2023 Hugo Rossi Lectureship. Finally, we do a deep dive into one of our more recent graduates, Rory “Ziggy” Uibel and his adventures in growing a highly successful local instrument company.

The issue also highlights faculty and students who have received prominent recognition and have had exciting research accomplishments. While there are many to acknowledge, I would like to give a shout-out to Cindy Burrows (Pauling Medal), Valeria Molinero (Irving Langmuir Award and induction into the National Academy of Sciences), Michael Morse (Distinguished Professorship), and Luisa Whittaker -Brooks (U Presidential Scholar, ACS-WCC 2024 Rising Star Award, and MRS Outstanding Early Career Investigator Award). It is always rewarding to see our colleagues honored for their excellence!

On a sad note, we lost several of our former colleagues, including Laya Kesner, Frank Harris, and Wes Bentrude. I was personally close with Wes as he retired soon after I arrived but remained present for several years while I was building my program. He was such a kind and giving person with an easy smile and great sense of humor. I will also note that his research on understanding the reactivity of unusual radicals has circled into the mainstream many years after his initial publications. The organic chemistry community is utilizing his insights as the use of radicals has had a renaissance in recent years.

As a final note, this is my last year as department chair. This has been a demanding job, and I look forward to passing the reins to my successor. However, I can say with all honesty that working with such an incredible group of people has been a pleasure. The culture of our department–collaboration, excellence in education and science, and a good sense of humor–has been a centering force through the challenges encountered.

Sincerely,

 


Chair Matt Sigman

Read the full issue here