UMM Sci & Math Discipline News

Tracey Anderson has spent the past year exploring a new area of research. "I think it better fits our academic schedule and the aquatic resources that are available in our area," she explains.

"I am looking at the benthic (bottom) fauna that inhibits local lakes and potholes during the winter. (Yes, you read that right, winter). This started out as a bit of an exploratory whim when Nic Buer, Josh Gieffer, and Kendrick Novak convinced me that they wanted to so some research a few winters ago. I'd never done anything like that, and had no idea what we'd fine, but indeed we were able to collect aquatic insect larvae from the bottom sediments. Oh, by the way we did have to cut through the ice in order to collect our samples, but that was half the fun.

"Thankfully, I received a small research grant from the Dean and now the Biology Discipline has a gas-powered ice auger! Last winter I worked with Missy Rynerson and Andrew Windschitl. We attempted to determine how many samples were needed in order to confidently characterize the benthic community in Page Lake, a small lake outside of Hancock, MN. (The answer seems to be 10 samples, by the way.) Missy and Andrew presented their results at the Undergraduate Research Symposium. I hope to continue this research in other surrounding lakes in the future."

Tracey still teaches Freshwater and Entomology in alternate fall semesters. She reports that last year's entomology class turned out to be maniac insect collectors.

"Truly no insect was safe in Stevens County until collections were turned in in December!" she laughs. "Indeed we had a blast and I continue to enjoy seeing students turn into accomplished entomologists by the end of the semester. This fall I am teaching Freshwater Biology and yet again look forward to analyzing the macroinvertebrate community in the Pomme de Terre River. I am adding a couple of new field trips this year, including a trip to eastern South Dakota where we hope to see some spring-fed, forested streams that flow from the Coteau des Prairies."

Tracey also continues to teach a First Year Seminar on insects and human society. Anyone who can attend the FYS Jamboree can most likely sample edible bug options as have been offered in previous years.

In addition to teaching, Tracey keeps busy with other campus and University-wide responsibilities. This year she is the sole faculty Chair of the FYS program.

"This is kind of like the academic version of the "ball-boy" on a basketball team, but does have its rewards as well," Tracey says. "I am also serving as the NCAA Faculty Athletic Representative, which involves a fair amount of paperwork and a chance to interact with the Cougar athletic teams. I also get down to the Twin Cities campus to serve on a committee. This is really good, important work, but also makes me happy to be on the UMM Campus!!!"

In spite of being busy with academic activities, Tracey reports that she is getting better at cultivating off-campus interests. She is still very involved with the local Humane Society (often working as a county dog-catcher!) She has also become a motorcycle enthusiast.

"My bike is much bigger and faster than Gooch's and I've really enjoyed the few road trips I've taken recently," she says.

Van Gooch continues to teach Cell Biology and the "hide the snake in the shirt" trick never grows old! And the 30-year-old drinking duck continues to drink. Van is the UROP coordinator, a program that continues to thrive. Van is looking toward phased retirement with a full load for 2007-2008, 75% 2008-2009 and 25% 2009-2010.

Van continues to involve students heavily in his circadian rhythm research with UROPS, Directed Studies and MAPS. The discovery of putting a synthesized firefly gene into Neurospora will finally be published as the cover article in the Jan 2008 issue of Eukaryotic Cell. The entire Neurospora community is abuzz with this discovery. Two UMM students (Julie Fox and Melissa Touroutoutoudis) will be included as authors and three more in the acknowledgements (Nick Wohlner, Judy Olson and Brianna Johnson). At least two other papers are in progress from this work.

Dave Hoppe says "so long" - he's retiring at the end of spring semester, 2008. Sorry, you won't be hearing any more good frog stories (unless his lucky replacement happens also to be a herpetologist.) The biology discipline is searching for a vertebrate-oriented biologist, who could be an ichthyologist, ornithologist, or mammalogist - or maybe even another herper!

Dave plans to pursue much more ichthyology himself, especially the lure and bait preferences of walleyes and largemouth bass. He will also be doing ecological consulting for lake associations, attorneys, etc. faced with unwise lakeshore developments.

Margaret Kuchenreuther received a Faculty Research Enhancement Fund grant to provide seed money for a project entitled, "The phylogeography of North American Aconitum species."

"This project grows out of my interest in Aconitum noveboracense (northern monkshood), a rare, herbaceous perennial that is federally classified as a threatened species under the U.S. Endangered Species Act," Margaret explains. "It may soon lose federal protection because a recent taxonomic treatment reclassified the species as merely geographically seperated populations of the common western species, Aconitum columbianum."

The goal of Margaret's projects is to clarify the evolutionary origin and taxonomic affinity of A. noveboracense populations in the context of the broader relationships of several North American Aconitum species.

"I am collaborating with Dr. James F. Smith, a plant systematist at boise State Univeristy, who has experience working on similar questions and a laboratory that is set up to do the necessary molecular work (gene sequencing) and data analysis," says Margaret.

In June, Margaret traveled with Arne Kildegaard (Assoc. Prof. of Economics) to Västerås, Sweden to represent UMM by presenting a paper, entitled, Leveraging Assets: A Case Study of the Sustainability Initiative at the University of Minnesota, Morris," at the 13 th Annual International Sustainable Development Research Conference.

Margaret, Keith Brugger (Geology), and Pete Wyckoff (Biology) were awarded an Interdisciplinary International Research Circle Grant in Spring 2007, sponsored by the University of Minnesota Office of International Programs. Their project, "Recent and On-going Environmental Change in the Arctic," took them and students, Donnie Hicks and Dana Damm, to the Swedish Arctic last summer.

(Above from left to right: Pete Wyckoff, Margaret Kuchenreuther, Keith Brugger and student Dana Damm at Tarfala, Sweden)

Keith and Donnie spent two weeks on Rabots Glaciär near Tarfala Research Station. There they continued Keith's long-term research program, which is designed to measure changes in the geometry of the glacier in response to recent climate change. Keith also spent several additional weeks working on Storglaciären glacier.

Storglaciären has been retreating since the early 1900s and the position of its margin has been well documented since that time. Approximately 50 years ago, a study documenting plant colonization of the area from which Storglaciären has retreated was conducted. Because it is warmer and wetter now than it was then, Margaret is interested in repeating the study to see if patterns of colonization have changed as climate has changed. As a prelude to this work, Margaret and Dana collected samples of the mosses, lichens and vascular plants in front of the glacier. Now all Margaret has to do is learn the fine points of lichen and moss identification!

Pete and Dana and Margaret collected tree cores from living and dead birch trees near Tarfala and Abisko. Pete is interested in the ways in which tree growth rates can be used as predictors of tree mortality.

Pete Wyckoff and recent alum Grace Meyer attended a meeting of the wildlife society where Grace presented work they had done on the impact of deer on forest tree regeneration in west central Minnesota.

Pete and his students have been taking their research on invasive European buckthorn (that's a tree) in a new direction: they are looking at exotic earthworms and their possible link to the buckthorn invasion. It comes as a surprise to many to learn that there were not earthworms in Minnesota prior to European settlement and that some parts of the state remain worm free.

Senior Brenna Burns and Junior Matt Bombyk accompanied Pete to Duluth in June 2007 to learn worm taxonomy and identification techniques from UMD's Dr. Cindy Hale. In August, Pete gave a presentation (with alumni co-authors Andy Shaffer and Becky Bombyk) on earthworm distribution in west central Minnesota at the Ecological Society of America meetings in San Jose.

In August, Pete, Keith Brugger (geology) and Margaret Kuchenreuther traveled to northern Sweden, funded by a U of M international research circle grant. While there, Pete collected 225 tree cores (tree ring samples) from three sites that he will use to examine the link between growth and mortality for birch trees growing at treeline. A student in Pete's lab will be processing the cores this fall.

Timna Wyckoff reports that she is still teaching Biochem, Biochem Lab and Micro. "Biochemistry and microbiology are my favorite subjects in the world and I get paid to talk about them incessantly and try to get them to be other people's favorite things in the world...how cool is that?" she asks with a laugh.

In May of 2007, Timna took a poster created by her and two student co-authors to Toronto to the American Society for Microbiology General Meeting in May detailing the latest work on the "dairy project".

She and husband Peter Wyckoff taught Summer Scholars for the third time last summer. The course, "The Reemerging Threat of Infectious Disease," has a website that can be viewed at here.

Timna was also the lead instructor for a week-long infectious disease teacher institute (high school bio teachers) at the Science Museum last summer. http://www.smm.org/schools/profdev/infectious/

"Our eldest daughter, Acacia, will be in 1st grade (this never ceases to amuse my former students who knew her as a baby). Sequoia is 4 and a half and super-ready to go to preschool at the "big school" with her 'big sister,'" Timna reports.

I spent the spring semester working on a UROP with UMM student Janice (Kyung Mee) Lee (08) on a project titled "Using NMR to study temperature dependent hydrogen bonding in N-Methylformamide . " Janice presented her results at the UMM Undergraduate Research Symposium (URS) and is planning to finish up some details and present at the Spring 08 American Chemical Society Meeting.

I also finished a paper titled "Dynamics of Dilute Water in Carbon Tetrachloride" with UMM student Lauren Goodrich (07) as a co-author. It was published in the July 19, 2007 issue of the Journal of Physical Chemistry A.

As the Spring semester wrapped up, I once again helped the ACS Student Affiliates celebrate another successful year by preparing a turkey dinner for their banquet./p>

I spent the first part of the summer trying to keep my feet from swelling to the size of watermelons and the second part of the summer in a sleep-deprived haze. Both were brought on by the newest Goodnough. Ely Francis was born on July 2nd at 1:13 am, weighed in a 9lbs and measured 19 3/4 inches. You can check out pictures on Facebook or www.flickr.com/photos/roppnough.

Ely took his first plane ride at 3 weeks of age as we traveled back to my home in Pennsylvania. I was invited back to Alumni Weekend at St. Francis University to receive the Outstanding Young Alumni award. I had graduated from St. Francis in 1997 with a degree in Chemistry and Math.

Nancy Carpenter worked over the 2007 summer with students Owen Kinsky and Becky Korth on an Initiative for Renewable Energy and the Environment (IREE) grant studying various species of microalgae as a source for biodiesel. This is a collaboration with Dr. Roger Ruan of the St. Paul campus.

"The IREE work (microalgae) is a new initiative that I hope more UMM students and faculty will take advantage of," Nancy says.

Nancy continues work on her beta-ketoacyl ferrocene research, and in the fall 2007, two students (Bethany Nyland and Carla Steinbring) will contribute to her studies of palladium(II) chlorovinyl complexes. The palladium work is an outgrowth of Nancy's 2005 sabbatical collaboration with Dr. Kris McNeill of the Minneapolis campus. Presented the palladium work at the spring ACS meeting in Chicago

"I'll always love organometallic synthesis," says Nancy. "The compounds you make are fascinating and the puzzles you can end up with are super challenging. The fact that small molecule organometallics are used as catalysts keeps them incredibly relevant, even in this age of renewable energy and green chemistry."

Her main involvement on campus these days is representing UMM to the system-wide Faculty Consultative Committee, which requires daily trips to the twin cities campus.

In the classroom, Nancy has now added to the organic lab curriculum what she refers to as "UMM's own mini-ethanol plant." Students will ferment corn to distill out their own ethanol.

Also, last year, Nancy started to use a schoolpad in lecture. "This is a device whereby my lecture notes are written onto a tablet and projected onto the screen," she explains. "They can be captured as a pdf file and posted on the web. WHAT A HOOT. They were almost 100% illegible for the first few weeks! Great entertainment value!"

Ted Pappenfus reports that he, Nancy Carpenter, Jenn Goodnough and Len Keeler (physics) were awarded a Grant-in-Aid from the Office of the Dean of the Graduate School for the purchase of a "glove box." Matching funds came from the Division, Dean's Office and a generous donation from UMM alum Tim Brown.

"The glove box provides an inert atmosphere for the handling of air and/or moisture sensitive compounds," Ted explains. The instrument was installed in June and was used often by UMM undergraduates over the summer.

Ted will be on single semester leave in Fall 2007. He is working on research related to low bandgap organic materials and hope to submit a few manuscripts for publication in this area as well as prior work on environmental sensors.

In Spring 2007, Ted attended the national ACS meeting in Chicago. There, he presented his research, ""Alternative syntheses and utility of platinum(II) terpyridyl acetonitrile complexes." In Fall, 2007, Ted attended the national ACS meeting in Boston to present, "Conducting polymers in undergraduate general and organic chemistry laboratories."

Pappenfus, Ted M.; Melby, Jacob H.; Hansen, Brent B.; Sumption, Devin M.; Hubers, Scott A.; Janzen, Daron E.; Ewbank, Paul C.; McGee, Kari A.; Burand, Michael W.; Mann, Kent R. "Reverse Selectivity in m-CPBA Oxidation of Oligothiophenes to Sulfones." Organic Letters

Pappenfus, Ted M.; Hermanson, David L.; Ekerholm, Daniel P.; Lilliquist, Stacie L.; Mekoli, Megan L. "Ruthenium indenylidene complexes for olefin metathesis: Microscale experiments for the undergraduate inorganic/organometallic laboratories" Journal of Chemical Education

"During most of this time I was in Morris, but we did get a chance, in the summer of 2006 and 2007, to visit my wife's family in Tokyo," says Tim.

"Part of my sabbatical time was spent investigating some possible new areas for my research in the enzymology of archaea. The majority of my time, however, was spent writing a new organic chemistry textbook, one which focuses on biologically relevant reactions and molecules. This has been a huge undertaking, but one that has also been a lot of fun and a great learning experience for me. I am hoping to begin using the new text in the fall of 2008. I also hope to get it published - one textbook publishing company is currently taking a look at it, so I will hope for the best!"

"I'm teaching three courses fall semester, two familiar ones, Physical Chemistry and History of Chemistry, but a brand new one in the honors program.

"I've become active in the honors program in the last seven or eight years. This new course is my fifth preparation during that period. I'm team-teaching the course with political scientist Paula O'Loughlin. We call our course 'Revolutions in Science and Politics.'

"We start with the French Revolution and Chemical Revolution, which occur at the same place and time. Then we jump forward to the 1930s, when I lead the class through some of the mysteries of relativity and quantum theory. We have thirty-one students. Paula led them through the first discussion, and I was impressed with her skill as a leader, and at their enthusiasm and engagement with the topic. I tell Paula that we are a complementary pair, that she'll keep them awake and I'll put them to sleep."

Jinzhu Gao is working with MAP student John K. Roth to develop analytical cost models for performance estimation of visualization algorithms.

"I am still collaborating with professors and researchers from other universities, national labs as well as the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute on distributed visualization," she reports.

"Working with several universities and national labs, I am trying to build a collaborative environment for data analysis and visualization so that scientists can easily share the data as well as the research results."

Jinzhu also notes that two new courses have been added to UMM's Csci curriculum: CSci 2601: Interactive Computer Graphics (Fall 2007) and CSci 1021: Introduction to Data Visualization (Spring 2008)

• Robert Sisneros, Chad Jones, Jian Huang, Jinzhu Gao, Byung-Hoon Park and Nagiza Samatova. "A Multi-Level Cache Model for Run-Time Optimization of Remote Visualization", IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Vol. 13, No. 5, pages 991-1003, 2007.

• Jian Huang, Huadong Liu, Micah Beck, Andrew Gaston, Jinzhu Gao, and Terry Moore. "Visualization Viewpoints: Dynamic Sharing of Large-Scale Visualization", IEEE Computer Graphics and Visualization, Vol. 27, No. 1, 2007.

• Qishi Wu, Jinzhu Gao, and Mengxia Zhu. "A scalable framework for distributed virtual reality using heterogeneous processors". The 16th International Conference on Artificial Reality and Telexistence, Hangzhou, P.R. China, November 29 - December 1, 2006 (ICAT 2006). Published in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2006, ISSU 4282, pages 314-323.

• Markus Glatter, Colin Mollenhour, Jian Huang and Jinzhu Gao. "Scalable Data Servers for Large Multivariate Volume Visualization", IEEE Visualization 2006, Baltimore, MD, October 2006. Published in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Vol. 12, No. 5, pages 1291-1298, 2006.

Kristin Lamberty finished her dissertation and all requirements for graduation in January 2007 and officially received her Ph.D. in May 2007. She says, "It is great to be officially done!"

Last year, Kristin worked on a MAP with a student, and plans to continue that work with another MAP student in the 2007-08 academic year. Also last year, she traveled to San Jose, CA to attend CHI 2007 (the ACM conference on Human-Computer Interaction) and to New Brunswick, NJ for the Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning conference.

During summer, 2007, Kristin and Nic McPhee worked with students in grades 6-12 for two weeks for the Henjum Creative Study Institute. "We used a shortened version of the media computation course that we introduced last year for our undergraduates," she says.

Kristin also reports that Computer Science has introduced a new introductory course, "Introduction to Digital Media Computation."

"The course is a new approach to learning about computer science through media (images, sounds, and movies) and uses the Python language," says Kristin.

She is also the new lucky individual who is discipline coordinator for the Computer Science discipline.

Dian Lopez had a busy year as a University Senator and she also spent time traveling monthly to the Minneapolis campus for other Senate committee meetings. She is also a member of the MICS (Midwest Instruction and Computing Symposium) Steering Committee. She chaired the search committee that hired Andrew Thall for Nic's sabbatical replacement. She is also actively involved in recruiting students (she helped register our new Chinese students this fall) and in helping them attain internships and research opportunities once they arrive. One of her research students, Rob Jansen, presented his research with her at the MICS conference.

During 2006-07, Andy chaired the Campus Resource and Planning Committee that completed the Strategic Plan for the campus, assisted with the planning for the remodeling of the Community Services Building and the ACM Programming Contest held on campus in November, served in the all-university Senate Committee on Information Technology and Midwest Instructional and Computing Symposium (MICS) Steering Committee. He also taught courses on Network Security, Ethical and Social Implications of Technology and a two-week Robotics workshop for high school students.

Dian and Andy also attended numerous events during the year including the SIGCSE national conference in Northern Kentucky, the ITiCSE international conference in Dundee, Scotland. At the 40 th Annual MICS conference in Grand Forks, ND (where both Andy and Dian are on the Steering Committee for this conference), six UMM students presented their research and UMM students won the programming contest competing against over 30 teams from the five-state area. Both Andy and Dian chaired sessions at MICS. They also manned a booth at the STEM conference sponsored by the Minnesota governor where they helped explain our program to prospective students and they worked at displays at both the Fargo and Alexandria Fairs as well as attended several student recruiting events such as Eastcliff receptions, a Saint's baseball game and the National College Fair. Dian arranged the visit and presentation by a UMM Distinguished Alumni, Gordon Haubenschild, whose career with IBM included facilitating many internships and permanent employment opportunities for UMM students.

Elena Machkasova was granted a single-semester research leave and will spend

2 months of the fall semester of 2007 in Frankfurt, Germany, working on theory of program optimizations with a colleague Dr. Manfred Schmidt-Schauss.

Elena presented a paper "Computational Soundness of a Call by Name Calculus of Recursively-scoped Records" at Workshop on Reduction Strategies in Rewriting and Programming (WRS) in Paris in June 2007. The paper will be published in Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science.

She continues her research on optimization of Java generic types. A poster based on this research, co-authored by students Eli Mayfield, J. Kyle Roth, Daniel Selifonov, Nathan Dahlberg, and Elena Machkasova (advisor) will be presented at Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA) in Montreal in October. Elena continues this work with Eli Mayfield and Kyle Roth over the summer. The summer student research was supported by Grant-in-Aid.

As far as teaching goes, she continues teaching in the area of theory and programming languages, at both introductory and advanced levels. She expanded a repertoire of web programming technologies used in UMM courses by exploring ruby, rails, and AJAX in a new upper-division course on client-server programming.

Nic McPhee is on sabbatical for the academic year 2007-2008 at the University of Essex (Colchester, UK), working with Riccardo Poli, William Langdon, and others, to better understand the theory of evolutionary algorithsm.

Nic dropped us an email from across the pond to share his family's new address in Essex:

In his email, Nic wanted us to mention the following info about students he worked with in the 2006-2007 academic year:

Andy Korth and Tyler Hutchison won best student paper award at MICS 2007 for their paper "On the impact of geography and local mating in evolutionary computation". Those two and Scott Lembcke also took first out of 42 teams in the MCIS 2007 programming contest.

The team of Korth, Hutchison, Lemcke, and Daniel Selifonov took first at the Digi-Key Collegiate Computing Competition in October '06.

The team of Lemcke, Hutchison, Jake Nelson, and Matt Carlson took third at Digi-Key in October '05.

"I've been made an associate editor of the Journal of Artificial Evolution and Applications," Nic reports.

On a personal note, he and son Tom hosted a very successful fund raising concert (The Mutant Variety Show) in April, 2007, raising over $800 for cancer related charities.

One of Nic's photographs was chosen from over 2,000 submissions as one of the 12 semi-finalists in Round 3 of the BBC's Photographer of the Year 2006 competition. Another of his photographs will appear this fall in a new book on Vikings published by Dorling Kindersley.

Finally, Nic notes that he just completed a three-year stint as chair of the Scholastic Committee. Also, he's pleased to report that he was granted full professorship in May, 2007.

Keith Brugger had three papers published in the past year. The first was co-authored with Kurt Refsnider ('04) and titled "Rock glaciers in central Colorado, USA, as indicators of Holocene climate change." It was published in Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research, v 39, this past February. In that same month, another paper, "Cosmogenic 10 Be and 36 Cl ages from late Pleistocene terminal moraine complexes in the Taylor River drainage basin, central Colorado, USA" appeared in Quaternary Science Reviews (v 26). The third paper, "The non-synchronous response of Rabots Glaciär and Storglaciären, northern Sweden, to recent climate change: a comparative study," came out in the Annals of Glaciology (v 46).

Brugger received two grants, the first (with Ted Pappenfus, Chemistry) for $100,000 from the National Science Foundation for the purchase of an X-ray diffraction instrument. The second grant ($20,000) was from the Office of International Programs (Twin Cities) and is designed to facilitate research collaboration with Swedish colleagues interested in past and on-going environmental change in the Swedish Arctic. This grant also involves Margaret Kuchenreuther and Peter Wyckoff in Biology as well as UMM undergraduate students.

During the past summer, Keith spent two months in the Swedish Arctic working with Neal Iverson's (Iowa State University) research group on Storglaciären. The focus of the NSF-sponsored research is to understand the flow dynamics near the transition from a temperate bed that allows basal sliding to the frozen bed near the ice margin. Flow here has profound implications for how the glacier responds to climate change and how sediment is transported in glacial systems. While in Sweden he also revisited Rabots Glaciär to conduct a differential GPS survey of ice surface elevations with UMM student Donnie Hicks. This data will be used in the long-term monitoring of how the glacier's geometry changes in response to recent climate change. Keith also continues his collaboration with Kurt Refsnider (now at the University of Colorado for his PhD) and Eric Leonard (Colorado College) in work that is attempting to unravel the glacial and climate history of the Sangre de Cristo Range in Colorado.

Keith will be presenting or co-presenting three papers at the upcoming meeting of the Geological Society of America Meeting in Denver later this Fall. He encourages any and all UMM students who might be attendance to stop by the posters to say hi, or better yet, come to the University of Minnesota (all campuses) alumni reception. Finally, wherever you might be don't forget to drop us a line so we can post your activities and news on the Disciplines web site!

"The 10 th iteration of the UMM REU program ran in the summer of 2007," Cotter reports. "The group now does research in both Minnesota and Brazil - so there are, of course, a lot of adventures. This summer was a lot of fun and the students continue to find new and interesting geologic problems to explore. The UMM REU program began in 1989 so the next time it runs (Summer of 2009) will be the 20 th anniversary! If you can, plan to come to the "Friends of REU" meeting - July 31 and August 1, 2009. Mark your calendar!"

In July 2008, Cotter's "Geomorphology of the Italian Alps" course will run again. "It's a fun geology trip with a lot to see and do in 3 weeks and it's always great to have alumni participate in this adventure," he says. "Even JVA is thinking about showing up! If you can, plan to join us in late July - early August, 2008!"

One last note (if you're not feeling old already), Tess Cotter headed off to college this year. She's a freshman at St. Olaf, thinking about Environmental Studies.

Jamey Jones worked on three projects in the field this past summer, all under the broad theme of trying to better understand the tectonic evolution of the North American continent more than one billion years ago.

"My summers involve field research in Colorado, New Mexico, and (at some point in the future) the Great Lakes region," he explains. "I spent three weeks with two undergraduate geology majors mapping the geology of the Collegiate Peaks Wilderness in central Colorado. We collected a number of samples for new U-Pb geochronology that I will be working on during the winter."

His research students were both funded by the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP).

Jamey also began a new project with a colleague at Bucknell University on exposures of igneous and metamorphic rocks the Santa Fe Range of northern New Mexico, and renewed his collaboration with faculty at Fort Lewis College and the University of New Mexico. They are working together on the tectonic evolution of the Needle Mountain in southwestern Colorado.

"The broader theme and objectives of my research have remained the same, and my approach and the techniques I use (particularly geochronology) are the same," Jamey says. "But I continue to expand the geographical scope of my work into new parts of the southwestern U.S. (New Mexico, Arizona, Wyoming), and I am also looking into relevant projects here in the Great Lakes region."

Jamey received monies for geochronology research through an Educational Mapping Program (EDMAP) grant from the U.S. Geological Survey that was awarded to a colleague at Montana State University.

"We did some collaborative work in the Glenwood Springs area of western Colorado trying to understand the age and tectonic significance of a major zone of crustal deformation," says Jamey. "Two UMM undergraduate students were involved in the field component of the study last summer (2006), and I recently completed much of the new geochronology work using analytical facilities at The University of Texas at Austin. I am presenting our preliminary results at the fall Geological Society of America meeting in Denver, Colorado."

He is also planning to apply in fall, 2007 for a Grant-in-aid from the University of Minnesota system, and hopes that those funds will help him to finish setting up facilities for doing mineral separation here at UMM.

Jones, J. V. III and Connelly, J. N., 2007, Proterozoic tectonic evolution of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, Colorado: Rocky Mountain Geology, v. 41, p. 79-116.

Jessup, M. J., Jones, J. V. III , Karlstrom, K. E., Williams, M. L., Connelly, J. N., and Heizler, M. T., 2006, Three Proterozoic orogenic episodes and an intervening exhumation event in the Black Canyon of the Gunnison region, Colorado: The Journal of Geology, v. 114, p. 555 - 576.

He anticipates submitting two papers for publication in fall 2007 to some of the top geology journals. Alumni interested in checking out Jamey's recent abscracts can find them at his research web page: http://cda.morris.umn.edu/%7Ejonesjv/research.html

"I have become involved with international initiatives here at UMM through the International Programs Committee," Jamey adds. "I will travel to China in March, 2008, as part of a larger system-wide delegation to review study abroad opportunities at universities in Shanghai and Hong Kong. I also helped organize and lead the geology club's spring break field trip in March, 2007. We took 23 students out to Utah for seven days and camped and hiked in Arches and Canyonlands National Park."

Jamey has added a new three-day, two-night fall field trip to his fall Minerology class. They will visit the north shore of Lake Superior and the Gunflint. Alums and other interested parties in Minnesota or the surrounding region are always welcome to join field trips, so contact Jamey for dates and other information.

"I also developed two spring semester field trips for my Igneous and Metamorphic Petrology class that both run in April," says Jamey. "One is to the St. Cloud area to look at granites of the 1.8 billion year old East Central Minnesota Batholith, and the other is to the Minnesota River Valley to look at granites and high-grade metamorphic rocks that are some of the oldest rocks in North America (~3.6 billion years old)."

Jamey has also added a new course to UMM's geology curriculum. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Remote Sensing (Geol 2161) was offered in the Fall of 2006, and this class will be offered again in Spring 2008.

"I have been working with various colleagues trying to determine the age and tectonic setting of thick, compositionally mature Precambrian quartzites that are exposed throughout the southwestern U.S," Jamey says.

"It is becoming quite clear that these quartzites and Baraboo Interval quartzites exposed from South Dakota to Wisconsin were deposited roughly at about the same time, and these rather unique rocks are providing us with some remarkable new insights into the evolution of Earth's climate approximately two billion years ago. We had no idea that these metamorphic rocks would tell us anything about oxygen levels in the ancient atmosphere or the chemistry of ancient oceans, but our work is a small part of a rapidly growing body of research that is helping us to understand how and when the atmosphere and oceans evolved chemically to a point where the "explosion" of complex, multi-cellular organisms could occur. "

"After 34 years at UMM, I think it's about time, although some of you might have suggested it's way over due! I will teach half time (full time Spring Semester only)for up to five years, and then bid fond farewell to UMM. Those of you who know my interests will appreciate that schedule," says Jim.

He adds that he can be reached through his UMM email address at any time, at home, or at West Central Environmental Consultants in Morris.

Barry McQuarrie and Chris Orth (UMM Math/Physics 2006) are currently working on a paper entitled "Algebraic approximants and Borel resummation of divergent series arising from perturbed quantum oscillators", which they hope to submit for publication sometime this fall.

Barry has also made some changes to the Differential Equations course this fall--it now includes a project with a paper and oral presentation drawn from areas of student interest. He's excited to see what the students create for their presentations in December!

Peh Ng's former MAP student, Samuel Potter (UMM 2009), presented the results from their project, "Totally Unimodular 0,1,-1 matrices and directed hypergraphs" at the 2007 UMM's Undergraduate Research Symposium.

Peh was invited to be on a panel on "Undergraduate Research" at the April 2007 Mathematical Association of America's North Central Section Meeting in St. Paul.

In Spring-Summer 2007, Peh worked with and supervised Pierrick Vallat; a graduate student from the Universite of Blaise-Pascal, France. They worked on "The lift-and-project methods for solving Mixed-Integer Optimization Problems." Peh has been invited to be a visiting professor at that university in May-June 2008 to continue that research with Pierrick's PhD advisor.

Currently, Peh is working on "Efficient Vehicle-Routing Problem" for five school districts in west central Minnesota. This project is partially supported by the UMM's Center for Small Towns and the Morris Academic Partnership with Charles Rudeen (UMM 2009) as a MAP student.

Math alumni are cordially invited to get updates about the math discipline on the web at http://www.morris.umn.edu/academic/math

Dave Roberts was happy to receive the UMM Faculty Distinguished Research Award this March. He had a new paper accepted in June, "Wild Partitions in Number Theory." One of the points of the paper is to make a connection between well-known classical combinatorics and a relatively esoteric part of number theory, p-adic fields.

"I had a great time with my family visiting England, France, and Spain for the month of July," Dave reports. "It was their first ever vacation of this sort.

In Spain, we were by chance staying at the same place as a UMM alumna, Laura Justin, and everyone was very happy to catch up on things. Also in Spain, I gave my first math talk ever in Spanish. I'm pretty sure the audience politely hid the fact that they were just as much entertained by bad Spanish as they were informed by new math!"

This fall, Dave is teaching Calculus II for the fifth time at UMM, Precalculus for the first time, and Number Theory for the third time. In Precalculus, he's very pleased to be using the extensive online resources that math colleague Barry McQuarrie has set up for students. Dave's finding such a networked course to be a new experience. In Number Theory, he's looking forward to the last five weeks of the course where the text will be two of Dave's research papers.

Sylke Boyd worked on a publication on the vibrational properties of the RDX crystal during the summer of 2007, as well as working through the results of previous research students. There was a lot of programming and other computer work.

"Also, I have been visiting my former mentor, Thomas Frauenheim." Sylke reports. "He is now the director of the Bremen Institute for Computational Materials Science. I was honored to spend a few days in his work group, which includes several graduate students, postdocs and visiting professors from Hungary, Taiwan and other locations in Germany."

Sylke received a faculty research enhancement grant for her trip to Germany that also included presentations on her research.

"During the visit we talked about plans of having a research student from Morris visiting the Center in Bremen for several weeks next summer, as well as about the possibility of having UMM students taking courses in Bremen in form of an international studies program. There are a few obstacles, mainly due to a varying interpretation of academic degrees in the US and Germany," she says.

Sylke hopes to initiate a major project studying friction in the form of a large-scale computer model. The expertise present at the Bremen Institute can support the quantum-mechanical description of Angstrom-scale interactions along the interface, while expertise from Sylke and students can handle the larger bulk effects accompanying the deformation under shear stress. This would be a project for the prospective student who gets to go for a research summer to Germany.

"It is always inspiring and gives new energies, to meet with peers in the field, and of course to meet with old acquaintances and have a good beer together along the way," says Sylke.

She adds that she has an interest in broadening her research scope to include frictional processes. "In particular, the transition to slipping and sliding is loaded with problems, since it takes greater force to make something slide than to keep it sliding. In robotics, where precision movements need to be initiated and stopped, this transition is the greatest problem. A better understanding of the mechanisms may lead to better control. Actually, this thought process was initiated by a senior thesis project by Bill Cox a couple of years ago," says Sylke.

Sylke maintains her involvement with the UMM's Commission on Women. This interest has involved her in the development of a new student club; the "Parent Pack." The new group has a constitution and is in the approval process to be recognized by the university. In addition, the Commission on Women has sponsored a Holiday Party for student families, which was well-attended.

Sylke reports that physics alumni Matt Gravelle has received his teaching licensure in Science and Math, after an internship as teacher in New Zealand. He decided not to go into teaching right away, but to take care of a software company for game software, which he is managing together with a friend.

Chris Orth is doing very well in the graduate program at Washington University in St Louis. Anna Schliep is starting a Graduate Program in Maine this fall.

Sylke has developed a new physics course being taught fall 2007: "Physics of Weather". This 1000-level replaces "Physics of Sound and Music". The advantage of having a low-level course like this is that more students will be able to take it.

"The course will cover the atmosphere, weather processes, hydrological cycle, wind systems, weather forecasting, the role of human activities onto the atmospheric system and vice versa," Sylke explains. "I hope this course will make people love the big skies of the prairie and that they will get a little excited about physics. Students will take away a sense of being part of this natural world to a much larger degree than they may have realized before."

As a useful sidekick of the course: there is a weather station installed on the roof of the science building, which gives in-situ information about current conditions to anybody who cares:

Len Keeler has been working on research, measuring the classical paths of electrons within excited potassium. "I obtained some excellent data this summer and I'm working on a paper to be submitted to Physical Review A," says Len.

He's also still working on improving ultrasound snow sensors for measuring snow fall on glaciers. The biggest issue is calibration. Compensating for the speed of sound due to temperature fluctuations is easy, but compensating for wind speed is another issue!

"It seems like we need to take two separate measurements, one from an object at a calibrated distance to measure the speed of sound, then a second to the surface of the snow," he says.

Len spent a lot of time in summer helping with Camp Alpha (rocket camp). "I made an electronic "kit" for kids to solder together," he explains. "It was only an experiment this year, so I had 5 junior high kids soldering together acclerometers. It uses a stamp microprocessor and a little acceleration sensor. They all worked really well when the rockets didn't crash. From the acceleration we could determine the velocity and position as a function of time.

"On one rocket we measured a maximum acceleration of 13 g's, a maximum velocity of 187 miles/hr, and a maximum altitude of 1600 feet. So the next thing to do is install a barometer so we can get pressure vs altitude!"

Student Jake Melby made an analog trajectory computer in Len's 2006 Electronics class. "It computes the parabolic trajectory of a projectile with the initial velocities controlled by potentiometers (knobs)... with no digital electronics!" Len reports.

"Finally, we had lots of fun in Medical Physics this past year. We had great success with contrast agents in our planar x-ray lab. The lumen of fish guts seemed to glow like crazy. I brought the class to the Mayo Clinic and we met a lot of specialists and physicists. We were there for a whole day and I managed to remember to take just one picture before we left!"

Jon Anderson is working with Professor Steve Burks in Economics on analysis of trucking data. They are currently performing statistical analyses to determine driver characteristics related to safety and retention by the participating firm. Several UMM students have been, and will be involved in this long-term project.

During the 2005-2006 academic year, Jon was on sabbatical leave at The Australian National University (ANU).

"I was a member of the faculty of Finance and Applied Statistics," he explains. "This position enabled me to continue to work with a colleague in finance at the ANU and another at The University of Auckland (New Zealand). During the summer 2007, we presented a paper at the Asian Finance Association Conference in Hong Kong. My family and I all attended the conference. It was a fantastic introduction to Asia for all of us."

Jon currently chairs UMM's student behavior committee. He is also performing an analysis of public health data from Ottertail County, Minnesota, with UMM graduate, Matt Rousseu.

"I made a presentation of Matt's findings in May 2007 at the Thumper Pond Conference Center in Ottertail MN," says Jon. "The county officials were very impressed with the quality of Matt's work."

Jong-Min Kim reports that he has recently had the following journal publications:

[1] J.-M. Kim, E.A. Sungur, and T.-Y. Heo (2007), "Calibration Approach Estimators in Stratified Sampling," Statistics & Probability Letters; Vol. 77, 1, 99-103.

[2] J.-M. Kim, and M.E. Elam (2007), "A Stratified Unrelated Question Randomized Response Model," Statistical Papers; Vol. 48, 2, 215-233.

[3] T.-Y. Heo and J.-M. Kim (2007), "Bayesian Inference for Multinomial Group Testing," The Korean Communications in Statistics; Vol. 14, 1, 81-92.

[4] T.-Y. Heo and J.-M. Kim (2007), "A Closed-Form Bayesian Inferences for Multinomial Randomized Response Model," The Korean Communications in Statistics; Vol. 14, 1, 121-132.

[5] S-.S. Chae, C. Kim, J-.M. Kim, and W.D. Warde (2007), "Cluster Analysis using Different Correlation Coefficients,? Statistical Papers; In Press.

[6] H.P. Singh, R. Tailor, S. Singh and J.-M. Kim (2007), "A modified estimator of population mean using power transformation," Statistical Papers; In Press.

[7] H.P. Singh, R. Tailor, S. Singh and J.-M. Kim (2007), "Quantile Estimation in Successive Sampling," Journal of the Korean Statistical Society; In Press.

In addition, Jong-Min has recently been involved in the following presentations and workshops:

[1] H. An, T.-Y. Heo, and J-.M. Kim, "Bayesian inference for group testing with application to California HIV data," IMST2007-FIMXV:Fifteenth International Conference of Forum for Interdisciplinary Mathematics on Interdisciplinary Mathematical and Statistical Techniques, Shanghai, China, May 20-23, 2007. (Oral Presentation by Hyonggin An)

[2] J-.M. Kim, E. A. Sungur, and Y. Jung, "Application of Spatial Copula," Poster Presentation at 32th Spring Leture Series, University of Akansas, Spatial and Spatio-Temporal Statistics, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR, U.S.A. April 12-14, 2007.

[3] E. A. Sungur, Y. Jung, and J-.M. Kim, "A Copula Model for Spatial Process with Air Pollution Application," ENAR 2007 (International Biometric Society), Atlanta, GA, U.S.A. March 14, 2007. (Oral Presentation by Yoonsung Jung)

[4] J.- M. Kim, C-.K. Son and J. Byun, "Calibrated Spatial Stratified Estimator in Spatial Population," ENAR 2007 (International Biometric Society), Atlanta, GA, U.S.A. March 13, 2007.

[5] J-.M. Kim, E. A. Sungur, and Y. Jung, "New Directional Dependence using Copula Function," Poster Presentation at 9th Annual Winter Workshop on Environmental and Environmental Health Statistics, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, U.S.A. January 12-13, 2007.

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