Scientia: Research at the University of Tennessee
Across the Campus
UT–ORNL Distinguished Scientist Ward Plummer has been elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences. Plummer, who has been on the UT physics faculty since 1992, is the director of the Joint Institute for Advanced Materials that is to be built on the UT campus and supervises research at the Department of Energy's Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences at ORNL. Plummer specializes in research on the electronic, magnetic, and structural properties of a material's surface at the atomic scale.
Adedeji Badiru, head of UT's Department of Industrial and Information Engineering, has been elected to the Nigerian Academy of Engineering. Badiru has been on the faculty of the College of Engineering since 2000.
A new center in the UT College of Engineering is focusing on developing innovative materials that will be at the core of next-generation medical imaging devices. The Scintillation Materials Research Center is a multidisciplinary research facility that seeks to discover and develop new high-performance materials that will serve as the foundation for advanced gamma-ray, X-ray, and neutron detectors. "Major advances in the diagnostic power of medical imaging systems are linked to the scintillation materials used in them," said center director Chuck Melcher. "We expect our center to develop the center as a partnership between the university and Siemens Medical Solutions Molecular Imaging, which donated $3.5 million in equipment and funds. The firm is a 2005 merger of Siemens Medical Solutions and CTI Molecular Imaging, a company founded in 1983 by four alumni of the UT College of Engineering to exploit PET (positron emission tomography) technology.
Three faculty members affiliated with UT's MARCO Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies have won fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies. Rachel Golden Carlson, an assistant professor of music, will study "Mapping Medieval Identities in Occitanian Crusade Songs," paying special attention to attitudes toward Christianity and Islam in Occitania (southern France). Hilde de Weerdt, an assistant professor of history, will study the news and print culture of China's imperial court in the 10th through the 13th centuries. Jay Rubenstein, an associate professor of history who is new to the university, will spend the 2006–07 academic year on a Frederick Burckhardt fellowship studying at the American Academy in Rome. He will examine Vatican manuscripts related to the First Crusade (1096–1099) in an attempt to understand how the crusade reshaped the character of medieval Europe.
Ten UT graduate students from geography and earth and planetary sciences will take their growing expertise into middle-school science classes in four East Tennessee counties, thanks to an innovative grant from the National Science Foundation. The $1.97-million GK–12 program (a partnership of graduate students and K–12 teachers), led by UT geography faculty Sally Horn and Ken Orvis, is intended to broaden science education by funding graduate students who will share their research in hands-on activities designed to complement the middle-school curriculum. The UT students will spend 10 hours per week with selected classroom teachers and will be supported for an additional 5 hours of weekly preparation time. The GK–12 program will also sponsor science nights at the middle schools and provide opportunities for middle-schoolers to visit the campus with their parents.
The Nottingham Prize for the best Ph.D. student paper given at the Physical Electronics Conference in 2006 went to a UT physics student. Murat Özer, a student of UT faculty members Jim Thompson and Hanno Weitering, won the prize, which honors the late Wayne B. Nottingham of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Özer has also been honored recently with a UT Chancellor's Citation for Professional Promise and a Stelson research fellowship from the physics department. He is the lead author in a recent Nature Physics article on superconductivity of thin films.