Kudos to UTSA faculty and staff

... to UTSA faculty and staff

(Jan. 11, 2002)

Grants, Awards and Lectures

--Bob Hard, associate professor of anthropology, received funding by the National Science Foundation for his proposal "Continuing Archaeological Investigations of Late Archaic Cerros de Trincheras Sites in Chihuahua, Mexico" in the amount of $43,997. He also received the 2002-2003 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers.

--Clyde Phelix, associate professor of biology, has received notification from the DOD-AFRL (Department of the Air Force-Air Force Research Laboratory) of an awarded one year of support of a Historically Black College and University Minority Institute (HBCU/MI) proposal, “Electron Microscopy Analysis of Albumin Leakage Across the Blood-Brain Barrier Following Microwave Exposure.”

--Dhiraj Sardar, physics and astronomy project development specialist, has been awarded $125,795 by the NSF to fund his proposal “RUI: Investigation Of Spectroscopic And Laser Properties Of Praseodymium Ions In Apatite Crystals And Novel Organic Dyes In Sold State Plastic Hosts."

--The Sloan Foundation awarded fellowships to four UTSA College of Sciences faculty: Edwin Barea-Rodriguez, David Jaffe, Joe L. Martinez, and Robert Renthal. The Foundation will provide one fellowship per year to UTSA as long as minority enrollment in the doctoral program is maintained at historical levels. The stipend is $38,000 for one year and is awarded to a minority doctoral student who has advanced to candidacy.

--Robert Hiromoto, Rajendra Boppana and Kleanthis Psarris of the Department of Computer Science have been awarded $282,000 by the National Science Foundation for their proposal, "Research Experience for Minority Students in High-Performance Computing and Communication." This award is funded with expectation of an additional $1,217,800 over the next five years.

--Richard Wadsworth , associate professor of management science, was presented the UT System Telecampus Teaching Excellence Award at the UT System Information Systems and Distance Education Conference last fall.

--Steven Levitt, chair of the Department of Communication, received the Best Paper Award at the 2nd International Conference, New Horizons in Industry and Education, September 13-14, on Milos Island, Greece. His paper on "Improving the Critical Communication and Decision-Making Interface Between Engineers and Managers" was part of a competitively selected conference program of 43 papers from authors representing 11 countries.

--Thad Bartlett, assistant professor of anthropology, won a Faculty Research Award to support his fieldwork with gibbons in Thailand this summer.

--The following faculty members received Fulbright scholar grants: Chak-Tong Cha (to University of International Business and Economics, Beijing, China), Juanita Firestone (to University of Klagenfurt in Austria) and Dwight Henderson (to East China Normal University, Shanghai).

--Jim Balentine and David Heuser are recipients of the 2001-2002 ASCAPLU$ Standard Awards. These are cash awards made by the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP). They reflect ASCAP's commitment to encouraging writers of non-pop music. They are granted by an independent panel and are based upon the unique prestige value of each writer's catalog of original compositions as well as recent performances of those works in areas not surveyed by ASCAP.

--Ron Ribble, lecturer in psychology, has recently been selected to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award of The International Biographical Centre in Cambridge, England.

--Santiago Daydi-Tolson, professor of modern languages and literatures, read a paper on Alexander von Humboldt's travel writings in Latin America at the international conference on "Travel Literature to and from Latin America", held at Humboldt State University, Arcata, California, last June.

--MaryEllen Garcia, associate professor of modern languages and literatures, gave a panel presentation entitled "Loans and Word Play in Pachuco Caló" at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest in Albuquerque, September 28-30. Currently Vice President for the organization, she will serve as President in 2002, and will deliver the Presidential Address at next year's meeting in Pasadena, California.

--William Scouten, dean of the College of Sciences, attended the 2001 International Biotechnology Convention and Exhibitionlast June in San Diego. Sponsored by the Council of Biotechnology Centers (BIO), the convention was the world's largest biotech event. Scouten spoke about "Essential Tools for a Sustainable Chemical Industry" in a session on "Biocatalysts - The Key to the Future of Chemical Processing." He also delivered the welcome speech from the Council of Biotechnology Centers for BioParks 2001, a satellite conference of BIO 2001 co-sponsored by CBC and the Association of University Related Research Parks.

--Jeffrey A. Halley, Department of Sociology, presented his paper, "The Non-Publics of Dada," at the Sixth International Meeting for the Sociology of Art, "The Non-Publics: The Arts in Reception(s)," Grenoble, France, November 23, 2001.

--Raymond Baird, Department of Psychology, presented a poster at the annual meeting of American Psychological Society in Toronto titled Domain expertise sometimes increases false recall in memory performance.

Appointments and Promotions

--Rafael Lopez-Mobilia was promoted to assistant professor of physics in Spring 2001. A physics lecturer at UTSA since 1996, Lopez-Mobilia obtained his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Texas-Austin working under Steven Weinberg (Nobel Laureate, 1979), and his M.S. in Physics from the University of Notre Dame. His areas of research are theoretical particle physics and cosmology, foundations of quantum mechanics, and quantum computation.

--Shiro Konno was promoted last summer to senior lecturer. He joined the UTSA faculty in fall 1996 and received his Ph.D. from Arizona State University.

--Ron Ribble, lecturer in psychology, has recently been appointed a member of the Board of Governors of the International Platform Association, Washington, D.C. and will chair a committee which will oversee the organization's College Internship Program.

--Dibyendu Sarkar, earth and environmental science, is serving as associate editor of "Environmental Geosciences," the quarterly journal of the Division of Environmental Geosciences (DEG) of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG). Founded in 1917, AAPG is currently the world's largest professional geological society.

--Steve Brown, earth and environmental science, was recently elected president of the GIS in Texas Education group. GIS in Texas Education is an affiliation of Texas colleges and universities for the purpose of promoting the use of GIS in all academic fields and for setting GIS educational standards in Texas. This also means that UTSA will host the 2002 GIS in Texas Education Conference next summer.

Publications

--Mary Ellen Garcia, associate professor in modern languages and literatures last summer saw the publication of her article, "Siempre and Todo el Tiempo: Investigating Semantic Convergence in a Bilingual Dialect," which appeared in the May 2001 issue of Hispania, the journal of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese.

--Ron Ribble, psychology, recently released "Troubadour: The Best of Rhyme—2001" showcasing some of the English speaking world's finest lyric poets and featuring an interview with James Ragan, internationally acclaimed poet and director of the USC Graduate Creative Writing Program.

--Celita DeArmond and Angela Dunnington, UTSA reference librarians, published an article entitled "Creating Effective Search Strategies" in the new book Teaching Information Literacy Concepts: Activities and Frameworks from the Field edited by Trudi E. Jacobson and Timothy H. Gatti. The book is No. 6 in the Active Learning Series published by Library Instruction Publications and focuses on providing librarians with hands-on activities, lesson plans, assignments, and course frameworks to promote information literacy.

--Dhiraj Sardar, department of physics and astronomy, along with former students Michael Mayo, Anthony Sayka, and Raylon Yow saw the publication of "Optical characterization of positive photoresists" in the June 2001 issue of Semiconductor International.

--Thomas Coyle, department of psychology, had two articles published: "Factor analysis of variability measures in eight independent samples of children and adults" in Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, and "IQ is related to the worst performance rule in a memory task involving children," in Intelligence.

--Richard Wenzlaff, chair of psychology, coauthored an article titled "Beneath the veil of thought suppression: Attentional bias and depression risk in Cognition and Emotion." He co-authored with Ann Eisenberg, "Mental control after dysphoria: Evidence of a suppressed, depressive bias" was published in Behavior Therapy.

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