Share News of Your Achievements

NSM is proud of the achievements of our outstanding alumni, students and faculty. Submit news of your awards, new jobs and honors to breakthrough@nsm.uh.edu or contact Kathy Major at ksmajor@uh.edu or 713-743-4023.

Students

Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships (SURF): Twenty-eight NSM majors participated in SURF during summer 2013 with 21 NSM faculty members hosting students in their labs. SURF provides students with a concentrated, full-time research experience under the mentorship of faculty members, with each student receiving a $3,500 stipend.

The team of Huy Dinh, Gregory Funchess, and Alonso Miranda placed 87th out of 578 teams participating in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition last year. Held annually, the competition stimulates a healthy rivalry in mathematical studies among colleges and universities in the United States and Canada. The competition, open to undergraduates, consists of two sessions of six problems each. Last year, 4,277 students took part in the competition. Department of Mathematics students are currently preparing for the upcoming competition in December. Read more on the Math website

Tier One Scholarships: Seventy-five NSM majors hold Tier One scholarships, representing 40 percent of all Tier One Scholarships distributed by the university.

Faculty

Kevin Burke (Professor, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences) will be the recipient of the European Geosciences Union’s (EGU) 2014 Arthur Holmes Medal. The medal is one of the three most prestigious awards given by the EGU. Burke is being recognized for his exceptional contributions in the area of solid earth geosciences and plate tectonics. The award will be presented in the spring at the EGU’s General Assembly in Vienna.

Martin Cassidy (Research Scientist, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences) completed a two-year term as president-elect and then president of the Houston Geological Society. The organization is the largest local geological society in the world with more than 4,000 active members. Cassidy works on carbon sequestration problems.

Timothy Cooper (Associate Professor, Biology and Biochemistry) received a five-year National Science Foundation CAREER Award to continue his study of the causes and consequences of evolvability in bacterial populations. Read full article

Seamus “Shay” Curran (Associate Professor, Physics, and Director, Institute for NanoEnergy) is also the CEO of C-Voltaics, UH’s first nanotech company. C-Voltaics recently won two prizes recognizing the company for its commercial potential. In August, the company received the Young Technology Award at the Commercialization of Micro- and Nanosystems Conference in The Netherlands, a competition for companies less than 10 years old. In October, the Houston Technology Center named C-Voltaics the $50,000 grand prize winner of the Goradia Innovation Prize. Read related article

Olafs Daugulis (Associate Professor, Chemistry) was named one of the 10 American Chemical Society (ACS) Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award recipients for 2014. The award, limited to 10 recipients each year, recognizes and encourages excellence in organic chemistry. Cope Scholar Awards, sponsored by the Arthur C. Cope Fund, include a $5,000 award, a certificate, and a $40,000 unrestricted research grant. Each recipient will deliver an award address at the Arthur C. Cope Symposium during the Fall ACS National Meeting in 2014.
     In addition, Daugulis’ work was a featured research highlight in two chemistry journals, Chemistry & Engineering News and the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS). The highlights summarized Daugulis’ paper, “Copper-Catalyzed, Directing Group-Assisted Fluorination of Arene and Heteroarene C-H Bonds,” published online June 12 in JACS. The featured summaries help make the information more accessible to a broader community of researchers and scientists. Co-authors on the paper were chemistry graduate students Thanh Truong and Kristine Klimovica. The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health and The Welch Foundation.

Ognjen Miljanic (Assistant Professor, Chemistry) was recognized in the Journal of Organic Physical Chemistry’s Early Excellence Profiles. Miljanic’s profile was published online September 20 and will be included in a later print edition. Each print edition contains one Early Excellence Profile. Profiles include current research interests, awards, top three papers published and an interesting complete-the-sentence section, such as “The holy grail in modern chemistry is . . .” Read the complete profile: Miljanic Early Excellence Profile.

Ioanna Semendeferi (Visiting Assistant Professor, NSM) was elected to the Executive Board of the National Institute for Engineering Ethics (NIEE). NIEE is one of the premier ethics organizations in this country, dedicated to advancing the understanding and practice of ethics within the engineering profession. She is the co-principal investigator on UH’s NSF “Experiencing Ethics” grant.

Ding-Shyue (Jerry) Yang (Assistant Professor, Chemistry) has been awarded a Robert A. Welch Professorship in High Temperature Superconducting and Chemical Materials from the Texas Center for Superconductivity at University of Houston (TcSUH). The appointment, typically for two years, was effective Sept. 1. The Welch Foundation created the endowed professorships at TcSUH to assist with recruitment and retention of outstanding faculty, research faculty and visiting scientists.