Breakthrough (College of Natural Sciences & Mathematics)

UH College of Natural Sciences & Mathematics Breakthrough (College of Natural Sciences & Mathematics)

NSM Pride: Awards and Honors

Share News of Your Achievements

NSM is proud of the achievements of our outstanding alumni, students, staff 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.


Alumni

Jakob Joachin (’20, Biology) has been awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Joachin is working in Kerri Crawford’s lab through August with funding from an NSF Research Experiences for Post-Baccalaureate Students Fellowship and will pursue a master’s degree at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, before entering a Ph.D. program.

Amanda Pascali (’20, Geology) received a Fulbright Student Research Grant. In collaboration with University of Messina, Italy, she will conduct ethnomusicology research to preserve and revitalize the songs of working class and blue collar communities, including translating the songs of Rosa Balistreri, a key female figure in Sicilian music. Pascali will also document the perspectives of women and working-class individuals on class issues, imprisonment, organized crime, immigration and gender roles; some of the fundamental themes in songs sung by Balistreri. This project aims to preserve the words and meanings sung in Sicilian, deemed an endangered language by UNESCO. Pascali is singer/songwriter and writes songs that speak to the experience of growing up as a first-generation American. She was recognized as the Houston Chronicle’s Musician of the Year in 2021.

Urvi Sakhuja (’21, Biology) will journey to the Czech Republic to serve as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant. During her time in the Czech Republic, she hopes to learn more about the role of multilingualism in education. Likewise, she hopes to cultivate her leadership and cultural communication skills. Following the Fulbright program, Sakhuja will be attending medical school to pursue her goal of becoming a physician.

Josh Willis (’96, Physics), a climate scientist and oceanographer with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, will be a guest on X-STEM All Access on September 21. The program is a free, virtual 30-minute series for middle and high school students designed to get them excited about STEM. Willis will discuss his work to understand the role that the ocean plays in melting Greenland’s glaciers and the impact on global sea level rise. X-STEM All Access, presented by the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Space Force, and Discovery Channel, is a project of the USA Science & Engineering Festival. Learn More

Students

Ritwika Biswas (M.S. Student, Biology) won UH’s inaugural Three-Minute Thesis (3MT) competition, winning $1,000. Her short presentation covering her research on Crohn’s disease beat out the presentations of students from other colleges.

Thomas Carroll (Computer Science major) presented a paper at the 28th IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium. The premise of Carroll’s work was to create a system that facilitates a traffic-routing model for self-driving cars. In his system, participating vehicles collaborate to select their routes to reduce the average travel time for all. His study was based primarily on the 2019 paper, “Work-in-Progress: Leveraging the Selfless Driving Model to Reduce Vehicular Network Congestion,” co-authored by Carroll’s mentor Albert Cheng with his students Guangli Dai, Pavan Kumar Paluri, Thomas Carmichael and Risto Miikkulainen. Carroll graduated May 13.

Three NSM students received UH Outstanding Senior Honors Thesis Awards: Thomas Carroll (Computer Science major), Giovanna De Vita Sifontes (Biochemical and Biophysical Sciences major) and Jose Emiliano Esparza Pinelo (Biology major).

Dan E. Wells Outstanding Dissertation Award
Spencer Fuston (Ph.D. Graduate, Geology) was the Spring 2022 recipient of the Dan E. Wells Outstanding Dissertation Award. The award was announced during the UH Commencement for NSM on May 13. His dissertation is titled “Reconciling North American Tectonics with the Deep Mantle through Structurally Unfolding Subducted Slabs and Mantle Convection Modeling.” The result of his research is a new plate tectonic reconstruction of Western North America since the time of the dinosaurs, made by restoring tectonic plates lost to subduction. His dissertation represents a paradigm shift in our understanding of the tectonic history of North America. Related Photo

Gilman Scholars
Three NSM students – Brock Fosnight and Hussaina Motiwala (Biology majors) and Ngan Nguyen (Chemistry major) – received the U.S. Department of State’s Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship. Gilman Scholars receive substantial financial support for learning abroad activities. This competitive award recognizes exemplary yet underserved students who may not otherwise have opportunities to venture outside of the U.S.

Joint Admissions Medical Program 2022 Cohort
The Joint Admissions Medical Program (JAMP), created by the Texas legislature, provides support and encouragement for economically disadvantaged students from across Texas to successfully matriculate into a Texas medical school and pursue a career in medicine. The awardees for 2022 are all either NSM majors or NSM minors. Through the program they will receive support, including scholarships, summer stipends, internships and MCAT preparation.

2022 Awardees: (Major/Minor)

  • Hadeel Al-Sahli - Nutrition/Biology
  • Mariam Dumitrascu - Honors Biomedical Science
  • Celine Luu - Biochemistry/Medicine & Society
  • Angel Nguyen - Public Health/Biology
  • Vijeta Revanker - Business Management/Biology

Cristina Morales-Mojica (Ph.D. Student, Computer Science) is participating in a second NASA internship. For the virtual internship, she works with a team developing the next generation of urban air mobility in the form of autonomous and electric drones. The team is trying to determine how this sort of transportation would work in an urban environment like New York City. Through simulations, engineers work on models to simulate realistic flight behavior, while artificial intelligence experts create algorithms to generate data and train flight models for the drone. Morales-Mojica’s responsibility is to develop an interface for engineers and AI experts to understand each other’s information – “how can we translate what the AI expert knows to a language that the engineering group can also understand?”

Anushka Oak (Biology major) is the recipient of a Fulbright Student Research Grant and will head to San Sebastian, Spain, to work as a predoctoral researcher at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language. Oak graduated in May and also completed a B.A. in Spanish.

Chamini Pathiraja (Ph.D. Student, Physics) was awarded an Advanced Light Source Doctoral Fellowship by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The fellowship provides a year-long research opportunity at the Advanced Light Source user facility where she will receive scientific training and professional experience. The Advanced Light Source is a particle accelerator facility used by scientists around the world. Parthiraja is working on the Resonant Inelastic X-Ray Scattering experiment, using that technique to investigate the electronic structure and magnetic structure of materials. She started her fellowship on April 1. Her advisor at UH is Byron Freelon.

Hai Pham and Phillip Pham (Biology majors) received Fulbright English Teaching Assistant Awards. Both will serve as Fulbrighters in Taiwan.

Karissa Plum (Ph.D. Student, Biology) received the R.C. Lewontin Early Award Graduate Research Excellence Grant from the Society for the Study of Evolution. These awards assist students in the early stages of their Ph.D. programs. Awards, which range from $1,500-$2,000, can be used to collect preliminary data or to enhance the scope of their research beyond current funding limits. Her advisor is Rebecca Zufall.

Bea Rivera (Mathematics major) is one of about a dozen young professionals who will participate in a two-year fellowship with the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Rivera, a mathematics and economics double major, will work as a research assistant with the microeconomics group, supporting a variety of projects and ongoing analysis of the U.S. and global economy. The group provides direct reports to the bank and economic forecasts but also studies the economic life of Chicago. The team includes microeconomists who study the intersection of economics and education, politics and labor. Along with her work at the Fed, her fellowship includes enrollment in economics classes at the University of Chicago. Rivera graduated May 13.

Ozzy Tirmizi (Ph.D. Student, Geology) was awarded a Department of Defense Science, Mathematics and Research for Transformation (SMART) Scholarship. Through the scholarship, his tuition is covered until he graduates, and he will spend his summers, beginning in 2023, interning for eight to 12 weeks at the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center’s Geospatial Research Laboratory in Alexandria, Virginia. He is also guaranteed employment with the lab after graduation. Related Article

UH Undergraduate Research Day
Seventy-one NSM undergraduates presented their work at the 2022 Undergraduate Research Day, highlighting their faculty-mentored projects through either individual or group posters. The event is hosted by the UH Office of Undergraduate Research and Major Awards.

Faculty/Staff

Sergio Alvarez (Earth & Atmospheric Sciences) travelled to Réunion Island, located about 600 miles off the coast of Madagascar, as part of the Tonga volcano Rapid Response Experiment (TR2EX). The effort was in response to the underwater volcano that erupted on January 14 several miles from the Polynesian country Tonga. The team took measurements of sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere using a weather balloon and a recently patented sulfur dioxide sonde. This instrument, developed by the team at UH and St. Edward’s University, takes measurements at high altitudes. Their balloons sampled the volcanic plume and measured a large amount of sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere.

Dinler Amaral Antunes (Biology & Biochemistry) and scientists from Rice University, Scotland’s University of Edinburgh, and Brazil’s Federal University of Ceará collaborated to create the webserver DINC-COVID. Their work published in the journal Computers in Biology and Medicine. DINC, which stands for Docking INCrementally, is an online tool that can screen whether a drug can bind to a protein that’s being targeted for treatment. Antunes helped develop the tool while a postdoctoral researcher in Lydia Kavraki’s lab at Rice University. The team built the DINC-COVID version specifically to test drugs’ ability to dock to multiple conformations of SARS-CoV-2 proteins. The webserver uses molecular dynamics simulations to produce a “movie” of the motions of proteins. Researchers then extract representative “pictures” of what was captured by the movie, and they offer this ensemble for users to test the binding of their drug candidates. More than 500 people have used the server from 54 different countries. DINC-COVID enables people with limited computational resources and those who do not have a computational background to test their own molecules.

Ashley Askew (Dean’s Office/Student Success) and Eduardo Cerna (Scholar Enrichment Program) attended the Texas Association of Black Personnel in Higher Education Conference. While there, they were able to network with over 200 higher education professionals from across the state and attend sessions that empowered them in the areas of personal and professional growth and how to better serve students in the years to come after of the COVID-19 pandemic. Notable sessions included Transforming the Next Generation’s Mindset, Empowered Women, Level up Your Professional Worth, and Black Wall Street: Why was Such Information Hidden from History/Textbooks.

Eric Bittner (Chemistry/Physics) received a year-long appointment as the Ulam Scholar at Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Beginning July 1, he will conduct research at the laboratory’s Center for Nonlinear Studies as a visiting scholar. He will provide a series of three to four lectures to the research community and gain insight and knowledge from resident scientists. The Ulam Scholar position is offered to world-class scientists in the fields of theoretical physics, biology, chemistry, mathematics and computational sciences. His appointment as Ulam Scholar will also provide an onsite research opportunity for physics Ph.D. student, Nosheen Younas, who will spend this summer at Los Alamos conducting research.

Eduardo Cerna (Scholar Enrichment Program) was honored as a UH Cub Camp Namesake for 2022-2023. Each year, there are four Cub Camp groups, and each camp is named after a UH faculty, staff or alumnus nominated by the UH community for going above and beyond to improve the success of our students. The 2022-2023 honorees are Cerna, Diana de la Rosa-Pohl, Monica Floyd, and Carl Lewis. UH Cub Camp is an experience for first-year students during the week before classes start. The new Coogs spend three days learning about UH, its traditions and the on-campus community.

Di Chen (Physics, TcSUH) was elected to the Executive Committee of the Accelerator Applications Division of the American Nuclear Society. Chen’s three-year term begins in June at the conclusion of the Division’s Executive Committee meeting. The Accelerator Applications Division promotes “the advancement of knowledge of the use of particle accelerator technologies for nuclear and other applications. It focuses on production of neutrons and other particles, utilization of these particles for scientific or industrial purposes, such as the production or destruction of radionuclides significant to energy, medicine, defense, or other endeavors, as well as imaging and diagnostics.”

Naihao Chiang (Chemistry) received a three-year, $741,940 grant from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering. With the grant, he is developing a plasmon-induced intracellular delivery method. Chiang’s intracellular delivery uses a highly localized and intensified electromagnetic field to bring materials into the cell, using gold, plasmonic non-contact nanopipettes he and his lab will make.

Yunsoo Choi (Earth & Atmospheric Sciences) and doctoral student Masoud Ghaharemanloo published a paper documenting the decrease of a potentially dangerous air pollutant during 2020’s COVID-19 stay-at-home period. The findings appeared in the journal Atmospheric Environment. The team looked specifically at quantities of the pollutant PM2.5, which presents potential health risks that include heart disease and respiratory problems. All but one of the 11 U.S. cities examined experienced reduced levels of PM2.5. The team also included Yannic Lops, Jia Jung, and Seyedali Mousavinezhad from UH and Davyda Hammond of Oak Ridge Associated Universities.

Paul Chu and Liangzi Deng (Physics, TcSUH) published in the Journal of Superconductivity and Novel Magnetism. The article outlined their work that included the first time a pressure-quench process has been used to retain the high-pressure-enhanced superconductivity of materials in a high-temperature superconductor at atmospheric pressure. The ultimate goal of this experiment was to raise the temperature to above room temperature while keeping the material’s superconducting properties.

Vaughn Climenhaga (Mathematics) has been awarded a Simons Fellowship in Mathematics for the 2022-2023 academic year. Climenhaga will take a sabbatical research leave to focus on his studies of chaotic behavior in geometric systems, with the goal of finding a new mechanism for chaos in positive curvature. He also plans to work on a book project.

Kerri Crawford, Rebecca Zufall (Biology & Biochemistry) and recent Ph.D. graduate Hannah Locke were part of an international study of parallel evolution carried out in cities globally. The study looked at Trifolium repens, or white clover, which is found across all continents except Antarctica. Hundreds of scientists used it to test the evolution of the production of hydrogen cyanide in white clover in urban and rural environments and published their findings in the journal Science. The small plant produces the chemical to protect it from herbivores and drought stress.

Postdoctoral researcher Jan Dudenhoeffer, graduate student Noah Luecke and Kerri Crawford (Biology & Biochemistry) published research findings in Nature Ecology and Evolution. Their study examined the effect of precipitation on the plant-soil interactions of Texas coastal prairie plants. The research involved 2,300 plants grown in three different water conditions – low watering, to mimic drier conditions, average watering and high watering. Their results could help ecologists and agricultural leaders predict how future plant environments will look under different climatic conditions, and specifically, how changing climates could influence Texas grasslands.

Department of Earth & Atmospheric Sciences Virtual Field Trips and the teachHOUSTON STEM Interactive Summer Program were featured in the AAAS Improving Undergraduate STEM Education Initiative’s Lessons Learned During COVID-19 Report: Strategies Transforming the Future of STEM Education. Both programs demonstrated innovative ways to keep students engaged during the COVID-19 pandemic. Jinny Sisson (Earth & Atmospheric Sciences) created a series of online field trips for the Introductory Physical Geology students that allowed them to remain engaged in field-based experiences and also provided the opportunity for students with physical disabilities to participate. The teachHOUSTON STEM Interactive Program provided summer internship opportunities for pre-service STEM teachers and provided a virtual camp for over 4,300 6th-9th grade students worldwide during the summers of 2020 and 2021.

Paige Evans, Jacqueline Ekeoba and Ramona Mateer (teachHOUSTON, Mathematics) presented a webinar, “Designing Curriculum for Pre-Service Teachers & Teacher Leaders.” The webinar was part of the AAAS – Advancing Research & Innovation in the STEM Education of Preservice Teachers in High-Need School Districts Program. Their presentation addressed how the teachHOUSTON program has transformed their coursework to become more culturally responsive and inquiry-based as a part of their NSF-sponsored Noyce programs. They also discussed how their culturally responsive and inquiry-based classroom management course is helping to better prepare secondary STEM teachers to teach in high needs schools.

Paige Evans (teachHOUSTON, Mathematics) received a $1.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation for STEMPro, an intensive nine-month alternative teacher certification program. It focuses on post-baccalaureates, recent graduates, and established STEM professionals. Participants will hone their teaching skills with 500 in-classroom hours, more than most traditional programs can provide. The program provides a scholarship that pays tuition. Plus, teachHOUSTON partnered with area schools that offer paid student-teaching residencies. Joining Evans as the project’s co-principal investigators are NSM colleagues Rebecca Forrest (Physics) and Jacqueline Ekeoba, Ramona Mateer and Leah McAlister-Shields (teachHOUSTON, Mathematics). Virginia Rangel of UH College of Education is also on the grant. Learn More About STEMPro

James Flynn (Earth & Atmospheric Sciences) has been named a Senior Member of the National Academy of Inventors. Flynn developed an inexpensive and accurate sensor for detecting sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere. It can be flown tethered to another instrument, on drones and on free-release balloons. It will be used to evaluate the impact of sulfur dioxide on the stratosphere and allow for validation of models, which are being used to predict future climate change. He is one of six UH faculty selected for the honor this year. Senior Members are chosen for their “success in patents, licensing and commercialization” and for producing “technologies that have brought, or aspire to bring, real impact on the welfare of society.”

Tony Frankino (Biology & Biochemistry) received NSM’s inaugural Faculty Award for Excellence in Service. This award recognizes a faculty member who has gone above and beyond in service that has had a substantial impact on students, faculty and the University. Frankino is committed to building a campus culture that is inclusive and supportive of our unique student population. He develops, runs and contributes to several programs that use undergraduate research to promote the personal growth, academic success and post-graduate achievement of students from all backgrounds.

Liming Li (Physics), Xun Jiang (Earth & Atmospheric sciences) and Ellen Creecy (Ph.D. Student, Atmospheric Science) published a paper May 16 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences documenting Mars’ extreme imbalance in energy budget, a term referring to the measurement of solar energy a planet takes in from the sun then releases as heat. The team reported that a seasonal imbalance in the amount of solar energy absorbed and released by Mars is a likely cause of the dust storms that have long intrigued observers. Further studies could grant insight into how ancient climate change affected the Red Planet, perhaps even how Earth’s future may be shaped by climate change. Creecy was lead author on the paper.

Andreas Mang (Mathematics) is the 2022 recipient of NSM’s Junior Faculty Award for Excellence in Research. The award recognizes faculty at the rank of assistant professor who have demonstrated great potential in research and/or scholarship by virtue of the exceptional quality of their contributions. Mang’s research lies at the interface of mathematics and computational science. His work seeks to gain knowledge from data to promote scientific discovery, decision-making and data-informed predictions, where the predominant applications are in the field of medical imaging.

Mariam Manuel (teachHOUSTON/Mathematics) and Melissa Zastrow (Chemistry) are the 2022 recipients of NSM’s John C. Butler Excellence in Teaching Award. The award recognizes NSM faculty, who have demonstrated outstanding accomplishments in teaching and have a track record of dedication to the teaching mission of NSM. Typically, two awards are made yearly: one to a tenured/tenure-track faculty member and one to an instructional faculty member.

Mariam Manuel (teachHOUSTON, Mathematics) was elected Vice President/President Elect for the National UTeach STEM Educators’ Association and will deliver the keynote at the upcoming National UTeach Conference. Manuel also received news that her research paper “The Intersection of Culturally Responsive Pedagogy and Engineering Design in Secondary STEM” will be recognized at the American Society for Engineering Education conference as winner of the 2022 Pre-College Engineering Education Division Best Paper Award and the Best Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Paper Award.

Frank McKeon and Wa Xian (Biology & Biochemistry, Stem Cell Center at UH) received a $2.7 million grant from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute to examine pro-inflammatory stem cell variants in cystic fibrosis (CF). This work is a first step toward limiting the consequences of chronic inflammation by identifying the source of this persistent and enigmatic inflammation in CF lungs. They will be developing therapeutic combinations that selectively target the pathogenic stem cell variants in the CF lung, while sparing the normal cells needed for regenerative repair. Related Article

Donna Pattison (Assistant Dean for Student Success) is the 2022 recipient of the Faculty Senate Award for Excellence in Service – Lifetime Achievement. Pattison was recognized for excellence in service and dedication to shared governance. She has been a member of the Faculty Senate for eight years. Over the course of her membership, she has served on multiple committees including the Budget and Facilities, Community and Government Relations, Executive, Faculty Governance, and Undergraduate Committees.

Weiyi Peng and Chunyu Xu (Biology & Biochemistry, CNRCS) published their findings in the journal Science Advances, along with researchers from Rice University, the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and CellTrans Inc. The collaborative research discovered a new method to treat cancer in mice through “drug factories” implanted next to organs. The drug factories are small spherical capsules that release cytokines, a type of protein, to fight cancerous tumors. Peng and Xu’s role was to help Rice researchers figure out how the capsules reshape the environment surrounding the tumor to achieve superior tumor-fighting immune responses in preclinical cancer models.

Zhifeng Ren and Paul Chu (Physics, TcSUH) are making inroads in converting seawater to green hydrogen and published findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The team developed a nickel and iron-based electrocatalyst that interacts with copper cobalt to create high-performance seawater electrolysis. They found this multi-metallic electrocatalyst to be one of the best performing among all reported transition-metal-based oxygen evolution reaction electrocatalysts, and suggest it can boost the development of seawater electrolysis technology. The process and technology has the potential to lower hydrogen production to $1 per kilogram in the future, with the expected wider deployment of solar and wind power to drive the electrolysis producing hydrogen from seawater.

Andrew Renshaw (Physics) received a $2.9 million National Science Foundation grant for the Urania Project. He will oversee the Urania Project’s installation and commissioning of its industrial-scale structure in southwest Colorado. Its special purpose will be to mine and process the nearly pure argon to be used by the DarkSide 20k particle detector located in Italy.

Nouhad Rizk (Computer Science) was named a 2022 Piper Professor by the Minnie Stevens Piper Foundation. Rizk joins a select group of teachers throughout the state to receive this honor and is the 13th UH faculty member and the fifth NSM faculty member to be named a Piper Professor. She has the additional distinction of being the first UH woman instructional faculty member to be selected as a Piper Professor. Each year, Piper Professors are chosen by the Foundation based on their superior teaching abilities and each receives an award of $5,000. Related Article

Min Ru (Mathematics) was awarded a four-month research professorship at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, California. He will share his expertise in Diophantine geometry, a branch of number theory. His assignment-in-residence begins January 17, 2023, and ends May 26, 2023. Diophantine geometry is one of three programs the institute will organize next year. The aim of the program is to bring together experts and young researchers to gain knowledge from one another, begin and continue collaborations, and to further advance the field by solving mathematical problems. According to the Institute, professorships are reserved for distinguished researchers who can make key contributions to their programs.

Robert Schwartz (Biology & Biochemistry) published articles in The Journal of Cardiovascular Aging on May 19 and June 15. The papers report on a first-of-its-kind technology that not only repairs heart muscle cells in mice but also regenerates them following a heart attack, or myocardial infarction as it is medically known. The groundbreaking finding has the potential to become a ‘powerful clinical strategy’ for treating heart disease in humans. The new technology developed by the research team uses synthetic messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) to deliver mutated transcription factors - proteins that control the conversion of DNA into RNA - to mouse hearts.

David Stewart (NSM Office of Research) was elected President of the Southwest Chapter of the American Medical Writers Association. This regional chapter covers members in Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma and New Mexico. AMWA’s mission is to promote excellence in medical communication and to provide educational resources in support of that goal.

Leon Thomsen (Earth & Atmospheric Sciences), research professor of exploration geophysics, was elected to membership in the National Academy of Engineering. He was recognized for contributions to seismic anisotropy concepts that produced major advances in subsurface analysis. Thomsen is one of only seven geophysicists who are current members of the NAE. Thomsen provides consulting service to industry through his company Delta Geophysics in Houston. At UH, he contributes to the teaching and research enterprises. His teaching endeavors include courses in the professional master’s degree program in geophysics with a specialization in petroleum geophysics and the Petroleum Geophysics Short Courses. Thomsen was also the research mentor for several graduated Ph.D. and M.S. students. Related Article

Madhan Tirumalai (Biology & Biochemistry) chaired a session at the recent astrobiology conference, AbSciCon 2022, in Atlanta with co-conveners, Mario Rivas (UH), and collaborators Jessica Bowman and Rebecca Guth-Metzler (Georgia Tech). The session, “Ribosomes - Origins and Evolution,” invited presentations covering any aspect of structure and function of the ribosome in relation to its origins and evolution (including expansion segments or deletion events), as well as the ribosome in the context of the RNA, RNA-peptide world and chirality. The ribosome offers a telescopic view of life’s evolutionary past transcending the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA).

Ny Riavo “Voary” Voarintsoa (Earth & Atmospheric Sciences) published a study in a special issue of the journal Malagasy Nature. The special issue, “The way of the future: New paleosciences research led by Malagasy scientists,” was a collective effort to promote the work of indigenous researchers in Madagascar with the aim to bring disciplinary diversity to western-dominated research on the African island. Her paper details the potential of speleothem isotopes from a cave in northwestern Madagascar to reveal information about the country’s past climate.

Yuhong Wang (Biology & Biochemistry) and Shoujun Xu (Chemistry) are developing a new imaging technique with super-resolution to peer into ribosomes. In cellular biology, ribosomes are workhorses, veritable factories inside cells, whose job is to make proteins. They are developing a type of spectroscopy to help understand how ribosomes make proteins deep within cells, the discovery of which could potentially guide drug design to treat cancers and viral infections. The work is funded by a $1.2 million grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences.

Arthur Weglein (Physics) will serve as keynote speaker at a post-convention workshop for the Society of Exploration Geophysicists International Meeting for Applied Geoscience and Energy (IMAGE ’22). Entitled “FWM (Full Wavefield Migration) or FWI Imaging: Exploring New Concepts of Seismic Imaging,” the workshop will be held September 1 in Houston. He will provide a comprehensive analysis and perspective on the role of primaries and multiples in seismic data processing. Recent progress, along with open issues and challenges, will be described.

Panruo Wu (Computer Science) received a prestigious, five-year, $528,733 CAREER award from the National Science Foundation. His work will focus on the development of algorithms and open-source software that use high-level computer processors. Through his CAREER award, Wu aims to acquire tensor processing units to carry out his work. These special units accelerate matrix operations. Wu seeks to bring the capability of the processing units to a broader set of applications, including scientific computing and data driven computing.

Shaun Zhang, Xinping Fu and Lihua Tao (Biology & Biochemistry, CNRCS) developed a new way to detect very rare and highly heterogeneous circulating tumor cells with high specificity and sensitivity. The UniPro device was reported in the journal Molecular Therapy. UH’s Office of Technology Transfer & Innovation is working with industry partners to establish the best plan to commercialize the technology.

UH Teaching Excellence Awards

Teaching Excellence

William Widger (Biology & Biochemistry)
This award is given to faculty in recognition of outstanding achievements in teaching.

Teaching Excellence - Instructor/Clinical

Monique Ogletree (Biology & Biochemistry)
This award is given in recognition of outstanding teaching by faculty instructors, clinical faculty, research faculty, artist affiliates and lecturers.

Teaching Excellence - Provost Core

Alexander Robinson (Earth & Atmospheric Sciences)
This award is given to faculty who have demonstrated outstanding teaching in undergraduate core curriculum courses.

Teaching Excellence - Distinguished Leadership in Teaching Excellence

Paige Evans (teachHOUSTON/Mathematics)
This award is given in recognition of faculty who have made sustained and significant contributions to education within the context of their responsibilities as a full-time faculty member.

Undergraduate Research Mentor Awards

Loi Do (Chemistry) and Tony Frankino (Biology & Biochemistry)
The award acknowledges faculty who are making a significant impact in their field by supporting and mentoring undergraduate students in research and scholarship endeavors and who have demonstrated at least five years of mentorship involvement.

UH Awards for Excellence in Research, Scholarship and Creative Activity

Professor Award

Ioannis Kakadiaris (Computer Science)
This award recognizes faculty who have a substantial continuing record of outstanding research, scholarship and creative activities.