Appointments, honors and activities
May 16, 2014
• Faculty and staff honors:
- Todd Kelley, associate professor of technology leadership and innovation, and his co-author received the 2014 Gerald R. Day Top Peer-Reviewed Article Award from the International Technology and Engineering Educators Association this spring. The article, which Kelley wrote with Woodrow Wilson Indiana Teaching Fellow Moira McSpadden, is titled "Engineering Design: Diverse Design Teams to Solve Real-World Problems" and was published in Technology and Engineering Teacher in 2012. McSpadden and Kelley propose using real-world engineering design problems to impact classroom culture and team diversity and enhance student learning experiences. McSpadden, who was a graduate student in the engineering/technology teacher education program, attended Purdue as a STEM Goes Rural fellow.
• Notables:
- The Purdue University Grounds Department accepted the fifth consecutive Tree Campus USA award on behalf of the university this spring. Tree Campus USA is a national program created in 2008 to honor colleges and universities for effective campus forest management and for engaging staff and students in conservation goals. Purdue received the award by meeting the five standards outlined by the Arbor Day Foundation: maintaining a tree advisory committee, utilizing a campus tree-care plan, dedicating annual expenditures towards trees, holding an Arbor Day observance and organizing student service-learning projects.
- The Department of Physics and Astronomy held a Relativistic Plasma Astrophysics workshop May 12-14. Prominent scientists discussed recent research results, trends and future directions in the study of plasma astrophysics. The workshop’s primary focus was theory and computer simulations with applications to pulsars and magnetars, pulsar wind nebulae, active galactic nuclei and gamma-ray bursts. The workshop was organized by Purdue physics professors Dimitrios Giannios and Maxim Lyutikov, and Dmitri Uzdensky from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and Sergey Komissarov from the University of Leeds. More information is available at http://www.physics.purdue.edu/~lyutikov/workshop13/
