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Tara Green

• Tara T. Green's book, From the Plantation to the Prison: African American Confinement Literature, was recently released by Mercer University Press. The book is an examination of the various forms that imprisonment has taken as a social, historical and political experience of African Americans. Green is an assistant professor of English at NAU.
• Head track and field coach J.W. Hardy has been highlighted in the April-May edition of Portraits, a publication of the Arizona Southern Baptist Convention.
  
  Featured on the cover, the article is titled "Finishing Well: NAU coach helps students run the race." It discusses the former All-American's commitment to faith and coaching, while using his position to serve as a role model for his student-athletes.
• Laura Umphrey, associate professor of communication, recently published an article in Communication Research Reports on video conference instruction. This research was funded by an NAU e-Learning grant. The article is called, "Student Perceptions of the Instructor's Relational Characteristics, the Classroom Communication Experience, and the Interaction Involvement in Face-to-Face versus Video Conference Instruction."
• Raymond Michalowski, Regents' Professor of criminology and criminal justice, and Nancy Wonders, professor and chair of the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, recently published their research in Beyond Transnational Crime, a special issue of the journal, Social Justice. Michalowski's article is titled, "Border militarization and migrant suffering." Wonders' article is titled "Globalization, border reconstruction projects and transnational crime."
• John Paul Roccaforte, a research specialist for the Ecological Restoration Institute, had an article published in the International Journal of Wildland Fire titled "Landscape-scale changes in canopy fuels and potential fire behaviour following ponderosa pine restoration treatments."

  Ceramic vessel by Jason Hess

• A ceramic vessel created by associate professor Jason Hess will be awarded to the Governor's Art Award artist recipient on April 23. The Governor's Arts Awards, sponsored by the Arizona Citizens/Action for the Arts, a nonprofit arts advocacy organization, acknowledge outstanding service to the arts in Arizona.
• Nine NAU undergraduate students gave presentations on their Space Grant-funded research at the 17th annual Arizona/NASA Space Grant Undergraduate Research Internship Program Statewide Symposium on April 19 at the University of Arizona. The students and the titles of their presentations are:
  • Eric Beitia, physics and astronomy major (mentor: Tim Titus, U.S. Geological Survey): "Wintertime CO2 frost formation could be the mechanism behind H2O ice patches in the Martian northern hemisphere"
  • Isaac Bickford, forestry major (mentor: George Koch, biology): "The impact of fire on surface albedo in southwestern ponderosa pine forest"
  • Buddy Davis, physics and astronomy major (mentor: Randy Dillingham, physics and astronomy): "Gas adsorption in carbon nanotubes"
  • Catherine Juranek, geology/biology major (mentor: David Best, geology): "A paleogeographic reconstruction of impact craters"
  • Heidi Larson, physics and astronomy major (mentor: David Koerner, physics and astronomy): "Debris disk candidates around nearby stars"
  • Gregory Mace, physics and astronomy major (mentor: Lisa Prato, Lowell Observatory): "Mass ratios for young double-lined spectroscopic binaries"
  • Jason Sanborn, physics and astronomy major (mentor: Ted Bowell, Lowell Observatory): "Holding the world still: An inexpensive and reliable method for telescope guiding"
  • Isaac Shaffer, physics and astronomy major (mentor: Gary Bowman, physics and astronomy): "Cosmic rays and manned interplanetary travel"
  • Mike Thomson, electrical engineering major (mentor: Elizabeth Brauer, electrical engineering): "Hardware accelerator test bench for error-correcting algorithms"
• Tom Alward, ceramics student, was one of 10 students nationwide to be awarded a $15,000 Windgate Fellowship from the Center of Craft, Creativity and Design in North Carolina. The fellowship recognizes students whose work "demonstrates a balance of content and design and a mastery of materials; is informed by craft process, materials, traditions, and/or sensibilities; demonstrates innovation, curiosity, and a commitment to growth; and shows evidence of how the work might stimulate creative thinking or dialogue among other artists."
• Three senior art education students have articles published this month in SchoolArts magazine, a national publication for art teachers. The students and their articles are Ashton Mochamer's "Imaginary Pop-Up Animals," Jesse Bradley's "Personal Symbols Mask" and Laura Sutton's "Going Dotty!"