In July 2010 the first "Weather Camp" was held at UTEP.  It was sponsored by an NSF grant and by the UTEP Upward Bound Program.  The Weather Camps have been held in numerous US cities under the leadership of Dr. Vernon Morris and Mike Mogil.  This, however, was the first time it was conducted at UTEP by Dr. Rosa Fitzgerald, partnering with Ms. Barbara Levine. "Weather Camps" are programs of formal instruction and hands-on, practical demonstrations of atmospheric, meteorological phenomena. The goal is to motivate students towards the atmospheric & meteorological fields of study at a young age.  

 

Drs. Cristian Botez, Felicia Manciu and Marian "Mickey" Manciu have recently received tenure and have been promoted to Associate Professor.  Congratulations!
 

Lizabeth Rodriguez, our department Administrative Assistant, won the President's Staff Scholarship for the 2010-2011 Academic Year.  She was formally awarded by Dr. Natalicio at the Staff Council Info Fair on August 18th.  Congratulations Liz!
 

Dr. Murat Durandurdu was awarded a $199,023 grant from the Office of Naval Research.  The grant, titled:  "Pressure-induced phase transformation of metallic glasses" was funded Feb 1, 2010 and will run until January 31, 2013.   Description:  An understanding of the atomic structure of metallic glasses at ambient and extreme conditions (high temperatures and pressures) is very important for their technological applications.  In this project, we propose a unique approach to model metallic glasses and study their amorphous-to-amorphous phase transformations using constant pressure ab initio simulations. The success of this proposal will be a major step forward in our capabilities to understand the metallic glasses at ambient and extreme pressure conditions.

Dr. Tunna Baruah was recently awarded $120,000 by the U.S. Department of Energy.  Her grant is titled:  "Solvent effects on charge transfer excited states of organic donor-acceptor molecular systems."  Description: A realistic description of light harvesting molecules requires the inclusion of solvent molecules that can play a very important role in stabilizing charge transfer excited states. These states generally have large dipoles that can polarize the solvents. The solvent molecules in turn produce a reaction field that stabilizes the excited state. This effect is significant and cannot be ignored if one strives to obtain accurate excitation energies. We propose to develop a method to extend our successful excited state method to include solvent polarization effects.
 

This summer, Drs. Fitzgerald, Hagedorn, and Manciu (Mickey) gave presentations to incoming students and advised those interested in becoming physics majors.  Their efforts, along with all our efforts to make this an outstanding department, gained us 28 new majors (14 of whom are in the new Medical Physics/Pre-Med track).  Welcome to the new students!!