August 4, 2017
UAF celebrated Nanook Rendezvous, its annual reunion weekend, July 20-23. More than 100 alumni returned to campus from as far away as Florida, Massachusetts, Colorado, Missouri, Washington, California and Arizona. The reunion used to be held in late September but was moved to allow alumni to visit during the summer. Also, alumni awards are now presented at the Blue and Gold Gala in February.
The Pollock Conservation Cooperative Research Center, which is run by the UAF College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences, received $98,250 from American Seafoods, Glacier Fish, Starbound and Trident Seafoods as part of the Pollock Conservation Cooperative.
A UAF Alaska Center for Unmanned Aerial Systems Integration team and a Canadian company have flown an unmanned aircraft beyond the line of sight for the first time as part of efforts to bring such aircraft to northern airports. The flights took place in the last week of June 2017 at Alma, Quebec, Canada. The UAF center and Arctic UAV Inc., a company based in Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada, conducted the flights.
Rosemary Madnick, the executive director of the UAF Office of Grants and Contracts Administration, has received a prestigious service award from the National Council of University Research Administrators. She will be honored at NCURA’s annual meeting next week with a Julia Jacobsen Distinguished Service Award, which is given to individuals who have made sustained and distinctive contributions to the nonprofit higher education association.
Laura Conner, a research assistant professor of science education with UAF’s Geophysical Institute, received a $1.7 million grant from the National Science Foundation to train informal science educators, such as librarians, museum staff and after-school providers, through the Fostering STEAM project. STEAM stands for science, technology, engineering, arts and math.
University of Alaska Fairbanks researchers recently gave Juneau and Sitka new information about what ocean waters near these Southeast Alaska communities might do during a tsunami. The information came from UAF Geophysical Institute tsunami modelers Elena Suleimani and Dmitry Nicolsky. They're working to provide inundation maps and other information to the 60 to 70 Alaska communities that could be hit by tsunamis. The new maps take into account ocean currents that can cause water surges in harbors and other areas, sometimes hours after the first tsunami wave.
UAF College of Liberal Arts Dean Todd Sherman is working on a large-scale painting in the lobby of the University of Alaska Museum of the North inspired by a special exhibit, “Polar Passion.” The exhibit contains many polar bear paintings and prints collected by Grace Schaible, a former UA regent and state attorney general who died June 9. Sherman agreed to create a painted polar landscape to give visitors the chance to share in a polar bear viewing experience. Visitors are invited to take photos in front of the landscape and share them to social media with the hashtag #PolarPassion.
Alaska Sea Grant agent Melissa Good and UAF College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences professor Brenda Konar helped create a traveling museum exhibit, “Underwater Forests of the Aleutians.” It focuses on ecosystems in the coastal environments surrounding the Aleutian Islands and how human communities depend on them. It opened at the Museum of the Aleutians on July 13 and after October will move to other Alaska museums. The exhibit is a collaboration between CFOS, San Diego State University, the University of Washington and Kansas State University.
Alaska Center for Energy and Power Director Gwen Holdmann has been invited to serve on the advisory council of the University of Washington’s Clean Energy Institute. CEI is a prominent research program in renewable energy technologies that supports next-generation solar energy and battery materials. ACEP has also invited CEI Director Dan Schwartz to join its advisory committee, a “cross-pollination” that ACEP and CEI expect to foster closer relationships between the schools.
UAF graduate student Ellen Chenoweth and others published Alaska Sea Grant-funded research on humpback whales feeding on hatchery salmon. Resulting news stories appeared in the New York Times, New Scientist, Alaska Dispatch News, Science News Magazine, Food & Wine, Daily Mail, Seafoodnews.com and South Dakota Public Broadcasting.
Javier Fochesatto received the American Meteorological Society Editors’ Award for serving as a reviewer for the Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology and “for providing valuable reviews that helped the decision-making process, particularly in controversial situations.” Fochesatto is invited to attend the 98th annual meeting of the AMS in Austin, Texas, in January to receive this award in person.
UAF alumnus Chris Manhard and others published the results of Alaska Sea Grant-funded research on salmon and climate change. The Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences named the article an editors’ choice for 2017 and said it was of “particularly high caliber and topical importance.”
Maggie Chan, a UAF graduate student, will head to Washington, D.C., next year as a Sea Grant Knauss marine policy fellow. She is in a select group of 61 fellows nominated by Sea Grant programs nationwide. Alaska Sea Grant currently has two Knauss fellows — Charlotte Regula-Whitefield is in U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s office, and Kelly Cates works at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.