There is much to celebrate as February comes to a close! This week’s recognitions include: Lab Manager Adrian Gonzalez joins TNI’s Chemistry Expert Committee; Celeste Carruthers is the first woman chosen as Editor-in-Chief of the Economics of Education Review; Oak Ridge National Laboratory and joint faculty member at UT awarded a grant of nearly $1 million from the National Science Foundation; a 2019-2020 Tennessee Architecture Fellow wins a 2020 national AIA/ACSA Housing Design Education Award; and Professors in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences received their AAAS rosette pins at the 2020 AAAS Annual Meeting in Seattle.
Gonzalez Joins TNI’s Chemistry Expert Committee
Adrian Gonzalez, PhD, lab manager for the Water Quality Core Facility (WQCF), was recently accepted into membership of the Chemistry Expert Committee of The National Environmental Laboratory Accreditation Conference (NELAC) Institute, also known as TNI.
TNI establishes and enforces national standards for laboratory quality and proficiency, and are national experts in operating laboratories under strict quality management systems.
The role of the Chemistry Expert Committee is “to improve the technical quality of environmental testing methodologies by providing tools—such as detection, quantitation and calibration—that assure the quality of data, which may be adopted by federal and state regulatory agencies.”
The WQCF was established in 2018 with the mission of providing water quality analytical services to academic researchers, governmental agencies, and non-governmental clients in the region.
Boyd Center Professor Named First Female Editor-in-Chief of Economics Journal
Celeste Carruthers has been appointed editor-in-chief of the Economics of Education Review. She is the journal’s third editor-in-chief in its 39-year history and the first woman to serve in that role.
Carruthers, the James and Joanne Ford Faculty Research Fellow, is an associate professor of economics in the Haslam College of Business at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She also holds a dual appointment as a research faculty member in the Boyd Center for Business and Economic Research.
The journal received more than 700 submissions in 2019, and Carruthers will manage those submissions in her role. She will route promising studies to a team of 11 co-editors for peer review, promote the journal to a broad audience and coordinate special issues on emerging and important education topics.
ORNL Scientist, Joint Faculty Member Receives NSF Grant to Study Arctic Phosphorus Availability
Mount Denali above tundra in Alaska’s Denali National Park. (Unsplash)
Elizabeth Herndon, staff scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and joint faculty member at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has been awarded a grant of nearly $1 million from the National Science Foundation’s Office of Polar Projects to investigate how plants, microorganisms, and minerals compete for phosphorus in the Arctic tundra. Phosphorus is an essential nutrient for life but is in short supply in some environments, putting limits on plant growth and decomposition.
Herndon—an environmental geochemist in ORNL’s Environmental Sciences Division who holds a joint appointment with UT’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences —leads the project, which will take her to Toolik Field Station, Alaska, to conduct fieldwork. Lauren Kinsman-Costello, a Kent State University assistant professor of biological sciences and regular research collaborator with Herndon, and Michael Weintraub, professor of soil ecology at the University of Toledo, are collaborators on the project.
MacDonald Wins National Design Education Award
Katie MacDonald, a 2019-2020 Tennessee Architecture Fellow, was awarded a 2020 national AIA/ACSA Housing Design Education Award for leading students to investigate urban population growth and designing new models of residential living.
The project, Between Neighbors: Staging Domesticity in Multifamily Housing, equipped students to study the dynamics of communal life, bringing together private units and shared spaces. MacDonald taught the studio at Virginia Tech in spring 2019, prior to being named a fellow at UT.
Professors Named AAAS Fellows Recieve Rosette Pins at AAAS Annual Meeting
Annette Summers Engel and Christopher M. Fedo, both professors in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, received their AAAS rosette pins in a ceremony this month at the 2020 AAAS Annual Meeting in Seattle.
Both recipients were named Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Fellows are named in recognition of scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications. The award was announced in November 2019.