FACULTY newsletterseptember 2009

CPMS Physical and Mathematical Sciences

ABOVE Michael Dorff was recognized by the MAA as one of the nation’s top math teachers.

DEAN WHEELER

“We showed you can get a lot more out of glucose than other people have done before.”

The BYU College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences is pleased to announce that Michael Dorff, a professor in the Department of Mathematics, has received a prestigious teaching award from the Mathematical Association of America (MAA).

Professor Receives National Teaching Award

The Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo Award is given to college and uni-versity professors for distinguished teach-ing of mathematics. According to an MAA release, recipients’ excellence in teaching begins in (but is not limited to) the class-room. While Haimo awardees are “widely recognized as extraordinarily success-ful in their teaching,” MAA also states that “‘teaching’ is to be interpreted in its broadest sense, not necessarily limited to classroom teaching.”

In addition, Haimo Award recipients have also had a demonstrated impact on both alumni and the mathematical profes-sion as a whole. Such qualities result in comprehensively well-rounded educators who excel on every level. The award is very prestigious, with a maximum of three teachers awarded per year nationally.

Dorff has made many contributions to the teaching and learning of his mathemat-ics students at BYU. He demonstrates great care for his pupils, while simultaneously maintaining high expectations for their success, even in large lecture classes. He strives to help students see the bigger pic-ture and applies mathematical knowledge to real life situations.

Always the consummate teacher, Dorff has even schooled students outside of the traditional classroom. He recently orga-nized seminars for math majors, minors and prospective majors to learn about career opportunities. The Department of Mathematics has reported a 22% increase in the number of majors since Dorff began these seminars.

The MAA cites Dorff’s “most impressive accomplishments” as his work providing

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by: BYU News

ABOVE Gerald Watts and his research team have developed a method of harvesting electricity from carbohydrates.

A spoonful of herbicide helpes the sugar break down in a most delightful way.

BYU Researchers Discover Potential Fuel

Researchers at Brigham Young Univer-sity have developed a fuel cell – basically a battery with a gas tank – that harvests electricity from glucose and other sugars known as carbohydrates.

The human body’s preferred energy source could someday power our gadgets, cars or homes.

“Carbohydrates are very energy rich,” said BYU chemistry professor Gerald Watt. “What we needed was a catalyst that would extract the electrons from glu-cose and transfer them to an electrode.”

The surprising solution turned out to be a common weed killer, as reported by Watt and his colleagues in the October issue of the Journal of The Electrochemical Society. Watt shares his wonderfully appropriate last name with his great-great-uncle James Watt, the inventor of the steam engine.

The effectiveness of this cheap and abundant herbicide is a boon to carbohy-drate-based fuel cells. By contrast, hydro-

gen-based fuel cells like those developed by General Motors require costly platinum as a catalyst.

he next step for the BYU team is to ramp up the power through design improve-ments.

The study reported experiments that yielded a 29 percent conversion rate, or the transfer of 7 of the 24 available elec-trons per glucose molecule.

“We showed you can get a lot more out of glucose than other people have done before,” said Dean Wheeler, lead faculty author of the paper and a chemi-cal engineering professor in BYU’s Fulton College of Engineering and Technology. “Now we’re trying to get the power den-sity higher so the technology will be more commercially attractive.”

Since they wrote the paper, the re-searchers’ prototype has achieved a dou-bling of power performance. And they’re pursuing an even stronger sugar high.

Dorff continued

research opportunities for undergrad-uates. He has led a program for a number of years that has brought undergraduate students from across the country to BYU to participate in mathe-matical research they would otherwise be unable to perform at their respective institutions.

He also founded the Center for Un-dergraduate Research in Mathematics (CURM), which brings 15 faculty members from various universities to Provo. Dorff teaches his peers how to mentor under-graduates in mathematical research and how to do so on their own campuses.

One faculty member who attended a CURM workshop received a mini-grant

from Dorff’s group that allowed her to start an undergraduate research group at his school, which has benefited her stu-dents immensely.

“Michael Dorff has touched the lives of fifty students at [my institution] … and will touch the lives of hundreds more [in the future],” she said.

Dorff said he was incredibly honored by the recognition, but that the award really reflected the university’s commitment to ex-cellence in education.

“It’s an extraordinary honor for BYU and the Department of Mathematics,” he said. “Nobody in Utah has ever received this award. It just shows BYU and the de-partment are interested in quality, effec-tive teaching.”

Geology Professor Solves Glacial Phenomenom

While most other Central Asian glaciers retreated under hotter summer temperatures,

this group of glaciers advanced from one to six kilometers.

A new study by BYU geologist Summer Rupper pieces together the chain of events surrounding the unexpected glacial growth.

“Stronger monsoons were thought to be responsible,” said Rupper, who reports her findings in the September issue of the journal Quaternary Research. “Our research indicates the extra snowfall from monsoonal effects can only take credit for up to 30 percent of the glacial advance.”

As Central Asia’s summer climate warmed as much as 6 degrees Celsius, shifting weather patterns brought more clouds to the Southeast Himalayas. The additional shade created a pocket of cooler temperatures.

Temperatures also dropped when higher winds spurred more evaporation in this typically humid area, the same process behind household swamp coolers.

The story of these seemingly anomalous glaciers underscores the important distinction between the terms “climate change” and “global warming.”

“Even when average temperatures are clearly rising regionally or globally,

what happens in any given location depends on the exact dynamics of that place,” Rupper said.

The findings come from a framework Rupper developed as an alternative to the notion that glaciers form and melt in direct proportion to temperature. Her method is based on the balance of energy between a glacier and a wide range of climate factors, including wind, humidity, precipitation, evaporation and cloudiness.

Gerard Roe and Alan Gillespie of the University of Washington are co-authors of the new study.

Knowing how glaciers responded in past periods of climate change will help Rupper forecast the region’s water supply in the coming decades. She and collaborators are in the process of determining how much of the Indus River comes from the vast network of glaciers far upstream from the agricultural valleys of India and Pakistan.

“Their study can be used to help assess future glaciological and hydrological changes in the most populated part of our planet, which is a region that is now beginning to experience the profound effects of human-induced climate change,” said Lewis Owen, a geologist at the University of Cincinnati who was not affiliated with this study.

by: BYU News

by: Steve Pierce

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R - ORCA Student Deadline October 30

- MEGs Deadline October 30

- Izatt/Christensen Lecture November 3, 7pm B294 JFSB

- ORCA Mentor Endorsements due November 6

- MEGs Chair Endorsements due November 6

- Intellectual Property Seminar November 9, 4pm C-215 ESC

- Utah State Graduate Recruiting Fair November 9, 10am-2pm TSC Ballroom

- Weber State Graduate Recruiting Fair November 10, 9am-1pm Union Ballroom

- Westminster/Utah Graduate Recruiting Fair November 11, 10am-2pm Westminster

- BYU Graduate Recuiting Fair November 12, 10am-2pm WSC Ballroom

- UVU Graduate Recruiting Fair November 13, 10am-2pm Grande Ballroom

Ice, when heated, is supposed to melt. That’s why a collection of glaciers in the Southeast Himalayas stymies those who know what they did 9,000 years ago.

COLLEGE PUBLICATIONS

Prof. Dennis Tolley and colleagues from Duke and the National Coun-cil of Spinal Cord Injury Association recently published a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (appearing in July 2009) which investigates the correlation between the level of invest-ment in NIH research with population changes in the risk of specific diseases. They demonstrate a long-term correlation of increases in NIH funding and reductions in national cause specific mortality rates. The economic implications of this are discussed assuming that improved health at later ages will allow projected declines in the rate of growth of the US labor force to be partly offset by a higher rate of labor force participation in the US elderly population due to reduced chron-ic disease risks and functional impairment.

On August 3, at the Annual Joint Statistical Meetings held in Washing-ton DC, William F. Christensen, Professor in the BYU Department of Statistics was presented the 2009 Distinguished Achievement Award by the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and the Environment. The award is presented annually to recognize outstand-ing contributions to the development of methods, issues, concepts, ap-plications, and initiatives of environmental statistics. The citation of the award reads: “For promotion of undergraduate research in environ-mental statistics, outstanding record of collaboration with environmen-tal scientists, innovative research on receptor modeling and pollution source apportionment, and service to the profession.”

 

 

College NEWS statistics

Chemistry and BiochemistryTruong, Tai V.; Nackos, Aaron N.; Murray, Jacolin A.; Kimball, Jon A.; Hawkes, Jason E.; Harvey, Donald J.; Tolley, H. Dennis; Robison, Richard A.; Bartholomew, Calvin H.; Lee, Milton L. Journal of Chromatography A, 2009, 1216, 6852-6857. Sample introduction in gas chromatography using a coiled wire filament.

Farnsowrth, Paul B.; Spencer, Ross L.; Radicic, W. Neil; Taylor, Nicholas; Macedone, Jeffrey; Ma, Haibin. Spectrochimica Acta Part B, 2009, 64, 905-910. A comparison of ion and atom behavior in the first stage of an inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer vacuum interface: Evidence of the effect of an ambipolar electric field.

Spencer, Ross L.; Taylor, Nicholas; Farnsworth, Paul B. Spectrochimica Acta Part B, 2009, 64, 921-924. Comparison of calculated and experimental flow velocities upstream from the sampling cone of an inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer.

Ahmed, Sofia B.; Bentley-Lewis, Rhonda; Hollenberg, Norman K.; Graves, Steven W.; Seely, Ellen W. Hyptertension in Pregnancy, 2009, 28, 243-255. A Comparison of Predicting Equations for Estimating Glomerular Filtration Rate in Pregnancy.

Merrell, Karen; Thulin, Craig D.; Esplin, M. Sean; Graves, Steven W. Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry, 2009, 23, 2685-2696. An integrated serum proteomic approach capable of monitoring the low molecular weight proteome with sequencing of intermediate to large peptides.

Ams, Bridget E.; Jenkins, David M.; Boerio-Goates, Juliana; Morcos, Riham Michelle; Navrotsky, Alexandra; Bozhilov, Krassimir N. American Mineralogist, 2009, 94, 1242-1254. Thermochemistry of a synthetic Na-Mg-rich triple-chain silicate: Determination of thermodynamic variables.

Shirahata, Naoto; Linford, Matthew R.; Furumi, Seiichi; Pei, Lei; Sakka, Yoshio; Gates, Richard J.; Asplund, Matthew C. The Royal Society of Chemistry, 2009, 4684-4686. Laser-derived one-pot synthesis of silicon nanocrystals terminated with organic monolayers.

Henderson, Douglas; Bhuiyan, Lutful B. Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation, 2009, 5, 1985-1989. Simple Expressions for Contact Values of Density Profiles in a Planar Double Layer.

Thomas, Nathn R.; Shumway, Logan S.; Hansen, Lee D. Journal of Food Science, 2009, 74, C513-C518. Quantitative X-Ray Diffraction Determination of α-Lactose Monohydrate and β-Lactose in Chocolate.

Morshed, S. R.; Takahashi, T.; Savage, P. B.; Kambham, N.; Strober, S. Clin. Immunol. 2009, 132, 321-333. b-galactosylceramide alters invariant natural killer T cell function and is effective treatment for lupus.

Yin, N.; Long, X.; Goff, R. D.; Zhou, D.; Cantu, C.; Mattner, J.; Saint Mezard, P.; Teyton, L.; Bendelac, L.; Savage, P. B. ACS Chem. Biol. 2009, 4, 191-197. Alpha anomers of iGb3 and Gb3 stimulate cyotkine production by natural killer T cells.

Kim, H. Y.; Pichavant, M.; Matangkasombut, P.; koh, Y. I.; Savage, P. B.; Dekruyff, R. H.; Umetsu, D. T. J. Immonul. 2009,

182, 3252-3261. The development of airway hyperreactivity in T-bet-deficient mice requires CD1 d-restricted NKT cells.

Monine, M. I.; Posner, R. G.; Savage, P. B.; Faeder, J. R.; Hlavacek, W. S. Biophys. J. 2009, in press. Modeling multivalent ligand-receptor interactions with steric constraints on configurations of cell-surface receptor aggregates.

Yang, W.; Sun, X.; Wang, H.; Woolley, A.T.; Analytical Chemistry, 2009, 81(19), 8230-8235. Integrated Microfluidic Device for Serum Biomarker Quantitation Using Either Standard Addition or a Calibration Curve.

Lunt, B.M.; Linford, M.R.; Proceedings of ODS 2009 (Optical Data Storage), May 10-13, 2009, Proceedings on CD-ROM. Predicting the Reliability of Data on DVD-R Discs.

Lunt, B.M.; Linford, M.R.; Proceedings of International Symposium on Optical Memory (ISOM), October 4-8, 2009. Towards a True Archival-Quality Optical Disc.

Yang, L.; Vail, M.A.; Dadson, A.; Lee, M.L.; Asplund, M.C.; Linford, M.R.; Chemistry of Materials, 2009, 21, 4359-4365. Functionalization of Deuterium- and Hydrogen-Terminated Diamond Particles with Mono- and multilayers of Di-tert-amyl Peroxide and Their Use in Solid Phase Extraction.

Vijayaraghavan, K.; Nikolov, A.; Wasan, D.; Henderson, D.; Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, September 2, 2009, 48, 8180-8185. Foamability of Liquid Particle Suspensions: A Modeling Study.

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Chemistry and Biochemistry (cont.)El Shikh, M.E.M.; El Sayed, R.M.; Tew, J.G., Burton, G.F.; Encyclopedia of Sciences, 2009. Follicular Dendritic Cells (B Lymphocyte Stimulating.

Summers, H.A.; Smith, B.N.; Hansen, L.D.; Journal of Arid Environments, January 1-6, 2009, 73 (1). Comparison of Respiratory and Growth Characteristics of Two Co-occurring Confertifolia (Shadscale).

Computer ScienceMenke, J. and Martinez, T. R., Artificial Neural Network Reduction through Oracle Learning, Intelligent Data Analysis, vol 13, no. 1, pp. 135-149, 2009.

Peterson, A. and Martinez, T. R., Reducing Decision Tree Ensemble Size using Parallel Decision DAGs, International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools, vol. 18, No. 4, pp. 613-620, 2009.

Menke, J. and Martinez, T. R., Improving Supervised Learning by Adapting the Problem to the Learner, International Journal of Neural Systems, vol. 19, no. 1, pp. 1-9, 2009.

“Visualizing Phylogenetic Treespace Using Cartographic Projections”, Kenneth Sundberg, Mark Clement, Quinn Snell, Proceedings of the 7th international workshop on Algorithms in Bioinformatics (WABI), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, September 2009.

“Analysis of Long Branch Extraction”, T. O’Connor, K. Sundberg, H. Carroll, M. Clement, Q. Snell, Proceedings of Bioinformatics & Computational Biology (Biocomp), June 2009.

“Inferring Gene Regulatory Networks from Asynchronous Microarray Data”, David Oviatt, Mark Clement, Quinn Snell, Randall Roper, Proceedings of Bioinformatics & Computational Biology (Biocomp), June 2009.

“The GNUMAP Algorithm: Probabilistic Mapping of Oligonucleotides from Next-Generation Sequencing”, Nathan Clement, Mark Clement, Quinn Snell, Evan Johnson, International Conference on Intellegent Systems for Molecular Biology, June 2009.

“An Open-Source Phylogenetic and Alignment Package”, Hyrum Carroll, Adam Teichert, Jonathan Krein, Kenneth Sundberg, Quinn Snell, International Journal of Bioinformatics Research and Applications (IJBRA), Vol. 5, Issue 3, 2009, pp 349 - 364.

“Similarity Searching Using BLAST”, Kit J. Menlove, Mark Clement, and Keith A. Crandall, chapter 1 in “Bioinformatics for DNA Sequence Analysis, Methods in Molecular Biology”, Humana Press, a part of Springer Science Business Media, Business Media, LLC 2009 DOI 10.1007/978-1-59745-251-9_1

Smith, M., Giraud-Carrier, C. and Purser, N. (2009). Implicit Affinity Networks and Social Capital. Journal of Information Technology and Management, 10(2-3):123-134.

Hawkins, B. and Giraud-Carrier, C. (2009). Ranking Search Results for Translated Content. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration, 242-245.

Sabra Dinerstein, Christophe Giraud-Carrier, Jonathan Dinerstein, and Parris K. Egbert. Fused Multi-modal Deduplication. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Data Mining (DMIN’09), pages 253-259. CSREA Press, 2009.

Geological SciencesHorner, J.R., De Ricqles, A., Padian, K., Scheetz, R.D., 2009. Comparative long bone histology and growth of the “hypsilophodontid” dinosaurs Orodromeus makelai, Dryosaurus altus, and Tenontosaurus tillettii (Ornithischia: Euornithopoda). Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 29 (3): 734-747.

Boyd, C.A., Brown, C.M., Scheetz, R.D., Clark, J.A., 2009. Taxonomic revision of the basal neornithischian taxa Thescelosaurus and Bugensaura. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 29 (3): 758-770.

Britt, B.B., Eberth, D.A., Scheetz, R.D., Greenhalgh, B.W., and Stadtman, K.L., 2009. Taphonomy of debris-flow hosted dinosaur bonebeds at Dalton Wells, Utah (Lower Cretaceous, Cedar Mountain Formation, USA). Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 280, pages 1-22.

Radebaugh, J., 2009. Titan’s sticky dunes? Nature Geoscience 2 (September): 608-9.

MathematicsJ. W. Cannon, W. J. Floyd and W. R. Parry (2009). Subdivision rules and virtual endomorphisms. Geom Dedicata 141: 181-195.

Gus L. W. Hart and Rodney W. Forcade (2009). Generating derivative structures from multilattices: Algorithm and application to hcp alloys. Physical Review B 80: doi: 10.1103/PhysRevB.80.014120.

D. Lerch, O. Wieckhorst, G. L. Hart, R. W. Forcade, and S. Miller (2009). UNCLE: a code for constructing cluster expansions for arbitrary lattices with minimal user-input. Modelling and Simulation in Materials Science and Engineering 17: doi: 10.1088/0965-0393/17/5/055003.

Gus L. W. Hart and Rodney W. Forcade (2009). Algorithm for generating derivative structures. Physical Review B 77: doi: 10.1103/PhysRevB.77.224115.

Wayne Barrett, Ryan Bowcutt, Mark Cutler, Seth Gibelyou, and Kayla Owens (2009). Minimum rank of edge subdivisions of graphs. Electronic Journal of Linear Algebra 18: 530-563.

William Duke and Paul Jenkins (2009). Integral traces of singular values of weak Maass forms. Algebra & Number Theory 2 (5): 573-593.

William Duke and Paul Jenkins (2009). On the Zeros and Coefficients of Certain Weakly Holomorphic Modular Forms. Pure and Applied Mathematics Quarterly 4 (4): 573-593.

R. S. R. Menike, K. L. Kuttler, and M. Shillor (2009). Dynamic Adhesive Contact of a Membrane. Journal for Analysis and its Applications 29: 1-20.

Denise M. Halverson and Dušan Repovš (2009). Detecting codimension one manifold factors with topographicsl techniques. Topology and its Applications 156: 2870-2880.

Panos Papasoglu and Eric Swenson (2009). Boundaries and JSJ decompositions of CAT(0)-groups. Geometric And Functional Analysis 19: 558-590.

Gregory R. Conner, Christopher P. Grant, and Benjamin Webb (2009). Resistance and conductance in structured Zermelo tournaments. Advances in Applied Mathematics 44: 37-52.

Mathematics EducationWalter, J.G., & Hart, J. (2009). Understanding the complexities of student motivations in mathematics learning. Journal of Mathematical Behavior, 28,130-138.

Hendrickson, S., Hilton, S., Bahr, D. (2009). Using the Comprehensive Mathematics Instruction (CMI) framework to analyze a mathematics teaching episode. Utah Mathematics Teacher, 2, 21-26.

Corey, D. (2009). Trends of mathematics achievement in Utah. Utah Mathematics Teacher, 2, 40-52.

Physics and Astronomy“Measurement and simulation of laser-induced fluorescence from nonequilibrium ultracold neutral plasmas,” A. Denning, S. D. Bergeson, and F. Robicheaux,Physical Review A, Vol. 80, page 033415, 2009.

Brian E. Anderson, W. Jack Hughes, and Stephen A. Hambric, (2009) “Grating lobe reduction in transducer arrays through structural filtering of supercritical plates,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 126, p. 612-619.

Brian E. Anderson, Robert A. Guyer, Timothy J. Ulrich, Pierre-Yves Le Bas, Carene Larmat, Michele Griffa, Paul A. Johnson, (2009) “Energy current imaging method for time reversal in elastic media,” Appl. Phys. Lett. 95, 021907.

StatisticsSchlegel, M. E., Mayo, A. L., Nelson, S., Tingey, D., Henderson, R., and Eggett, D. Paleoclimate of the Boise Area, “Idaho from the Last Glacial Maximum to the Present Based on Groundwater H and O Compositions,” Quaternary Research, 71(2), 172-180, (2009).

COLLEGE PUBLICATIONS continued