Guntram Herb (Geography) has been accepted to the Digital Native American and Indigenous Studies workshop that will take place in May at Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis. This award covers all expenses of the workshop, including travel. The workshop will be instrumental for the development of new digital teaching modules on indigenous borderlands.

Noah Graham (Physics), a 2005 recipient of the Cottrell College Science Award, has been named a Cottrell Scholar by the Research Corporation, a private foundation that aids basic research in the physical sciences. This program is highly selective–only 5% of Cottrell College Science Award recipients since 1994 have been invited to join this stellar group. This honor places Noah in a national community of outstanding scholar-educators who produce significant research and educational outcomes and makes him eligible for unique grant opportunities. Congratulations Noah!

Frank Winkler (Emeritus Professor, Physics) has been awarded funding from the NASA-funded Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) for his role in a collaborative research project titled What Makes Radio-detected and Optically-detected Supernova Remnants in NGC6946 Different? The project, carried out in collaboration with colleagues from STScI, Johns Hopkins University, and Hofstra University, will use new observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, in conjunction with existing data from Hubble, from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, from optical telescopes at Kitt Peak in Arizona and Mauna Kea in Hawaii, and  from the Jansky Very Large Array radio telescope in New Mexico. The study will focus on understanding the remnants of exploded stars in the “Fireworks Galaxy,” so named because it has produced more supernovae (9) in the past century than any other known galaxy. The researchers hope that their work will shed new light on the cycle through which stars are born, live, die spectacularly as supernovae, and disperse matter that will eventually become the raw material for new stars.

Eilat Glikman (Physics) has been awarded a grant from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy on behalf of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, to lead a research project titled Testing the Triggering Mechanism for Luminous, Radio-Quiet Red Quasars in the Clearing Phase: A Comparison to Radio-Loud Red Quasars. This three year project, involving collaborators from Yale University, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, the University of California San Diego, and the Leibniz Institute of Astrophysics in Potsdam, Germany, is based on observations of radio-quiet dust-reddened quasars and involves a study of the relationship between radio emission and host galaxy morphology. Evidence for mergers would support a picture in which luminous quasars and galaxies co-evolve independent of their radio properties; whereas the absence of mergers would link radio emission to mergers and require an alternate explanation for the extreme properties of these radio-quiet dust-reddened quasars. If mergers do not dominate the evolution of radio-quiet quasars, then a new paradigm for black hole and galaxy growth will need to be established.