Schwabe Receives Fellowship

Kurt Schwabe, associate professor of environmental and natural resource economics from the Department of Environmental Sciences, recently was awarded a Flagship Fellowship by Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization. The fellowships are available for distinguished researchers to work for a period of time, generally up to six months, on a variety of issues of interest to the Australian government.

Schwabe will work in Australia’s Water for a Healthy Country Flagship.

He will collaborate with Australian researchers to help accelerate their research at the interface between economics, policy and water systems.

The Australian government has set aside more than $1 billion to address the salinity and drainage issues related to its irrigated agricultural production. The agricultural issues Australia faces are fairly similar to those afflicting California. Both are semi-arid and highly dependent upon irrigation for their agricultural production.

At UCR, Schwabe researches alternative strategies for pollution control and the valuation of environmental and natural resources. He leaves for Australia in August.

Zaera Named Editor of Journal

Francisco Zaera, professor of chemistry, has been appointed senior editor of The Journal of Physical Chemistry. His appointment will begin in early 2008. At UCR, Zaera’s research focuses on understanding the mechanism of surface reactions at the molecular level. Zaera is a fellow of the American Vacuum Society and is the recipient of the Humboldt Research Award as well as the Paul H. Emmett Award in Fundamental Catalysis.

Cold on the Trail

Assistant Professor of Environmental Sciences Brian Lanoil is looking at a really cold place. It’s a dark place too, with little to eat.

It's a Great Lakes-size body of water in the middle of Antarctica where microorganisms defy the odds and survive. Lanoil wants to know how.

The goal is to reconstruct the genomes of the microorganisms that live in the lake in order to find clues to how they have been able to withstand the isolated, harsh conditions for at least 1.5 million years. The lake is estimated to have been buried under ice for at least 15 million years.

With a two-year, $481,000 National Science Foundation grant, part of a special Congressional appropriation in support of the International Polar Year (IPY), Lanoil will work with colleagues at the University of Delaware and at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. They will compare their results with a similar study carried out at the Russian Academy of Sciences.

The IPY, which starts in March, is an international scientific campaign to learn more about polar science, to improve understanding of the critical role of the polar regions in global processes, and to educate students, teachers, and the public about these regions and their importance to global systems. The first IPY, in 1957, laid the basis for much of what we know today about the effects of polar regions on global climate and helped establish the U.S. presence in Antarctica.

Lanoil expects to find minimal genetic diversity among the microbes and to find features, such as super-efficient metabolisms and other genetic adaptations that allow them to live under extremely adverse conditions.

Professors Improve Retention, Attract Scholarships

Keeping students in the demanding fields of engineering motivated has always been a tough task.

So when Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering Sheldon Tan and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering Frank Vahid successfully improved engineering student retention at UCR it attracted some attention.

Their retention efforts have been funded by a grant from the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) and recently attracted the attention of the Verizon Foundation, which will augment the program with four scholarships for undergraduates studying electrical engineering.

The scholarship recipients will work with the students involved in the SIA program on events, programs and mentoring activities designed to create a sense of community.

Vahid and Tan's SIA program has concentrated on nurturing social activity among students, and on non-course related interactions between students and faculty.

These factors have proven to be critical in retaining students, particularly those who are the first in their families to attend college.

Other approaches under Vahid and Tan's program include group projects, a Web-based system linking freshmen to one another, and meetings to teach study habits and success strategies.

In the last year, retention rose from 55 percent to 62 percent, and the number of women in the program increased from 7.8 percent to 16.7 percent.