Spotlight - Office of the Provost - University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

Faculty Spotlights and Student Achievements

Faculty Spotlights

Tim Shea
Wineski, Kurt
Owens, Peter
Notaros, Branislav
Koot, Gerard
Kamm, Lew
Hirshfeld, Al
Buck, John

Prof. Tim Shea of the Charlton College of Business, uses 1960s VW for 7,000 kilometer trek across Africa. Read the press release...

Kurt Wineski receives a First Prize at the Wnter Jjuried Show. Kurt Wisneski received a First Prize in Printmaking in the Wnter Jjuried Show, The Art Complex, Duxbury, MA. (January to April 2004)

Branislav Notaros receives the 2005 Microwave Prize from the Microwave Theory and Techniques Society:

Branislav Notaros, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer
Engineering, was named the recipient of the 2005 Microwave Prize. This is the best-paper award by the Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (MTT-S) of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) granted for a paper published in the IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques. The winning paper is entitled "Higher Order Hierarchical Curved Hexahedral Vector Finite Elements for Electromagnetic Modeling" (March 2003, Vol.51). The award will be presented on June 15, 2005 at the MTT-S Awards Banquet as a part of the 2005 IEEE MTT-S International Microwave Symposium in Long Beach, California. The Microwave Prize is considered the highest and most competitive scientific/technical award in the microwave area worldwide.

Peter Owens releases "Oil and Chemical Spills":

Oil and Chemical Spills by Peter Owens is a recently published book targeted to young adult readers that takes a close look at major oil and chemical spills over the last forty years and explores the dangers that threaten the future of the world's environment. Lucent Books, 2004. Dr. Owens is the Associate Director of the M.A. in Professional Writing Program, and is the author of Rips, a novel, several nationally award-winning software programs, and a widely published journalist. He is currently writing a nonfiction book on teenage obesity and a fiction collection involving his own ceramic sculptings of historically important small boats and short stories about them.

Lew Kamm receives his 7th national award for excellence in teaching and scholarship:

Lew Kamm, Chancellor Professor of French Literature and Computer Science, has received his 7th national award for excellence in teaching and scholarship in a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Kamm will again be a seminar director in the 2005 NEH Program of Summer Seminars for Teachers. The seminar, which will be hosted at UMass Dartmouth, will focus on French literature, art, and film through the prism of Emile Zola's Germinal.

Al Hirshfeld receives a major writing prize in a worldwide competition sponsored by the Templeton Foundation:

Al Hirshfeld, Professor of Physics, received a major writing prize in a worldwide competition sponsored by the Templeton Foundation. The essay, on the 19th century physicist Michael Faraday, was one of four runners-up to the grand prize winner in a field of some 7,300 entries. Announcement of the award winners will appear shortly in Newsweek, the New York Times, and the New Yorker magazine. The winning essays and a description of the competition can be found on the Web at www.powerofpurpose.org

Gerard Koot receives a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities:

Gerard Koot, Professor of History received a a $134,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to conduct a five week Summer Seminar for School Teachers on “The Dutch Republic and Britain: The Making of a European World Economy,” to be offered at the Historical Research Institute in London and the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies in Wassenaar in 2005.

John Buck receives the "Passive Sonar Performance Limits from Information Theory" grant:

John Buck received a three-year $200,000 grant from the Office of Naval Research in October 2004. Dr. Buck joined the faculty of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth where he is currently a tenured associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1996. He also holds a joint appointment in the School for Marine Science and Technology (SMAST). His research interests include signal processing, underwater acoustics, and marine mammal bioacoustics. The title of this grant is Passive Sonar Performance Limits from Information Theory. More information concerning this grant will be provided at a later time.

Valerie Amaral of Acushnet was crowned Miss Massachusetts 2007 on Saturday, June 23 at the Bristol Community College Arts Center. Read the press release...

Jessica Gama ('07) is a winner in the New England area Students as Scholars Program:

Gama received Honorable Mention for her paper, "'Without Ever Leaving the Ground, She Could Fly': Ecofeminism and Soul Fulfillment in Toni Morrison's Pilate" (faculty sponsor, Professor Jen Riley, English/Women's Studies).

Roochi Chopra has been awarded an NSF scholarship of $30,000:

Ms. Roochi Chopra got her B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering (EE) in December 2003 and started working on her M.S. degree in EE this past January. Her advisor is Steven Nardone.

She has been awarded a highly competitive NSF scholarship of $30,000 per year for 3 years (which can be spent over 5 years). For the UMASS system, there were 2 awards: 1 for UMass Amherst in Mechanical Engineering and 1 for UMass Dartmouth in Electrical Engineering. Nationwide, there were 47 awards for Electrical Engineering.

View list of recipients at: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/gradawards/gf04awd.doc (Word document)

Kai Zhang receives the 2004 Environmental Chemistry Graduate Student Award:

Kai Zhang, a chemistry/biochemistry graduate student has just received "2004 Environmental Chemistry Graduate Student Award" from American Chemical Society due to his outstanding research in environmental chemistry and course work. He is the second graduate student at our school received this honor. The first student received this award at our Department is Jian Zhan in 2002.

Laura Garner publishes "I Ain't Superstitious":

Laura Garner, a student in the Masters in Professional Writing program, has just published her second novel, I Ain't Superstitious, with Five Star Press. Her first novel, Ain't Nobody's Bizness was published in hardcover in 2002 and released in paperback last year. She is currently working on her third novel.

Recently, the Cape Cod Times published a feature story about Laura. http://www.capecodonline.com/cctimes/garner1.htm

Mass High Tech Whiz Kid Nomination: UMass Dartmouth Electrical Engineering:

Nominations for top student:
Adam J. Carvalho
Thomas P. Hurst
Daniel P. Hoeg

Runners-Up:
Justin P. Koster, Jonathan E. Cornell, Christopher J. Yafrate, Keith M. Allen, Geoffrey Faucher, Daniel Boardman.

Graduate student in Psychology receives a Sigma Xi grant to support her thesis work

In December 2003, Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society awarded Rebecca Von Der Heide a grant-in-aid in support of her research: "Event-Related Potential Correlates of Interhemispheric Interaction in Adults with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder".This money will be used to fund participant testing. More...

Advanced Marketing Research students take on challenging projects for the Spring 04' Semester:

One team of students (Jessica Barron, Augusta Pratt, Christine Flahive, Daniel Cohen, Michael Marcoux, Andrea Amaral) enrolled in the Advanced Marketing Research class will be assigned to the Southcoast Tourism Committee, headed by Paul Vigeant, Associate Vice Chancellor of UMass Dartmouth. The team will access the demand for tourism in the southcoast. The ultimate objective is to create a sense of the southcoast as a tourism destination through the use of branding and positioning.

The second team (Theresa Sousa, Lindsey Arruda, Jeff Beland, Dara Chhim, Kerry O'Neil) will be assigned to Peter Jerome of New Harbour, Inc. Mr. Jerome has invented a new home goods product and has enlisted the assistance of the advanced class to access the potential demand. The product will be tested for price points and preferred channels of distribution.

Jamielee Croteau, Jr/Sr Psychology Major, was awarded the Chancellor's Outstanding Woman Award for a Student or Alumni.

Jamielee is entering her fourth year at the WRC. She started as a semi-shy office assistant, until she auditioned for the cast of The Vagina Monologues in 2002, winning a spot in the Wear & Say piece. She has attended, helped organize, and influenced other students' attendance at many events during the past three years. In her third year she decided to be Sex Educator. In order to successfully educate her peers, much research was required. Eventually she organized fun and informative 'Sex Talks' in the dorms. Three successful events were held during the 2003 Spring semester. Jamielee is also a cofounder of the Motherless Daughters Support Group, which she hopes to learn from and teach others the importance of "keepin' on."

Contact Info:

Email: webdevelopment@umassd.edu - UMass Dartmouth Web Development Team