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| NEWS FROM 2021 |
| Chancellor visits Chamberlin |
2021 November 17 — I was delighted to give DU Chancellor Jeremy Haefner a tour of DU's historic Chamberlin Observatory as part of the Homecoming Week and inaugural festivities earlier this month. We had a great conversation about Chamberlin's past and future role as a focal point for education and exploration for Denver and DU that you can watch here. Photos from the visit were also featured on Chancellor Haefner's Instagram.   |
Backyard science |
| 2021 July 21 — How do artificial lights affect the plants in our backyards? I found out part of the answer, along with 2 biologist colleagues and a group of middle-school collaborators! For the past several years, I and my colleagues Robin Tinghitella and Shannon Murphy have organized a summer STEM camp for middle-school girls at DU, called DU SciTech. In 2019 we worked with the campers to design an experiment testing the effect of streetlights on the nearby plant species in urban alleys. The girls collected data and did some initial analysis, and my colleagues and I, along with postdoc Dhaval Vyas, wrote a journal article about the results. Our paper has just been published in Ecology and Evolution, with 9 campers as co-authors! We were also invited to write a general-public-level blog post about our study and the camp. Hooray for community-based science! Light pollution is an issue that affects all of us and connects with many scientific disciplines, so it's a great topic for our camp to focus on. Unfortunately we haven't been able to run the DU SciTech camp since 2019 because of funding issues and COVID. We're hoping to be back next year with some follow-up projects! Update, 9/23/21: This research has been featured in a Scientific American article! |
| Leveling up |
| 2021 June 9 — I just got the news that my promotion to full professor was approved, effective September 1! I'm delighted and very grateful to all the wonderful students, colleagues, and mentors (as well as family and friends) who have supported me throughout my career. I'm looking forward to taking on new roles that allow me to provide more of this support to others. One of these new roles will be the interim director of DU's historic Chamberlin Observatory upon the upcoming retirement of my colleague Prof. Bob Stencel. Dr. Bob has been key to the success of this important facility for many years, and I'm honored to be carrying on the work he started. In cooperation with the Denver Astronomical Society, we hope to be restarting public events at the observatory soon! |