In the midst of ongoing concerns about the quality of teaching in America, a study by the UA College of Education brings great news -- first-year teachers in Arizona are launching their careers well prepared for their formidable task. A research team of Educational Psychology faculty and graduate students observed new teachers in K-12 classrooms over three years, tracking instructional activities, interactions with students and more. Their findings show that new teachers pass muster, delivering quality education as defined by a widely used, long-vetted evaluation standard. Honored for its insights and importance by the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, the study paves the way for still deeper examination of the factors that drive teacher success.

It's no easy feat to build an acclaimed musical career while turning out wave after wave of exceptional musicians. Such is the legacy of harpist Carrol McLaughlin, who recently added the University Distinguished Professor award to her many honors, including a Senior Specialist Fulbright Award. Hailed as one of the most influential harpists of the 20th century based on recordings, scores and 600+ solo concerts, McLaughlin also created the HarpFusion education model as a UA student in 1978. Emulated worldwide, it teaches the full range of musicianship – performance, composition, engineering, tour management and more – and has sent generations of students to the nation's best graduate programs and conservatories as well as chairs in world-renowned symphonies.

Popular Mechanics magazine has honored NASA’s UA-led Phoenix Mission with a Breakthrough Award for expanding possibilities in science and exploration. Since landing on Mars on May 25, Phoenix has taught us much about our Earth-like neighbor. Scientists recorded snow in the Martian sky. They discovered the soil has a pH like our own oceans, and found proof of both ice and perchlorate in the soil, advancing the possibility that Mars may have once sustained life. And though the looming Martian winter will soon starve the Lander’s solar arrays, Phoenix has at least one more mystery to unveil in the weeks ahead, sending back the first sounds from Mars.

More than 50 years ago, scientists pointed radio telescopes to the sky and found light from objects so distant that they appeared as faint stars, barely detectable. Today we know them as quasars—quasi-stellar-radio-sources—the oldest known galaxies, pulsing with energy from powerful black holes devouring as many as a thousand suns per year. Most are at the fringes of our expanding universe—up to 13 billion light years away—and may hold the key to understanding its earliest eras. Ready to turn that key stands the UA’s Dr. Xiaohui Fan, a global leader in studying these celestial Rosetta stones and the only astronomer to win a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship award.

The UA Department of Pediatrics has been awarded a $44 million, six-year contract to participate in the National Institutes of Health’s National Children’s Study, a major effort to investigate the interaction of genes and the environment on children’s health. This study will follow a representative national sample of 100,000 children from before birth to age 21 to investigate factors that may influence the development of conditions such as autism, cerebral palsy, learning disabilities, birth defects, diabetes, asthma and obesity. The principal investigator for the UA portion of the study is Fernando Martinez, MD, professor of pediatrics and director of the UA’s Arizona Respiratory Center. “I am convinced that this study, if successful, will be remembered for years to come as one of the most important scientific enterprises ever started regarding children’s health,” Dr. Martinez said.

The largest National Science Foundation grant ever received in Arizona was awarded to the UA – $50 million for a five year project called the iPlant Collaborative. Administered by the BIO5 Institute, it will create a global center and computer infrastructure to unite plant scientists, computer scientists and information scientists from around the world to answer questions of global importance. “This project is collaborative – designed by the scientific community, for the community,” says UA plant sciences professor, BIO5 member and iPlant director Richard Jorgensen, “and will change the way we do science.” All iPlant projects will offer programs for school-aged children, undergraduate and graduate students and interested lay people.

A Muscogee Creek and Cherokee from Oklahoma, Tom Holm is a prolific Native American scholar and award-winning UA American Indian Studies professor. He’s published more than 50 articles, books and government reports, even a children’s book on Native American warriors and code talkers in World War II. Now he’s turned to fiction, writing a gritty murder mystery set in 1920s Oklahoma with corrupt lawmen, insatiable businessmen and an oil boom on Indian land. His debut novel is called “The Osage Rose.” “New York Times” best-selling author Margaret Coel says, “Tom Holm has written an engaging debut novel with characters that matter and a story that lingers on after you've turned the last page.“ The book is published by UA Press.

Without small heat shock proteins, we couldn’t survive. Despite their name, these molecules play a much larger role than simply responding to heat stress. They’re critical in our responses to infection, toxins, oxygen deprivation and more. As part of our cellular repair system, they help new proteins form and help dispose of old ones. And researchers understand this complex science thanks largely to professor Elizabeth Vierling in the UA Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics. Vierling’s early research on these under-studied molecules expanded the field dramatically, earning her a Guggenheim Fellowship, the prestigious Humboldt Senior Research Fellowship, continuous funding from the NIH and NSF and now, a Regents’ Professorship, the highest honor conferred on faculty by The University of Arizona.

Insecticides kill pests. Simple, right? Wrong. Even as they kill, insecticides drive evolution, because only toxin-resistant individuals survive and reproduce. This accelerated evolution means that when insecticides are overused they can quickly become useless. Conundrums like this keep Dave Crowder busy. A Ph.D. candidate in the UA's Entomology Program, Crowder uses mathematical models and experiments to study how crop-destroying whitefly populations might dwindle or thrive in various farming scenarios. His research helps determine how best to control these and other pests and is helping to rank UA entomology #2 among all major U.S. research universities in the most recent Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index.

Christopher A. Lewicki’s life revolves around Mars. After graduating from the UA, he started working day and night for two years on the phenomenally successful Mars Rover landings – integrating 46 different motors, overseeing 3 a.m. practice landings and keeping 10,000 wiring connections and miles of cable straight. Now he is NASA’s flight system engineer for the Phoenix Mars Scout Mission, the UA’s largest-ever research endeavor, headed by Peter Smith of the UA Lunar and Planetary Lab. This Mars-obsessed UA aerospace engineering grad is “a force of good on our project,” Smith said.

Both the UA men’s and women’s swim teams made a big splash this year, winning their first national championships on back-to-back weekends. Then several team members competed in the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, including Lacey Nymeyer, who scored a silver medal. On Wednesday, November 12, the champion Wildcats met President George W. Bush in the White House. They toured the nation’s capitol, were photographed with the president and attended a celebratory dinner with UA alumni and representatives of Arizona’s Congressional delegation. True to form, their eventful day ended back in the pool for practice.

Teamwork pays off, especially when it’s The University of Arizona leading a mission to Mars. The UA won the 2008 Arizona Governor's Innovator of the Year Award in the academia category for leading NASA's Phoenix Mars Mission. The University of Arizona’s entire team of scientists, engineers and students who ran the mission from Tucson share credit for the award, which recognizes excellence in innovative technological advancement. The UA’s teamwork also came into play successfully with mission partners Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA, Lockheed Martin Space Systems, and the Canadian Space Agency. The Phoenix Mars Mission is the first university-led Mars mission and showcased The University of Arizona’s leadership in planetary exploration.