April 2011 — The City of Grand Prairie, Texas is implementing two environmental management projects designed to create and preserve riparian habitat on the grounds of the Grand Prairie Landfill and in floodplains along the Trinity River. Working with a grant from the City in collaboration with Grand Prairie personnel, UNT wetland plant ecologist Kevin Stevens, research scientist Joe Snow, and several MSc students will develop strategies to safeguard the ecological health of the wetlands.
Landfills are examples of places where humans have aggressively altered the land. A conscious re-construction of the affected zones is one approach that can stimulate the ecosystem to recover and function at a high level of ecological performance. Two wetland mitigation areas are at stake, totaling 8 acres. Planting and nurturing a diverse native plant community is key to the plan. Read more
April 2011 — Greater access to one of our nation’s most tumultuous periods will soon be at the end of a Google search. Under the guidance of Associate Dean Cathy Nelson Hartman, the University of North Texas Libraries plan to digitize and provide online access to a group of UNT collections from the Civil War and Reconstruction periods. Researchers, history connoisseurs, and the general public can view the collections through the Portal to Texas History, a digital database composed of newspapers, photographs, letters, maps and uniquely Texan historical materials, from prehistory to the present day. Read more
March 2011 — Ohad Shemmer, assistant professor of physics, received a $28,645 grant from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology for the project, “Black Hole Growth and Star Formation in the Early Universe: z=4.8 Sample.” The study will provide flux measurements on the star formation rates of 40 quasars, which will be used to establish important correlations between star formations, black-hole mass and accretion rates. The grant is part of Shemmer’s ongoing research of black holes in collaboration with an international team of astronomers.
Shemmer and fellow researchers have identified the earliest known epoch of fast growth of the supermassive black holes in outer space, coming a step closer to understanding the mysteries of the universe.
Shemmer said this discovery is a “missing link” between black holes observed in galaxies today and the first black holes formed due to the explosion of the first stars. A black hole is an extremely dense, massive object which can form in the aftermath of the explosion of a massive star, or a supernova. Its gravitational field is so intense that no matter or electromagnetic radiation can escape. Most galaxies in the universe, including the Milky Way, harbor supermassive black holes in their centers that vary in mass from about one million to about 10 billion times the mass of the sun. Read more
March 2011 — New aircraft are designed to be more aerodynamic so they can travel longer distances, especially as fuel economy becomes a consideration. The physical form of the vehicle is one factor that affects flight performance, and the materials used in the design is another. The exterior panels of an aircraft’s shell, for example, are increasingly made from lightweight and composite materials. But how well do these lighter materials withstand weather conditions such as extreme wind, humidity and temperatures?
Triumph Aerostructures, the aerospace leader formerly known as Vought Aircraft Industries, Inc., has selected UNT to conduct principal tests on its composite aircraft panels to gage durability and performance. Nandika D’Souza, professor of materials science and engineering, is the recipient of a grant award from the corporation and will lead the research experiments with the support of graduate students from her lab. D’Souza says, “The composite panels are subjected to harsh conditions to deliberately accelerate damage. The tests help us conduct structural analysis of the materials.” One test will study the effects of water on the panels to learn how added moisture, including humidity, contributes to weight. Other tests include compression, tension, bending, fatigue, creep and stress relaxation measurements. The implications for the research are potentially far reaching; results could help designers improve future materials.
D’Souza’s research team will use state-of-the-art UNT facilities to conduct the range of tests, including the Polymer Mechanical and Rheology Laboratory and the Center for Advanced Research and Technology, both of which offer a sophisticated assortment of instruments — from electron microscopy tools and imaging cameras to vacuum ovens and humidity chambers.
January 2011 — The Semiconductor Research Corporation is funding the work of UNT professor of chemistry, Jeffry Kelber and collaborator Peter Dowben, a physicist with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, for their project, Graphene Heterostructures for Logic and Interconnects; CVD Growth and Interface Chemistry. The researchers have discovered a novel way to grow graphene, a carbon based film used in high-tech applications, which could significantly influence the design of integrated circuits and the manufacture of ultrafast, electronic devices.
Conventional methods using graphene chemistry involve the physical transfer of individual graphene sheets from graphite to SiO2 or other insulating surfaces — an impractical approach that can affect device fabrication and lead to inhomogeneous doping, or weakened conductivity. Kelber and Dowben grow the graphene directly on an electronically insulating substrate using a process called chemical vapor deposition (CVD). This ‘growth chemistry’ approach eliminates the transfer step altogether and is a far more efficient way to resource its properties. Additionally, the researchers find that, by growing graphene on a Magnesium Oxide (MgO) substrate, they achieve a superior interface because the film displays and maintains a band gap — essential for suitable Logic Device applications.
The two researchers will test graphene’s ability to hold a band gap in the presence of external, electrical fields in combination with various surface structures to expand current knowledge of film synthesis and growth to other substrates for an emerging variety of nanoelectronic device applications.
January 2011 — University of North Texas professor and researcher Dr. Pudur Jagadeeswaran has been awarded $200,000 by the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) to fund research that will determine if zebrafish can be used to develop an early detection method for prostate cancer. The grant was one of 52 grants CPRIT awarded to 13 institutions in Texas, totaling more than $40 million in cancer research funding.
Prostate cancer is the second most common cause of cancer deaths in men, but currently there is no test available to detect prostate cancer in its early stages. The two-year research project seeks to develop a test that can detect prostate cancer in its early stages and can be treated with chemotherapy. Read more
January 2011 — Juneteenth is an emancipation celebration of freedom for African Americans that originated in Texas and the Southwest and is observed in nearly every state as well as Washington, D.C. Its roots in Texas go back 143 years, yet no one has written a scholarly history of this uniquely Texan commemoration and its emergence as a national celebration.
Department of History professor, Dr. Elizabeth H. Turner, has received a $20,000 fellowship award from the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University to research and write a book about the evolution of Juneteenth and its significance in the collective memory of African American citizens. Turner seeks to contextualize the celebration’s place in African American arts and culture by exploring its symbolic role in the nation’s commitment to end slavery and white supremacy and as a source of inspiration for black Americans that helped fuel the national civil rights movement and remind citizens of their rights to equal opportunities.
Early Juneteenth gatherings began with church services, sermons, hymns, prayers, and community parades and feasts and evolved to include the 1968 Poor People’s March on Washington, civil rights conferences, and historical exhibitions with artifacts, literature and music depicting “Negro progress since emancipation.” Juneteenth is observed by many states today as an official holiday and as a national and international phenomenon of cultural and political influence, with celebrations of music, plays, dance and other affirmations of African American heritage.
The American Psychological Association (APA) has selected Dick Rogers, Regents Professor of Psychology at UNT, as the recipient of the 2011 Award for Distinguished Contributions to Research in Public Policy. This is the 3rd time in APA history for a recipient to be honored with Distinguished Awards in both Applied Research (2008) and Public Policy (2011).
This award honors a psychologist who has made a distinguished empirical and/or theoretical contribution to research in public policy, either through a single extraordinary achievement or a lifetime of work dedicated to informing public policy through psychological understanding. Rogers’ research on juveniles’ comprehension of the Miranda warnings, for example, led to the American Bar Association recommending the creation of a policy to develop simplified Miranda warning language.
Rogers began his career at UNT in 1991. He served as director of clinical training at UNT from 1992-1996. As a prolific writer with more than 140 refereed articles, Rogers has published six books focusing on clinical and forensic practice, and three psychological measures for the evaluation of malingering (feigning mental illness), insanity, and competency to stand trial.
October 2010 — Territorial disputes over valuable land or waters can potentially lead to war between countries. Oil. Minerals. Water rights. Land with a strategic defense position — the factors that make territory valuable to one group or the other are diverse, but more than half of the world's disagreements over territory have been managed without armed conflict. UNT political scientist, Paul Hensel, studies these disagreements to understand how new issues emerge and what strategies succeed in resolving them and why. Hensel sees conflict management as an under scrutinized area that can shed light on broader patterns of dispute and negotiation, with potential use for scholarship, policymaking and peace initiatives. Read more
The University of North Texas will build one of the most advanced materials analysis laboratories at any university when it begins construction of its new Nanofabrication Analysis and Research Facility in November at UNT's Discovery Park .
The new $6 million facility will integrate UNT's Center for Advanced Research and Technology (CART) with a new clean room that will allow scientists to synthesize and process samples of new materials and then test and examine them at the molecular and atomic levels using CART's 27 state-of-the-art instruments and microscopes. CART is one of the nation's most extensive facilities for powerful materials characterization and analysis.
The project, titled, Modernization of Multi-scale Characterization, Analysis, and Synthesis Facility for Materials and Devices: Remote Access, Visualization, and Public Engagement, received $1,046,053 in award funds from the National Science Foundation. "The opportunity to co-locate the equipment housed in the Center for Advanced Research and Technology with a new clean room is a major step toward integrating world class research into our institution," said Vish Prasad, principal investigator on the project and vice president of research for UNT. "While we have a legacy of excellence in science, our engineering and technology programs are young enough that we can reshape them into leading research centers, giving our students, our faculty and our science community opportunities to develop new technologies for a wide range of applications." Read more
The CAREER award is the most prestigious grant that the National Science Foundation gives to young investigators, and UNT assistant professor, Cheng Yu, Department of Engineering Technology, is among the 2010 recipients. The grant is given in support of early research that effectively integrates development activities with educational outreach.
Yu’s project, ‘Comprehensive Research on Cold-Formed Steel Sheathed Shear Walls’ studies the strength of walls in buildings and structural design. Yu proposes an improved, systematic testing method to study cold-formed steel walls in mid to low-rise buildings under realistic loading conditions. This research has important consequences for public safety; buildings can be better designed to distribute load for strength and reliability and deter disasters such as earthquakes or hurricanes. Designing safer, improved structures will additionally make the US building industry more competitive, create jobs, and promote economic recovery.
The educational component to Yu’s work involves developing a course curriculum, textbook and associated lab manual with the latest design theories for use by educators, students and professionals. Yu is also initiating a nationwide student competition on CFS structural design and innovation in collaboration with professional societies and other universities. Together these strategies will nationally promote education on CFS structures.
Six UNT faculty have received CAREER awards to date: Rada Mihalcea, Mohammed Omary, Pamela Padilla, Srinivasan Srivilliputhur, Angela Wilson, and now Cheng Yu. The CAREER awards hold additional promise in that the most commendable of the new award recipients could be nominated by NSF for the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed by the United States Government on scientists and engineers beginning their independent careers. Rada Mihalcea is the first UNT CAREER recipient to receive this distinction.
September, 2010 — The National Science Foundation supports research projects at various stages of development. One competitive funding category is EAGER: Early-concept Grants for Exploratory Research. These grants are for projects considered to be “high risk high payoff” in that the work might be untested or in the early stages of exploration but have potential to yield innovative, transformative results.
UNT electrical engineering assistant professor, Yan Wan, has received an EAGER award for her study on automated adaptation of infrastructure network dynamics. Electrical power systems, transportation networks, and communication networks all rely on the efficient and rapid computation capabilities of computers. Yet what if an environmental impact of some kind should disturb these networks? Most studies on graphical modeling constructs are limiting in their ability to interpret and distribute dynamic environmental impact. With her project, Collaborative Research: Stochastic Environmental-Impact Modeling for Automated Decision-Making in Infrastructure Networks: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach, Wan seeks to design an entirely new modeling framework with a unique suite of stochastic controls and analytical tools that can anticipate the consequences of different environmental scenarios, correlate data and improve the parameters of response and decision support. This work has promising ramifications for society as well as computer-science related work.
September 20, 2010 — Wes Borden, the Robert A. Welch Professor of Chemistry at the University of North Texas, has received the James Flack Norris Award in Physical Organic Chemistry, one of the American Chemical Society’s most prestigious honors.
The award, established in 1963 to encourage and reward outstanding contributions to physical organic chemistry, will be presented to Borden at the national meeting of the ACS in Anaheim, Calif., next spring.
In his research, Borden uses a form of quantum mechanics called molecular orbital theory to carry out calculations designed to further the understanding of the structures and reactions of organic molecules. “I am honored to have my name added to the list of previous winners, because it contains the names of the scientists who have been the world’s most respected physical organic chemists during the past 45 years,” Borden said. Read more
September, 2010 — Sponsored by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, the competitive program funds basic research by faculty in Texas institutions of higher education for one or more targeted areas in science and engineering.
Billy Buckles, PI and professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and Co-PI Kamesh Namuduri in the Department of Electrical Engineering, received $150,000 for their project, Adding Value to Sparse LiDAR Elevation Data. This project uses low density, laser-derived data, LiDAR, in combination with visual imagery to produce large-scale, 3D elevation maps of flood plains. LiDAR data have potential to be effective in disaster management programs, particularly floods, with additional applications for construction projects such as roadways, railways, oil and gas pipelines, communication networks and ports.
The second UNT project is for Hybrid Nanocomposite High-k Dielectric Flexible Films for Semiconductor Application by chemistry professor and PI, Oliver Chyan. A high-profile goal in the field of materials science is to create advanced, inexpensive and flexible organic semiconductors that can replace the inorganic, primarily silicon based, materials. With funding of $63,850, Chyan explores the potential of ‘high k’ materials and the development of much needed flexible, high k gate dielectrics to improve carrier mobility and operating power.
August 2010 - Assistant Professor and PI, Stephen Cooke, Department of Chemistry, seeks to advance the field of heavy metal chemistry with his study in high resolution, microwave spectroscopy. The Department of Energy has awarded $65,000 per year for three years for the project: Experimentally characterizing the electronic structures of f-electron systems using advanced high resolution Fourier transform microwave spectroscopies. Cooke will study the rotational spectra of prototypical heavy metal-containing systems to determine the contribution of f-electrons to chemical bonding.
August, 2010 – “What do you do with too much stuff in the digital age?” asks Andrew Torget, assistant professor in the Department of History. Historians, such as Torget, and humanists in general, must address this conundrum as they navigate the relatively uncharted terrain of digital scholarship.
Torget explains that when historians typically do research, it involves reading everything you can find on a subject. The bottom line is access. But how do you sift through 200,000 pages of newspapers from the NEH’s Chronicling America project? “There’s far too much information to review — turning every single page by hand — you cannot do this,” Torget says. “So the challenge is: How can you deal with this kind of scale to find meaningful patterns?”
The Office of Digital Humanities, a division of the National Endowment for the Humanities, is committed to helping scholars advance research in this area. Torget, PI, and Co-PI, Rada Mihalcea, associate professor of computer science and engineering’ received a $50,000 start up grant, Mapping Historical Texts: Combining Text-mining & Geo-visualization to Unlock the Research Potential of Historical Newspapers, which will develop search models combining text-mining and geospatial mapping that can effectively help scholars research large-scale collections of digitized historical newspapers. The project will use digitized texts from the NEH funded, Chronicling America, the national digital newspaper archive project.
Read an interview with Torget to learn more about this project
August, 2010 – The United States emergency management community has developed effective ways of moving large numbers of people away from a crisis endangered area, as in the case of Hurricane Katrina, but little guidance exists for evacuees or the communities that harbor them once they’ve been relocated, particularly if the relocation lasts for an extended period of time. James Kendra, Principal Investigator and associate professor in the Department of Public Administration (DPA), and Sudha Arlikatti, assistant professor and senior researcher in DPA, explore the consequences of long-term, mass invacuations in their NSF funded, Rapid Collaborative project titled, The Forgotten Aspects of Evacuation: Mass Evacuee Processing and Care by Host Communities Following the Haiti Earthquake. Read more
August, 2010 - Two UNT professors are pooling their interests and respective areas of expertise to research the development of a regional response plan that can provide necessary health services to a population in the event of bio-emergencies. Computer Science and Engineering associate professor, Armin R. Mikler (Principal Investigator) and Geography assistant professor, Chetan Tiwari (Co-PI) have been awarded a $429,608 National Institutes of Health (NIH) Stimulus grant for their project, A Computational Framework for assessing the Feasibility of Bio-Emergency Response Plans. The team seeks to develop a response plan based on the establishment and placement of service clinics throughout a given region. The clinics serve as points of dispensing (PODs) in emergency scenarios.
The geographic distribution and placement of these clinics is a central query to their research, and multiple factors must be considered. Each region brings different strengths and challenges based on the availability of resources, such as service professionals (e.g., physicians, nurses and clerks) and infrastructure (roads and buildings). The team will use computational methods to combine and assess data from multiple sources — information that will help in the analysis of existing response plans and in determining optimal locations for the clinics. The team will also utilize existing collaborative relationships with public health experts throughout the planning process.
NIH is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. One important difference between this NIH grant and others is that this is a “Stimulus” grant, with federal funding given by the ARRA, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, for the purpose of stimulating the US economy and empowering the nation’s best scientists to discover new cures, advance technology, and solve some of our greatest health challenges. This year ARRA provided an unprecedented level of support to the NIH, with $8.2 billion given in extramural funding. The Center for Scientific Review typically reviews 16,000 applicants in competition for this money. This year there were forty thousand applicants! Out of this number, only 400 university researchers nationwide were accepted! It is an honor that Mikler, Tiwari and team are among the recipients chosen for this prestigious award.
July, 2010 - UNTWISE, a program in the Department of Rehabilitation, Social Work and Addictions at UNT, has been awarded $500,000 by the Division of Rehabilitation Services (DRS) with the Texas Department of Assistive and Rehabilitative Services (DARS) to create an employment online training program for its community rehabilitation providers who work on behalf of persons with disabilities. Dr. Linda Holloway, Chair of the Department of Rehabilitation, Social Work and Addictions, and Martha Garber, Director of Applied Research and Development, serve as Principal Investigators for the grant — one of three recent, substantial awards that the team has secured on behalf of the department.
Well-trained service providers are better able to serve people with disabilities and find employment that matches their interests and skills. A key task that guides the UNTWISE project is to write a curriculum for web-based training in coordination with experts from DARS and the Association of Community Rehabilitation Educators. Training will take place in a learner-centered environment; problem solving and reality based situations will be integrated into the materials, which will include demonstrations, lectures, video clips, reading, homework, quizzes and a final test.
Another task is to write evaluation tools that test providers’ understanding and acquisition of knowledge, skills and abilities in positions such as job coach, manager of program services, and job placements specialist. Certificates and award credits will be provided to staff participants who have successfully completed the courses. Additional plans include developing sustainable web-based, continuing educational training programs.
July, 2010 - The National Science Foundation has provided $147,645 in award funds to Reid Ferring, UNT professor of Geography and PI of the project, Archaeological Investigations at Dmanisi, Republic of Georgia. Ferring has made important discoveries gleaned from his studies there since the early 1990’s. Human skulls that he and colleagues found back then were determined to be from some of the earliest humans who migrated out of Africa. The significance of this is that the age of the fossils — 1.77 million years old — reveals that humans left Africa hundreds of thousands of years earlier than previously thought. The 2010 NSF grant will support excavations in a new part of the site with remains that push back Dmanisi’s first occupations to 1.85 million years ago.
Taphonomic expert and anthropologist, Martha Tappan, University of Minnesota, will join Ferring and record observations on the patterns of butchery of large animals by the early humans at Dmanisi. Her studies and overall collaboration in the excavations, taken together with Ferring’s observations, will be useful in constructing substantive hypotheses about site formation and early human behavior at Dmanisi.
July, 2010 - The National Science Foundation has awarded a $208,868 grant to Dr. Narendra Dahotre, chair of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of North Texas, for a project that will seek to alter the microstructure of metallic glasses so that they can be used in commercial applications.
The objective of the three-year research project is to develop a new class of metallic glasses by increasing its strength and energy efficiency using laser-based technology. Possible uses include replacing steel cores used in electric transformers with the metallic glasses for higher efficiencies.
The project is a collaborative effort with Dr. Sandip Harimkar of Oklahoma State University, who also has received separate funding of $188,521.
In addition, Dahotre has been named to the 2010 Class of Fellows of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers, a professional organization that promotes manufacturing knowledge and education. Read more
June 8, 2010 - Department of Mathematics professor and PI, Su Gao, and fellow mathematics professors and Co-PI’s, Steve Jackson, Dan Mauldin, and Mariusz Urbanski, have received a $1,507,481.00 grant from the National Science Foundation to establish the first Research Training Group in logic and dynamics at the University of North Texas. The formalization of this group builds on successful collaborations among its members that have taken place over many years in research as well as the teaching and training of post docs, graduate students and undergraduate students. Faculty research represents a unique blend between the areas of logic and dynamics with expertise ranging from descriptive set theory and ergodic theory to definable equivalence relations and infinite iterated function systems. The project is expected to have a substantive impact on the improvement of mathematics research, education, and training at the university and beyond.
May 24, 2010 – PI and professor of Linguistics and Technical Communication, Sadaf Munshi, has been awarded $163,000 by the National Science Foundation to create an Archive of annotated Burushaski Texts for her two-year project, Documenting Endangered Languages. Burushaki is a language isolate, meaning it alludes taxonomic classification and is not known to be related to any other language in the world. Professor Munshi will coordinate the collection of data in Pakistan and India to create an archive of 15-20 hours of high quality, digitized audio and video recordings of Burushaski oral literature in different, significantly threatened, regional varieties, viz., Hunza, Nagar, and Yasin in Pakistan and Srinagar in India. The archive will include stories and legends, historical accounts, personal narratives, formal speeches, conversations, poems, and speaker-to-speaker discussion of data. Munshi intends this collection to be the springboard for pedagogical materials that will promote native language literacy. The documentation materials will be archived at the University of North Texas Digital Collections Library.
May 14, 2010 - The National Science Foundation has awarded $80,000 for the project, REU Site: Civil Conflict Management and Peace Science. Under the direction of professor and PI, John Ishiyama, and Co-PI, Michael Grieg, the UNT Political Science Department will host the NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program, a residence training program which supports meaningful research opportunities for undergraduate students. Peace science concerns the study of why violence occurs and how conflict can be peacefully resolved. The Political Science Department at UNT offers the only Peace Studies Program at a four-year educational institution in the south and southwest regions of the United States. What makes this REU opportunity unique is that summer participants will integrate their studies in civil conflict management and peace studies with training in computer simulation—students use data from real life scenarios to build predictive models that express conditions of conflict or stability. UNT professor of political science and PI, John Ishiyama, says, “We are unaware of any NSF REU in political science that combines training in political science research techniques and computer simulations and explicitly seeks to broaden recruitment to include underrepresented populations in higher education.”
April 27, 2010 - Congratulations to those faculty members and departments who were recognized and awarded for their commitment to UNT via teaching, research and/or service. Read more to see the list of award winners.
Four years ago Marsha Sowell, a senior political science major in UNTs Honors College, had never heard of the National Science Foundation or the Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program. She didn't know about research grants. She barely knew about college. But she thought maybe she wanted to be a lawyer and she knew she'd have to go to college to become one. Read more
The Office of Research and Economic Development wishes to recognize and congratulate doctoral student, Kailash Gupta, for his outstanding commitment to research. Gupta is completing his degree in Public Administration and Management and has a specialization in Emergency Management. As Principal Investigator (PI) and Co- PI of various disaster-based research projects, he has received an impressive number of grants and other awards for his work in a short period of time. Read more
Cathy Nelson Hartman, associate dean of university libraries and grant PI for the project, Mapping the Southwest, has received a $314,688 award from the National Endowment for the Humanities “We the People” program on behalf of The University of North Texas Libraries and its partner, the University of Texas at Arlington’s (UTA) Special Collections.
The project will digitize and make available online 5,000 historically significant rare maps of Texas and the Southwest. Online access to these maps will be provided through UNT’s Portal to Texas History, a collaborative digital gateway to historical materials from over one hundred partners. The subsequent map collections will comprise the third largest collection of online maps in existence.
April 07, 2010 – Jeffry Kelber, professor in the Department of Chemistry, has secured a $1,620,390 award from the Semiconductor Research Corporation that will provide for the establishment ofaUNT-SRC Center for Electronic Materials Processing and Integration. The new research center will focus on the fundamental understanding of advanced plasma processes and insulators used in manufacturing state-of-the-art semiconductor chips. Its mission is to ensure semiconductor devices continue to increase in performance while decreasing in size. Plasma processing is used throughout every stage in the manufacturing of semiconductor chips, including depositing, etching and cleaning materials. Read more
March 29, 2010 – Jeff Johnson, assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, received a National Science Foundation grant for his work, Collaborative Research: Balancing selection and MHC variation in an endangered bird. The $265,910 award will enable Johnson to provide a comprehensive theoretical framework for the study of the prairie-chicken, a species of grouse that is endangered or threatened in several states. The study will examine effective population size (Ne), gene flow and selection. Loss of genetic variation may affect the long-term stability of populations.
January 20, 2010 – Department chair and PI, Linda Holloway, received an award grant of $112,000 on behalf of the Department of Rehabilitation, Social Work and Addictions at the University of North Texas from the Meadows Foundation for the project: The Job Fit Program: Providing Employment Support for Individuals with Mental Health Disabilities. JOB FIT will provide comprehensive employment services for North Texans with mental illness who are ready to work. Each job seeker will work directly with an employment specialist to find a job that matches his or her skills, interests, and abilities, and meets the staffing needs of area employers.
Jan. 11, 2010 – Rebecca Dickstein, Ph.D., Department of Biological Sciences, is the lead investigator in a multi-institution project entitled, “Collaborative Research: Putative Nitrate Transporter Regulates Symbiotic Nodule Development.” The entire project is being funded from 9/1/09 to 8/31/13 by the National Science Foundation with a total award of approximately $1,081,873. UNT’s portion of the grant is expected to be approximately $647,363, with the remaining $434,510 awarded to collaborator D. Janine Sherrier at the University of Delaware. The research seeks to understand the mechanisms by which legume plants can form symbiotic nitrogen-fixing root nodules in association with soil bacteria to make their own nitrogen fertilizer and thus reduce fertilizer requirements and environmental pollution associated with crop production.