PROGRAM EVALUATION AND ASSESSMENT UPDATE: Beginning in January, 2006, the UND Graduate School initiated a revised schedule and process for periodic graduate program evaluations. These evaluations are completed in accordance with the North Dakota State Board of Higher Education Policy 403.1.2, Institutional Instructional Program Evaluation. These evaluations, administered by the Dean of the Graduate School, were revised to make them more timely, and to incorporate what the Council of Graduate Schools refers to as “Best Practices” in graduate program evaluations. The Program Review Schedule is available on the Graduate School website: http://graduateschool.und.edu/html/assessment.html. Please check this site at regular intervals for updates and other information related to assessment and program evaluation. Currently on this page you can access a general update and detailed description of the entire process (click here) as well as the current program review schedule (click here).
SUMMER COMMENCEMENT TO BE HELD AUGUST 4: The University of North Dakota's summer commencement will be held on Friday, August 4, at 3:00 p.m., at the Chester Fritz Auditorium. The speaker for the Summer Commencement Ceremony is Dr. Sheryl O'Donnell, chair of the UND Department of English. Dr. O'Donnell received her Ph.D.from the University of Arizona and her academic interests include: Restoration and eighteenth century literature; Renaissance non-dramatic literature; women’s studies; popular culture; literary theory; and discourse of agriculture. Dr. O'Donnell is a full member of the graduate faculty. In her spare time raises sheep on her farm near Red Lake Falls, Minnesota. For more information about commencement, just click here.
GRADUATE SCHOOL OFFERS DEGREE IN FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGY: The Graduate School will be offering a new online master's degree in forensic psychology for students and law enforcement professionals who have an interest in the field. The new degree, the first of its kind by an accredited university, was approved at the June 15 State Board of Higher Education meeting and will complement the on-campus master of science degree in forensic psychology approved at the board's April meeting. According to Douglas Peters, professor of psychology at UND, there are only a few master's programs in forensic psychology in the country. Peters also said in an interview with the Grand Forks Herald that students have been wanting a degree like this for a few years now: "I started offering Psychology and Law and related classes about seven years ago, and the enrollment was just incredible, and we had a waiting list for a lot of the classes," Peters said. "Students were asking me if they could get graduate work in forensic psychology. There seems to be a really big demand. And with the popularity of shows like 'CSI' and 'Profiler,' a lot of high school and college students have an interest in psychology in criminal and civil settings."
OVER 600 STUDENTS EARN GRADUATE DEGREES DURING 2005-2006 SCHOOL YEAR : The 2005-2006 academic school year saw over 600 students earn graduate degrees at the University of North Dakota Graduate School. Among the 611 students were 501 students earning various master's degrees, 39 doctoral degrees, 79 doctors of physical therapy, as well as 2 students earning specialist degrees. The Graduate School would like to congratulate all those who earned degrees during the summer, fall, and spring semesters, and we wish you all the best in your future endeavors!
NORTH DAKOTA EPSCoR ANNOUNCES UND DOCTORAL DISSERTATION AWARDS: The North Dakota Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (ND EPSCoR) has announced the 2006 Doctoral Dissertation Assistantship (DDA) awards at the University of North Dakota. ND EPSCoR’s DDA awards are designed to increase the completion rate of Ph.D. students enrolled in the science, engineering, and mathematics disciplines at North Dakota’s research-intensive universities; and to increase the number of competitive proposals submitted to the National Science Foundation. Dr. Peter Alfonso, ND EPSCoR Co-Chair and Vice President for Research at UND noted that “the overall goal of ND EPSCoR is to increase the competitiveness of North Dakota for merit-based grants and contracts in support of science and technology research from federal funding agencies”.
DDA support is available for up to 24 months to enable students to dedicate their time exclusively to dissertation research. Applications are made by the students with supplemental information provided by their advisors, along with endorsement from their Graduate Program Director and Department Chair. The seven awards made at UND were competitively selected from a total of eleven applications. Dr. Gary Johnson, ND EPSCoR Co-Project Director and Assistant Vice President for Research at UND, noted that “this is the largest number of DDA awards made in the history of the program at UND. The review committee was very impressed by the overall quality of the proposals”.
The 2006-07 DDA students, their departments and faculty mentors, and the topic of their approved research proposals are as follows:
Christian Biaku, Chemical Engineering, advisor Dr. Michael Mann, “Large Scale Integration of Electrochemical Stacks with Distribution Networks: An Impedance Spectroscopy Approach”
Lata Balakrishnan, Biochemistry, advisor Dr. Barry Milavetz, “Characterization of histone modifications during transcription”
Sunitha Bollimuntha, Biochemistry, advisor Dr. Brij B. Singh, “TRPC3 and neurosecretion”
Kristin Hillman, Pharmacology, Physiology & Therapeutics, advisor Dr. James Porter, “Adrenergic Modulation of CA 1 Hippocampal Circuitry”
Karthik Krishnan, Microbiology, advisor Dr. Ann Flower, “Regulatory Roles of Bip A in Escherichia coli”
Christopher Knudson, Anatomy & Cell Biology, advisor Dr. Patrick Carr, “The Distribution of Adrenergic Receptors in the Rodent Hippocampus”
James Maskey, Biology, advisor Dr. Rick Sweitzer, “Population Ecology of Moose in North Dakota: Movements, Habitat Use, Diets, and Parasitic Disease”
For additional information concerning ND EPSCoR or the DDA program, please contact Dr. Gary Johnson, Co-Project Director, ND EPSCoR, Twamley Hall 415, University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, ND 58201-7093, 701-777-2492.
SPACE STUDIES STUDENTS, FACULTY, TRAVEL ACROSS THE WORLD: Space Studies graduate students Bethany Bolles and Marc Kurz, along with their research supervisor Dr. Santhosh Seelan, visited the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), Colombo, Sri Lanka, in March 2006 to help evolve methodologies for joint collaborative research projects. Beth's research focuses on remote sensing based irrigated cropland inventory over the North American continent, while Marc's research focuses on wetland mapping and monitoring over the old glacial terrains of North Dakota and Minnesota. Both these research projects will form a part of the UN/World Bank funded IWMI's global efforts to provide critical resource information to monitor Earths key natural resources.
Lisa Kuchy, a Geography major and Space Studies minor, visited Goa, India, for a month in May-June for field work related to her thesis project involving a remote sensing based study of environmental impact of mining. The study attempts to track mining activity in Goa over the last 27 years and monitor environmental impacts, particularly on coastal foraminifers. During her stay in Goa, Lisa worked closely with Dr. Rajiv Nigam, a senior researcher at the National Institute of Oceanography, who has
conducted extensive research on foraminifers over the last three decades and has published a wealth of data. The collaborative work was initiated and arranged by Lisa's advisor Dr. Santhosh Seelan, Professor of Space Studies, who also participated in the field work for a week.
Space Studies professor, Dr. Santhosh Seelan spent a week in Haiti recently at the invitation of the Haitian-American Association of Engineers and Scientists to help identify potential join to research initiatives in the area of remote sensing of environment and natural resources development. During his visit, Dr. Seelan met with Haiti's Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis and other senior administrators, and also participated in an aerial survey of La Gonave island.
BMB GRADUATE STUDENT RECEIVES TRAVEL AWARD: Lata Balakrishnan, a graduate student working with Barry Milavetz in the
Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, was awarded an NCI funded travel grant from the organizing committee of the DNA Tumor Virus Meeting to attend their annual meeting July 11-16, 2006 at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, CA. The title of her platform presentation in the Gene Expression section of the meeting was "Histone Hyperacetylation in Immune Selected Transcribing and Replicating SV40 Chromosomes."
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