Auburn geoscientist establishes research and educational partnership with the University of Puerto Rico through a $505,000 NSF award

Laura Bilenker, assistant professor in the Department of Geosciences, and her collaborator Tom Hudgins, associate professor at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez, have received $505,000 from the National Science Foundation, or NSF, for their project Collaborative Research: Characterizing Iron Deposits in Puerto Rico to Elucidate Metal Transport and Magnetite Mineralization Processes in Skarn Systems. The award is funded through the Petrology and Geochemistry Program in NSF’s Division of Earth Sciences and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). The award began in August 2022 and concludes in July 2025. The $257,000 to Bilenker and $248,000 to Hudgins supports research on the iron deposits (skarns) of Puerto Rico and will advance our understanding of the mineral resources available for renewable energy infrastructure.

“We have created a sustained network between our two institutions,” said Bilenker. “With funding from this award, 10 undergraduate and four graduate students in Puerto Rico and Alabama will be able to collaborate virtually monthly, conduct fieldwork in Puerto Rico and use instrumentation at Auburn University.”

COSAM’s Prado and Falcao to present at 2022 AUX: Immersive Learning Experiences Workshop

Rachel Prado and Vanessa dos Reis Falcao, lecturers in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry in the College of Sciences and Mathematics, or COSAM, will present at this fall’s AUX: Immersive Learning Experiences Workshop offered by the Office of Information Technology, or OIT, and the Biggio Center. The event will be held Thursday, October 6 from 8:30 a.m. – 4 p.m. in the Mell Classroom Building at Ralph Brown Draughon Library.

In 2021, OIT and the Biggio Center created a new funding opportunity titled “Student Learning Through Immersive Virtual Experiences”, which resulted in six faculty projects that received full funding. Prado and Falcao were among the faculty named as 2021 grant recipients and are slated to present at the workshop, alongside other recipients, about their AUX 2021 project from 10 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.

Listen to the Primary Investigator of the NASA New Horizons mission at this year’s Duncan Lecture

Want to learn more about what is at the edge of our solar system? Is Pluto a planet or a ‘dwarf planet’?

Hear directly from the Primary Investigator, or PI, of NASA’s New Horizons space mission, S. Alan Stern, at this year’s Duncan Lecture on October 13 at 2 p.m. in the Sciences Center Auditorium. The New Horizons launched in Jan. 2006 and completed a flyby of Pluto in Jul. 2015. It provided us with the first maps of Pluto and its moons and continued onward the explore objects in Kuiper Belt. This area of space is a part of our solar system that begins at the orbit of Neptune and includes comets and dwarf planets, frozen relics from when our planets formed.

According to Stern, this area has exciting potential for space exploration.

COSAM’s Department of Mathematics and Statistics offers a new graduate certificate program in data science

In 2019, the Department of Mathematics and Statistics in the College of Sciences and Mathematics joined forces with the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering in the Samuel Ginn College of Engineering to launch a joint master’s program in data science and engineering (MS-DSE). The program has two tracks: data science managed by the Department of Mathematics and Statistics and data engineering managed by the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering. The program is designed to educate and train professionals in the analysis of big data and to give them the necessary tools for a successful career in this rapidly growing field. It is also aimed at educating students to meet the demand for data scientists in government, industry and academia and to develop data scientists with skills to innovate in the spaces of advanced data management and analytics.

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