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New Department Chairs
Ming-Kuo Lee named chair of the Department of Geosciences
Ming-Kuo Lee, the Robert B. Cook Endowed Professor in the Department of Geosciences, has been named chair of the department effective July 1.
Lee received a bachelor’s degree in geology at National Taiwan University and his doctorate in geology from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 1993. He joined Auburn in 1995 as an assistant professor, and he was named professor in 2006 and the Robert B. Cook Endowed Professor in 2010.
Lee and his students have conducted research on hydrology, environmental chemistry, and reactive transport of contaminants in groundwater aquifers for many years. Lee is working to perfect a process that uses bacteria to capture arsenic dissolved in drinking water to help address the issue of providing a safe, cost-effective way to bring safe drinking water to people in developing nations.
His research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA, the US Geological Survey, NOAA, the US Army, the American Chemical Society, and private companies. He was awarded the COSAM Faculty Research Award in 2008 for his research accomplishments on geochemistry, toxicity, and bioremediation of arsenic and other toxic metals in groundwater.
Santos named chair of the Department of Biological Sciences
Biological Sciences Professor Scott Santos was named chair of the Department of Biological Sciences effective July 1.
Santos previously served as a rotating program officer in the Division of Integrative Organismal Systems at the National Science Foundation (NSF). As such, he spent the 2015-2016 academic year at NSF assisting the Integrative Organismal Systems Deputy Division Director in the daily operations and management of the division.
Santos, who is also the co-director of Auburn’s Molette Biology Laboratory for Environmental and Climate Change Studies, conducts research related to population genetics, resource conservation, genomic evolution, and symbiosis biology in aquatic—both freshwater and marine—microbes and multicellular organisms, with a variety of molecular tools and computational approaches being utilized in these pursuits.
He recently received a two-year grant from the National Science Foundation’s Division of Environmental Biology. The research proposal is titled, “Assessing evolution of euryhalinity in anchialine shrimps,” and the funding will allow Santos to further investigate the evolution of the molecular mechanisms of osmoregulation in shrimp species from coastal ponds and pools.
He has authored more than 40 peer-reviewed publications since 2001 in journals such as The Biological Bulletin, Marine Biology, Journal of Phycology, Environmental Microbiology, Current Biology, Marine Ecology Progress Series, Animal Conservation, PLoS One, Molecular Ecology, and Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences USA.
Santos received a bachelor of science with distinction in zoology from the University of Hawaii at Manoa and a doctorate in biological sciences from State University of New York at Buffalo.
Ulrich Albrecht named interim chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics
Ulrich Albrecht has been named interim chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics effective July 1.
Albrecht received a master’s degree in mathematics with a minor in physics from the University of Essen, Germany, in 1980 and a doctorate in mathematics from New Mexico State in Las Cruces in 1982. After a year at the University of Duisburg, Germany, and a year at Marshall University, he came to Auburn in 1984. He received his Habilitation in Mathematics from the University of Duisburg in 1986.
His research is in abstract algebra. Albrecht has been investigating the relationship between the ring-theoretic structure of the endomorphism ring of a module and the structure of this module itself. His work originally focused on endomorphism rings of torsion-free Abelian groups, but it became soon apparent that the tools developed also provided interesting insides in the structure of mixed Abelian groups, i.e. group which have both a torsion and a torsion-free component.
Albrecht has been working with researchers from the University of Connecticut and Babes-Bolyai University, in Romania to develop a comprehensive structure theory of self-small mixed Abelian groups.
In addition to endomorphism rings, Albrecht is interested in non-singular rings and modules over such rings. In cooperation with L. Fuchs and J. Dauns from Tulane University, Albrecht classified the rings for which non-singularity and Hattori’s notion of torsion-freeness coincide. The resulting class of rings and the theory of their modules has been the focus of several research projects on which Albrecht collaborated with mathematicians from the University of Duisburg-Essen and Charles University in Prague.
Albrecht has been chair of the mathematics department from 2000-2002 and the graduate program officer from 2012-2018.
Last Updated: 10/12/2018