UND announces 2009 achievements

It was an amazing year at UND. From the Office of University Relations, here—unranked—are some of the top stories which radiated this past year out of North Dakota’s oldest university:

*AgCam, built from scratch by UND students and faculty, is installed on the International Space Station in April and is operated from UND’s Space Operations Center. Activated by astronaut Michael Barratt, AgCam takes infrared and near-infrared pictures — handy for judging vegetation — for use by farmers, ranchers, resource managers and teachers.
 
*U.S. News and World Report ranks UND’s School of Medicine and Health Sciences among the top five family medicine programs and also recognizes UND’s Center for Rural Health as a leading national resource for rural health information.
 
*President Barack Obama taps UND Center for Rural Health director Mary Wakefield to lead the Health Resources and Services Administration.
 
*President Barack Obama includes UND atmospheric scientist Jianglong Zhang in the White House list of 100 beginning researchers receiving the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers. This award is the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on young professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers.
 
*In October, Entrepreneur Magazine and the Princeton Review name UND’s entrepreneurship progarm one of the top 25 in the country. UND’s program has consistently ranked as one of the nation’s best.
 
*In January, UND graduate student Vishnu Reddy Kanupuru receives an official okay from the International Astronomical Union to name an asteroid he discovered “North Dakota.”   He presents an International Astronomical Union (IAU) certificate to Gov. John Hoeven at a Capitol ceremony. A native of India, Kanupuru also receives in December the first PhD granted by the UND John D. Odegard School of Aerospace Sciences. Kanupuru’s doctorate is in Earth System Science and Policy (ESSP) with a focus on space studies.
 
*In October, the UND College of Business and Public Administration celebrates an anonymous $10 million gift, its largest gift ever and one of the largest given to UND through the UND Foundation. Announced in October and established as a Challenge Grant, the donation could have a $40 million impact on the College of Business and Public Administration.
 
*UND  Flying Team captures its 15th national championship with a total of 469 points—an  all-time National Intercollegiate Flying Association (NIFA) record and 71 points ahead of the runner up—at the NIFA SAFECON competition in St. Louis. The team co-captain’s won top pilot award, and the team also received several individual honors.  UND Flying Team also won top honors in the Region V National Intercollegiate Flying Association’s (NIFA’s) Safety and Flight Evaluation Conference (SAFECON). UND’s winning score of 802 points was followed by St. Cloud State University with 564 points.
 
*UND aviation students surpass 100,000 system-wide flight training hours in a fiscal year, breaking their previous record of more than 95,000 hours. As of Sunday, June 21, the students also broke the record for the month of June with 8,830 hours, surpassing their record of 7,600 hours. UND Aerospace builds a new hangar following increasind student demands for flight time. UND flight activity also spurs building of new Grand Forks airport runway, which is dedicated this year. The first plane to land on the new runway was a refurbished Cessna aircraft, originally the first airplane used for instruction at UND.
 
*NASA scientists come to UND  to test space suits in the rugged Mars-like environment of the Dahlen Esker. The test is part of an in-service workshop for K-12 educators is sponsored by the UND-based multi-institution North Dakota Space Grant Consortium, NASA Ames Research Center, North Dakota State University, and UND. NASA funds UND’s next-generation lunar exploration system project. The three year $741,109 grant comes through NASA’s Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).
 
*UND-based North Dakota Space Grant Consortium and the UND Department of Space Studies unveil SpaceShip One-based space flight simulator—the second of two unique-to-UND training units—in the Spacecraft Simulator Facility. This UND space flight simulator was made possible by the generous cooperation of Cirrus Design Corp.
 
*UND Aerospace offers a new major—the Bachelor of Science in Aeronautics degree with a major in unmanned aerial systems (UAS). The new major was approved by the North Dakota State Board of Higher Education in May and is the first UAS major of its kind in the country and is being offered to meet the increasing demand for qualified UAS pilots and sensor operators in this rapidly growing field. Also, the U.S. Air Force chooses the UND Center for Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Research, Education and Training as the site for an academic outreach conference held Aug. 4-6.
 
 *The UND Research Foundation dedicates REAC 1, which houses the University’s Center of Excellence in Life Sciences and Advanced Technology (COELSAT). The $16-million-plus, 50,000-square-foot structure provides a research and development hub to increase the University’s output of innovative, creative and entrepreneurial patents and get them commercialized with private-sector partners. It also signals the brick-and-mortar launch of the UND Research Foundation’s (UNDRF) Research Enterprise and Commercialization (REAC) park, a place where high-tech businesses can set up shop, grow, and build production operations nearby.
 
*UND President Robert Kelley approves a tuition-waiver program for all UND students and prospective students who have earned U.S. Armed Forces veteran status as defined by the North Dakota Century Code. The action allows student veterans to attend classes and be billed the same tuition as North Dakota residents, regardless of state of residency.
 
*UND students volunteer to assist our neighbors in Fargo in their flood preparation efforts. Recognizing the needs of other communities, UND cancels classes from March 26 through March 30 to allow students to help with sandbagging and other flood protection needs. UND also opens a Volunteer Coordination Center  in the Memorial Union for marshaling resources to help with sandbagging and other floodfighting activities in Grand Forks, East Grand Forks, and several other area communities.
 
*West Hartford, Conn., native Alice Brekke is named the Vice President for Finance and Operations and Grafton, N.D., native Phyllis E. Johnson is named Vice President for Research and Economic Development. Both women are UND alumni. Paul LeBel officially begins his duties as Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs and Kathryn Rand takes over as dean of the UND School of Law.
 
*UND mourns the loss of President Emeritus Thomas J. Clifford, a North Dakota icon regarded as the most dynamic and influential figure in the history of higher education in this state and region. His leadership took UND to the level we know today: an institution known nationally and even internationally, for academic excellence, for  enterprise and creativity in meeting challenges, and for building opportunities for students and citizens. Among many other major accomplishments during his tenure, Clifford spearheaded the transformation of the UND School of Medicine and Health Sciences—the only med school in the state—from a two-year program to a full-fledged, four-year M.D. degree.
 
*UND offers the state’s first online master’s degree in early childhood education.
 
*The country’s first fully accredited online MSW degree that includes both concentration and foundation in social work graduates its first class. A special MSW hooding ceremony for graduates of the program takeS place in the Memorial Union Lecture Bowl.
 
*The  Graduate School and School of Engineering and Mines establish the country’s first master’s degree program in Sustainable Energy Engineering (SEE). This program is designed to equip students for careers associated with sustainable energy technologies as well as to conduct research and development activities or to pursue advanced studies in technologies that will provide sustainable sources of energy in the future.
 
*UND’s research enterprise has a state and regional economic impact of just over $195.3 million in FY2009, an increase of $21.2 million over last year. The University’s research activity in fiscal year 2009  funds 1,648 jobs, including 808 at UND. UND sponsored programs create 1,435 jobs within North Dakota. UND research activity also generates about $19.3 million in federal and state tax revenue. Overall, UND has an economic impact of more than $1 billion.
 
* UND football players Brandon Hellevang (K, Fargo, N.D.) and Andrew Miller (LB, Menomonie, Wis.) are among the 55 student-athletes named by the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics (NACDA) to the 12th annual Football Championship Subdivision Athletics Directors Association Academic All-Star team. UND student-athletes combined for a 3.085 grade point average (GPA) during the 2008-09 academic year, including a 3.112 GPA during the spring semester.
 
The highest GPA among UND’s teams belongs to head coach Tom Wynnes’ tennis squad, which produced a 3.654 GPA during the academic year. UND senior golfer Amanda Kaler (Fargo, N.D.) is named an ESPN the Magazine Academic All-America, becaming UND’s sixth student-athlete to garner Academic All-America honors during the 2008-09 season, the most in school history.
 
The previous school-record number of Academic All-Americans was five, set in 1984-85 and matched in 2001-02 and 2005-06.
 
Other UND highlights for the year include the following, also unranked:
*The UND Alumni Association awards its highest honor, the Sioux Award, to four outstanding UND graduates in October: Ed Schafer, former U.S. secretary of agriculture and former North Dakota governor; NASA astronaut and engineer Karen Nyberg; Dan Martinsen, former standout football player and business entrepreneur; and Lavonne Russell Hootman, retired professor of nursing who helped establish the Recruitment and Retention of American Indians or RAIN program.
 
*UND air traffic control student Kevin Broadway is named the UND Student Employee of the Year, North Dakota Student Employee of the Year, and the Midwest Association of Student Employment Administrators (MASEA) Student Employee of the Year.
 
*UND climate scientists Gretchen Mullendore and Matthew Gilmore earn major National Science Foundation research grants to study severe storms.
 
*Eighteen West Point cadets arrive at the University of North Dakota for a four-week helicopter flight training program. UND Aerospace’s summer helicopter training curriculum for the Army comprises in-class academic studies and hands-on flight instruction. At the completion of their training at UND, the Army cadets earn a student pilot’s certificate, having logged 18.5 hours of flight time. UND also hosts 20 Army Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) cadets from colleges around the country for  helicopter training.
 
*UND anthropologist and human rights expert Marcia Mikulak goes to Brazil to work with tribal, human rights leaders.
 
*The Modern Language Association awards sixth biennial Lois Roth Award for a Translation of a Literary Work to UND Chester Fritz Distinguished Professor of English Michael Beard and his colleague Adnan Haydar of the University of Arkansas for their translation of Adonis’s Mihyar of Damascus: His Songs, published by BOA Editions.
 
*A collection of largely never-before-published letters by famed 19th-century poets Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning is documented in a new volume by a team of Browning scholars, including UND’s Dr. Sandra Donaldson. The work, titled “Florentine Friends,” presents 232 letters the Brownings wrote to aspiring writer Isa Blagden, a Eurasian daughter of an English banker, between 1850 and 1861. As co-editor, Donaldson, a Chester Fritz Distinguished Professor of English, helped complete the volume with a team led by Philip Kelley and comprising Scott Lewis, Edward Hagan and Rita S. Patteson.
 
*UND Writers Conference celebrates its 40th anniversary with another talented installment of authors and poets with the theme of “Wit.” UND alum and pop-culture humorist Chuck Klosterman is one of the featured writers.
 
*UND philosopher Jack Russell Weinstein, founder and host of the popular Why? radio talk show on Prairie Public Radio, hosts a conversation with Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen.
 
*UND  “Frozen Fury” student rocket team competes at the inviation-only National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA’s) Marshall Space Flight Center rocket competition as part of NASA’s University Student Launch Initiative.
 
*Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and other leading U.S. media quote UND economist and Bureau of Business and Economic Research director David Flynn about North Dakota’s extraordinary economic performance during tough times nationwide. Flynn is also quoted extensively by national media on the economic impact of the spring flood in Fargo.
 
*Association of Technology, Management, and Applied Engineering (ATMAE) recognizes David (Dave) Yearwood, associate professor and chair, University of North Dakota Department of Technology, with its Outstanding Professor of Industrial Technology Award. Yearwood, whose department is part of the UND College of Business and Public Administration, was one of only four faculty members so recognized nationwide. ATMAE also recognized Lynda Kenney, assistant professor in the Department of Technology, for Outstanding Leadership.
 
*The UND Center for Community Engagement hosts a free community entrepreneurship forum in Rugby, April 17-18; UND President Kelley Robert attends and visits area businesses, confers with business, community leaders, and citizens. The UND Center for Community Engagement (CCE) also releases the first issue of Community Connect: The Journal of Civic Voices. This new community journal features profiles of communities and organizations, project reports, essays, and art.
 
*UND Center for Innovation celebrates 25 Years of innovation and entrepreneurship.
 
*The UND College of Nursing celebrates 100 years of nursing education, 50 years as a college, and 25 years of nursing research.
 
*Prominent Norwegian politician Odd Einar Dørum and American College of Norway founder Steinar Opstad  visit UND to lecture and meet with campus leaders and students who are active with educational exchanges in Norway.
 
*The UND Conflict Resolution Center (CRC) holds an International Symposium on Restorative Justice June 15-19. The symposium focuses on “Pathways for Restoring Community” and features Kay Pranis, restorative justice pioneer, Minnesota Department of Corrections, and many others with experience in using restorative justice principles in communities, schools and the justice system.
 
*The Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of North Dakota (OLLI@UND), in partnership with Bismarck State College, launches a new learning opportunity for people age 50-plus in the Bismarck-Mandan area with a full slate of classes this fall taught by local instructors.
 
*The UND School of Engineering and Mines hosts more than 800 area elementary and middle school students to a visit with NASA Space Shuttle Astronaut and UND engineering alum Karen Nyberg. She shows a presentation about her shuttle mission and will talk about her childhood dream of becoming an astronaut. Nyberg has been assigned to the crew of space shuttle mission STS-132.
 
*The U.S. Department of Energy awards UND scientists $3.5 million to develop North Dakota geothermal resources. The grants to UND will be used to explore electric power generation from geothermal resources in the western part of the state.
 
*A device that enables a helicopter to hover in place using a vision-based autopilot is judged to be the most innovative engineering design by a team of judges in the annual Freeman Innovative Design Competition at University of North Dakota School of Engineering and Mines (SEM). The first place cash award of $1,250 was presented to Armen Mkrtchyan, senior in electrical engineering for his ViSAR, a vision-stabilized autonomous system for rotorcraft.
 
*Mechanical engineering professor George Bibel, author of  “Beyond the Black Box: The Forensics of Airplane Crashes”—widely noted in aviation circles—is appointed as a distinguished lecturer by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
 
*UND’s Formula Society of Automotive Engineers  team returned from a successful trip to the Michigan FSAE competition. With finishes of 6th in acceleration, and 12th in design, the team  takes 39th place overall.
 
*Mechanical engineering senior David Dvorak wins first place at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Student Professional Development Conference for District C’s “Old Guard” oral presentation competition with his presentation entitled “Unmanned Aircraft Systems and Precision Agriculture.”
 
*The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) funds at $300,000 SUNRISE project titled “Efficient Regeneration of Physical and Chemical Solvents for CO2 Capture” to evaluate the use of composite polymer membranes and porous membrane contactors for the recovery of CO2 from CO2 -rich solvent streams from coal gasification syngas.
 
*UND science and engineering faculty of the Sustainable Energy Research Initiative and Supporting Education (SUNRISE) Group are selected to host a new National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates program based on chemistry-focused undergraduate research that contributes to the advancement of sustainable energy technologies.
 
*An interdisciplinary team of SUNRISE researchers from the University of North Dakota  and North Dakota State in Fargo is awarded a $1.95 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and an additional $527,000 from the North Dakota EPSCoR (Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research) program to study the impacts of particulate and trace element impurities on emerging advanced coal power systems.
 
*The UND Energy & Environmental Research Center (EERC) achieves its sixth consecutive record year of funded contracts. In the 12 month period ending June 30, 2009 (FY09), the EERC is awarded more than $43.9 million in funding. Total contract expenditures tops $39 million. The overall research portfolio, which is the total value of all active contracts during FY09 (including multiyear awards),  jumps to nearly $237 million, an increase of more than $10 million over the previous year.
 
*UND Energy & Environmental Research Center (EERC) and Whole Energy Fuels Corporation, headquartered in Bellingham, Washington, are poised to commercialize a novel and groundbreaking cellulosic biofuel technology developed at the EERC. Whole Energy is receiving global, exclusive licensing rights to EERC Foundation’s technology, which converts biomass and other recycled material into liquid biofuels.
 
*Accelergy Corporation, a global leader in the production of high-value domestically sourced liquid fuels, partners with the UND Energy & Environmental Research Center (EERC) to license EERC’s proprietary technology as part of its coal biomass-to-liquids (CBTL) process to accelerate the development of specialty liquid jet fuels used by the military from cleaner and non-petroleum sources. This follows a $4.7 million contract between the EERC and the U.S. Department of Defense Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for the development of the first completely renewable JP-8 jet fuel.
 
*UND Energy & Environmental Research Center (EERC) receives $1 million award to produce renewable fuels from North Dakota crambe and other oilseed crops at Tesoro’s Mandan, N.D., oil refinery.
 
*Renewable jet propellant-8 (JP-8) fuel developed and produced by the UND Energy & Environmental Research Center (EERC) is successfully flown in a rocket built by Flometrics, Inc., a product engineering company specializing in fluid dynamics and thermodynamics based in San Diego, California. The EERC’s fuel was created from completely renewable crop oils, such as canola and soybeans.
 
*UND School of Law professor and Center for Human Rights and Genocide Studies director Gregory S. Gordon, a highly-sought expert on war crimes and international human rights law, is featured, along with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and famed Nobel Peace Laureate Elie Wiesel, on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Web site.
 
*The School of Law and the UND John D. Odegard School of Aerospace Sciences  co-hosts a symposium titled “Complying & Flying: Legal and Technical Issues Related to Operating Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) in Law Enforcement.” Symposium relates to issues about UAS operations in law enforcement.
 
*The UND Center for Human Rights and Genocide Studies hosts renowned human rights and international law expert Margaret McGuinness, and, with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), brought the moving story of a Nazi death camp survivor Martin Weiss in his own words, to Grand Forks public and private school students.
 
*North Dakota will receive $15.9 million over five years for a National Institutes of Health (NIH) program aimed at increasing research opportunities, investigators and resources in biomedical research. Health and the environment are the focuses of research conducted under the North Dakota IDeA Networks for Biomedical Research Excellence (INBRE) program. Half of the budget will be used to support research projects at predominantly undergraduate institutions in the state. It is a record grant for INBRE and for the medical school.
 
*The Wyoming Assistive Technology Resources Program at the University of Wyoming’s Wyoming Institute for Disabilities and the UND Student Occupational Therapy Association at UND’s Casper affiliate collaborate to open an assistive technology and device demonstration center, with a technology demonstration changing every six weeks.
 
*Sixty-two health professionals begIn the clinical portion of their studies this week to earn the Master of Physician Assistant (PA) Studies degree. This is the PA program’s most diverse class ever, with students from Nigeria, Brazil, British Guyana, Vietnam, Laos, and the Middle East, and U.S. Native Americans and other ethnic minorities, according to PA program director Mary Ann Laxen.
 
*The Army Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) Fighting Sioux Battalion at UND achieves its fourth straight first-place victory at the Camp Ripley (Minn.) Ranger Challenge Competition.
 
*Eleanor Yurkovich, UND professor of nursing, was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing (AAN), the profession’s highest national honor. Yurkovich is a co-investigator for the Northern Plains Center for Behavioral Research.
 
*UND Nursing’s Barb Anderson, assistant program coordinator of the Recruitment and Retention of American Indians into Nursing (RAIN) Program, at the UND College of Nursing, receives the 2009 Community Service Award from the North Dakota Indian Education Association. The honor recognizes her many years of community service to tribal youth via the UND Indians into Medicine (INMED) Summer Institute.
 
*UND and California State Polytechnic University in Pomona (CPP), Calif., sign a memorandum of understanding to form a partnership that will allow senior level CPP undergraduate students to gain advanced standing in master’s degree programs at UND.
 
*U.S. Senator Byron Dorgan speaks at spring commencement. Honorary Doctor of Letters degrees are presented—one to Edwin Benson, known as the living history book of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara tribes; and one to LaVonne Russell Hootman, an innovator in nursing education who helped found UND’s Recruitment and Retention of American Indians into Nursing (RAIN) program. Twins President and UND graduate Dave St. Peter speaks at the winter commencement. In August, St. Peter and the Twins hosted UND for “UND Day at the Dome.”
 
*UND connects  to an ultra high-speed regional computer network known as the Northern Tier Network Consortium (NTNC) giving UND scholars the added capacity and enhanced tools to do even more complex problem-solving faster than ever. The upgrade lets UND researchers and scholars benefit from Internet capabilities that are 1,250 times faster than traditional Fast DSL/Cable Internet links and more than 178,500 time faster than Dialup services.
 
*UND President Robert O. Kelley is appointed to a prestigious 15-person Energy Initiative Advisory Committee by the Washington, D.C.-based Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU).
 
*The Defense Activity for Non-Traditional Education Support (DANTES) recognizes UND at the Department of Defense Worldwide Education Symposium—titled “Educating America’s Patriots”—for a partnership that has provided members of the U.S. armed forces with flexible education opportunities for the past 35 years.