Education Department extends UNT program

The University of North Texas has received a $355,102 grant from the U.S. Department of Education to extend its Student Support Services program through 2015.

Student Support Services is one of six federal Trio programs offered at UNT.

Trio is a series of programs created by Congress in 1965 to help low-income Americans enter college, graduate and move on to participate more fully in America’s economic and social life.

Student Support Services began at UNT in 1985. It was the second Trio program to launch at the university.

Students must be low-income, first-generation college students or have a physical or learning disability to participate in Student Support Services.

UNT’s program provides academic support, social engagement and cultural enrichment programs to an estimated 250 students.

Participants have access to one-on-one tutoring, skill-building workshops and social and cultural events.

Two professors win composers contest

Cindy McTee, professor of composition at the University of North Texas, and Steve Wiest, director of UNT’s One O’clock Lab Band and professor of jazz studies, have been selected as two of six winners of the Texas Composers Competition.

As statewide winners, McTee’s composition of “Double Play” and Wiest’s composition of “Ice-Nine” will be submitted to the selection committee of the 2011 World New Music Days held in Croatia, as part of the prestigious Music Biennale Zagreb.

The competition was presented by the Stephen F. Austin State University School of Music, in collaboration with the Composer’s Site and the International Society for Contemporary Music.

Internationally known chemist joins faculty

One of the world’s foremost computational chemists is joining the University of North Texas this fall as a distinguished research professor.

Jan Martin, who was most recently the Baroness Thatcher Professorial Chair of Chemistry at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, will join the UNT Center for Advanced Scientific Computing and Modeling.

The center is a collaboration of faculty who use advanced scientific computing to pursue research, training and education projects with applications in biology, chemistry and materials science and engineering.

The federally funded center has helped UNT earn a national reputation for research in computational chemistry.

Martin had worked at the Weizmann Institute, one of the top-ranking multidisciplinary research institutions in the world, since 1996.

His fields of research include the development of accurate methods for computational thermochemistry and spectroscopy, the design of more universally applicable density functional methods and applications of computational chemistry, and problems in catalysis and renewable energy.

Martin has won numerous awards, including the Dirac Medal from the World Association of Theoretical and Computational Chemists, the Outstanding Young Scientists Award from the Israel Chemical Society and the Alumni Award from the Belgian-American Educational Foundation. He has published more than 220 scientific papers in international journals.

Geography professor wins Powe award

Feifei Pan, professor of geography at the University of North Texas, has received one of 32 nationally competitive Ralph E. Powe Jr. Faculty Enhancement Awards from Oak Ridge Associated Universities.

Pan was one of four faculty members from Texas colleges and universities selected as winners, who were chosen from 114 applicants. He is the seventh UNT faculty member to win a Powe award since 2005.

The award will support Pan’s research on inversely retrieving the spatial variability of soil particle size distribution from remotely sensed soil moisture. Pan developed a method of estimating particle size distribution from observed soil moisture, which he used to determine the soil moisture mean and variance from soil collected at the Throughfall Displacement Experiment sites in Walker Branch Watershed in eastern Tennessee.

Oak Ridge Associated Universities is a consortium of 96 major research institutes that advances science and education by providing the universities with partnerships with national laboratories, government agencies and private industry. Oak Ridge Associated Universities manages the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education for the U.S. Department of Energy.

The Powe awards are given to faculty members with research in engineering and applied science, life sciences, mathematics and computer science, physical sciences and policy management and education. The $5,000 awards are intended to enrich the research and professional growth of young faculty members and result in new funding opportunities.

Award-winning faculty members’ universities are required to match the awards with additional $5,000 by providing funds for travel, equipment or other assistance for the faculty members’ research.

Student named finalist in design contest

University of North Texas senior Emily Schwarting has been named one of three finalists in the non-browser-based design category at the 2010 Adobe Design Achievement Awards.

The international competition bills itself as “the world’s premier design, film and interactive media competition for higher education students.”

As a finalist, Schwarting has earned lodging and airfare to the awards competition in Los Angeles in October.

For an interactive design class at UNT, Schwarting used Adobe After Effects to create the concept of an interface that helps people shop for food while looking for recipes to fit their groceries. The interface “allows users to browse recipes quickly while shopping, sync smartphone grocery lists, find the fastest route around the grocery store, discover additional meals based on their purchases and check out and pay for items with ease,” she said in the video.

Schwarting expects to graduate from UNT next May.