Recent achievements for the campus community were earned by Felix Chen, Sidnie White Crawford, the College of Engineering, Katarzyna Glowacka, Qing Hui, Elsa Knight, Qishuai Liu, Rachel McCown, Danny Ortega, Hannah Schafers, Jordan Stump and Jack Whittier.

Honors

• For the first time, Nebraska has received a four-star ranking from the Campus Pride Index — an overall indicator of institutional commitment to LGBTQ-inclusive policy, program and practice. The ranking was calculated based on factors like student and academic life, recruitment and retention, housing, campus safety and counseling and health.

• 11 programs at Nebraska were also named best in the state for non-traditional students by College Factual. The honored programs include anthropology, biochemistry, biological sciences, chemistry, English, geology, history, mathematics, political science, psychology and sociology.

• Felix Chen, Rachel McCown, Danny Ortega and Hannah Schafers, students in the College of Architecture, were recently honored at the 2019 Society of American Registered Architects New York Council Design Awards. McCown and Ortega won an Honor Award for their project “Searching for the Ineffable,” and Schafers and Chen earned the same award for their project “Remembrance.”

• The College of Engineering was among three institutions to receive the Excellence in Engineering for Veterans honor from the American Society for Engineering Education Military Engineering Awards Committee. The award was accepted on behalf of the college by Sohrab Asgarpoor, associate dean for undergraduate programs, during the organization’s annual conference in Tampa, Florida.

• Qing Hui, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, and Qishuai Liu, graduate research assistant, were finalists for best paper at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Conference on Industrial Electronics and Applications in Xian, China. The two were honored for their paper “B-Splines-Based Fuzzy C-Means to Maximizing Overlap Areas for Interconnected Power Systems.”

• Elsa Knight, an incoming first-year student in the College of Law, recently served as the Nebraska representative at the Henry Clay Center for Statesmanship College Congress. Knight represented the state for two weeks in both Kentucky and Washington D.C. and helped create policy over U.S.-Russia relations, specifically nuclear proliferation.

• Jordan Stump, professor of French, was recently featured in The New York Times’ 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years for his translation of Scholastique Mukasonga’s memoir “Cockroaches.” In the novel, Mukasonga recalls her experience as a child during the Rwandan genocide.

• Jack Whittier, director of the University of Nebraska Panhandle Research and Extension Center, is the recipient of the 2019 American Society of Animal Science Fellow Award for Extension. Whitter received the award during the organization’s annual meeting in Austin, Texas. The honor is reserved for those who have displayed distinguished service to the animal industry and been continuous members in the organization for 25 years or more.

Publications

• Sidnie White Crawford, professor emerita of classics and religious studies, published her new book “Scribes and Scrolls at Qumran” July 2. The novel explores the relationship between the caves the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in and and the nearby settlement of Khirbet Qumran.

• Katarzyna Glowacka, assistant professor of biochemistry, is part of a research team that has published a paper on a new computer model that evaluates how microscopic pores on leaves may open in response to light. The paper, featured in a special edition of Photosynthesis Research, outlines an advance that could help scientists create virtual plants to predict how higher temperatures and rising levels of carbon dioxide will affect food crops. The work was completed with colleagues at the University of Illinois and University of Cambridge.

Katarzyna Glowacka and team: Virtual plant research

This column is a regular feature of Nebraska Today. Faculty, staff and students can submit achievements to be considered for this column via email to achievements@unl.edu. For more information, call 402-472-8515.