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A Total Eclipse of the First Day of School

Hundreds of students, faculty and townspeople gathered in the rotunda of Dallas Hall on Monday, Aug. 21 to view a projection of the Great American Solar Eclipse at a viewing hosted by Dedman College and the SMU Physics Department. (Jeff McWhorter/SMU)

Dedman College, SMU Physics Department host Great American Solar Eclipse 2017 viewing

Thousands of students, faculty and townspeople showed up to campus Monday, Aug. 21 to observe the Great American Solar Eclipse at a viewing hosted by Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences and the SMU Department of Physics.

The festive event coincided with the kick-off of SMU’s Fall Semester and included Solar Eclipse Cookies served while viewing the rare astronomical phenomenon.

The eclipse reached its peak at 1:09 p.m. in Dallas at more than 75% of totality.

“What a great first day of the semester and terrific event to bring everyone together with the help of Dedman College scientists,” said Dedman Dean Thomas DiPiero. “And the eclipse cookies weren’t bad, either.”

Physics faculty provided indirect methods for observing the eclipse, including a telescope with a viewing cone on the steps of historic Dallas Hall, a projection of the eclipse onto a screen into Dallas Hall, and a variety of homemade hand-held devices.

Outside on the steps of Dallas Hall, Associate Professor Stephen Sekula manned his home-built viewing tunnel attached to a telescope for people to indirectly view the eclipse.

“I was overwhelmed by the incredible response of the students, faculty and community,” Sekula said. “The people who flocked to Dallas Hall were energized and engaged. It moved me that they were so interested in — and, in some cases, had their perspective on the universe altered by — a partial eclipse of the sun by the moon.”

A team of Physics Department faculty assembled components to use a mirror to project the eclipse from a telescope on the steps of Dallas Hall into the rotunda onto a screen hanging from the second-floor balcony.

Adjunct Professor John Cotton built the mount for the mirror — with a spare, just in case — and Professor and Department Chairman Ryszard Stroynowski and Sekula arranged the tripod setup and tested the equipment.

Stroynowski also projected an illustration of the Earth, the moon and the sun onto the wall of the rotunda to help people visualize movement and location of those cosmic bodies during the solar eclipse.

Professor Fred Olness handed out cardboard projectors and showed people how to use them to indirectly view the eclipse.

“The turn-out was fantastic,” Olness said. “Many families with children participated, and we distributed cardboard with pinholes so they could project the eclipse onto the sidewalk. It was rewarding that they were enthused by the science.”

Stroynowski, Sekula and others at the viewing event were interviewed by CBS 11 TV journalist Robert Flagg.

Physics Professor Thomas Coan and Guillermo Vasquez, SMU Linux and research computing support specialist, put together a sequence of photos they took during the day from Fondren Science Building.

“The experience of bringing faculty, students and even some out-of-campus community members together by sharing goggles, cameras, and now pictures of one of the great natural events, was extremely gratifying,” Vasquez said.

Sekula said the enthusiastic response from the public is driving plans to prepare for the next event of this kind.

“I’m really excited to share with SMU and Dallas in a total eclipse of the sun on April 8, 2024,” he said.

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Construction begins on international mega-science neutrino experiment

Groundbreaking held today in South Dakota marks the start of excavation for the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility, future home to the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment.

SMU is one of more than 100 institutions from around the world building hardware for a massive international experiment — a particle detector — that could change our understanding of the universe.

Construction will take years and scientists expect to begin taking data in the middle of the next decade, said SMU physicist Thomas E. Coan, a professor in the SMU Department of Physics and a researcher on the experiment.

The turning of a shovelful of earth a mile underground marks a new era in particle physics research. The groundbreaking ceremony was held Friday, July 21, 2017 at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead, South Dakota.

Dignitaries, scientists and engineers from around the world marked the start of construction of the experiment that could change our understanding of the universe.

The Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF) will house the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. Called DUNE for short, it will be built and operated by a group of roughly 1,000 scientists and engineers from 30 countries, including Coan.

When complete, LBNF/DUNE will be the largest experiment ever built in the United States to study the properties of mysterious particles called neutrinos. Unlocking the mysteries of these particles could help explain more about how the universe works and why matter exists at all.

“DUNE is designed to investigate a broad swath of the properties of neutrinos, one of the universe’s most abundant but still mysterious electrically neutral particles,” Coan said.

The experiment seeks to understand strange phenomena like neutrinos changing identities — called “oscillation” — in mid-flight and the behavioral differences between a neutrino an its anti-neutrino sibling, Coan said.

“A crisp understanding of neutrinos holds promise for understanding why any matter survived annihilation with antimatter from the Big Bang to form the people, planets and stars we see today,” Coan said. “DUNE is also able to probe whether or not the humble proton, found in all atoms of the universe, is actually unstable and ultimately destined to eventually decay away. It even has sensitivity to undertanding how stars explode into supernovae by studying the neutrinos that stream out from them during the explosion.”

Coan also is a principal investigator on NOvA, another neutrino experiment collaboration of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Laboratory. NOvA, in northern Minnesota, is another massive particle detector designed to observe and measure the behavior of neutrinos.

Similar to NOvA, DUNE will be a neutrino beam from Fermilab that runs to Homestake Gold Mine in South Dakota. DUNE’s beam will be more powerful and will take the measurements NOvA is taking to an unprecedented precision, scientists on both experiments have said. Any questions NOvA fails to answer will most certainly be answered by DUNE.

At its peak, construction of LBNF is expected to create almost 2,000 jobs throughout South Dakota and a similar number of jobs in Illinois.

Institutions in dozens of countries will contribute to the construction of DUNE components. The DUNE experiment will attract students and young scientists from around the world, helping to foster the next generation of leaders in the field and to maintain the highly skilled scientific workforce in the United States and worldwide.

Beam of neutrinos will travel 800 miles (1,300 kilometers) through the Earth
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, located outside Chicago, will generate a beam of neutrinos and send them 800 miles (1,300 kilometers) through the Earth to Sanford Lab, where a four-story-high, 70,000-ton detector will be built beneath the surface to catch those neutrinos.

Scientists will study the interactions of neutrinos in the detector, looking to better understand the changes these particles undergo as they travel across the country in less than the blink of an eye.

Ever since their discovery 61 years ago, neutrinos have proven to be one of the most surprising subatomic particles, and the fact that they oscillate between three different states is one of their biggest surprises. That discovery began with a solar neutrino experiment led by physicist Ray Davis in the 1960s, performed in the same underground mine that now will house LBNF/DUNE. Davis shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 2002 for his experiment.

DUNE scientists will also look for the differences in behavior between neutrinos and their antimatter counterparts, antineutrinos, which could give us clues as to why the visible universe is dominated by matter.

DUNE will also watch for neutrinos produced when a star explodes, which could reveal the formation of neutron stars and black holes, and will investigate whether protons live forever or eventually decay, bringing us closer to fulfilling Einstein’s dream of a grand unified theory.

Construction over the next 10 years is funded by DOE with 30 countries
But first, the facility must be built, and that will happen over the next 10 years. Now that the first shovel of earth has been moved, crews will begin to excavate more than 870,000 tons of rock to create the huge underground caverns for the DUNE detector.

Large DUNE prototype detectors are under construction at European research center CERN, a major partner in the project, and the technology refined for those smaller versions will be tested and scaled up when the massive DUNE detectors are built.

This research is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science in conjunction with CERN and international partners from 30 countries.

DUNE collaborators come from institutions in Armenia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Greece, India, Iran, Italy, Japan, Madagascar, Mexico, the Netherlands, Peru, Poland, Romania, Russia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom and the United States. — Fermilab, SMU

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Dallas Innovates: Mobile Makerspace Once Known as SparkTruck Rolls Into Town

The big, boxy California transplant is being adopted by Southern Methodist University and will be retooled for Texas to help teachers fuel the creative spark in students.

Reporter Dave Moore with Dallas Innovates interviewed Katie Krummeck, director of SMU’s Deason Innovation Gym in the Lyle School of Engineering, and Rob Rouse, clinical assistant professor in the Department of Teaching & Learning of Simmons School about their collaboration in design-based learning environments.

The School of Engineering and SMU’s Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development are building a dedicated place for students to adopt a “maker-based approach” to education.

The Dallas Innovates article, “Mobile Makerspace Once Known as SparkTruck Rolls Into Town,” published May 19, 2017.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Dave Moore
Dallas Innovates
You might call it a maker truck in the making, and it’s about to hit the streets of Dallas to promote the maker movement to teachers and students alike.

Formerly called the SparkTruck, Southern Methodist University adopted the vehicle from Stanford University in California where it resided for the past five years.

The truck made a cross-country journey to Dallas where SMU students will redesign it, inside and out, to make it a teaching tool to help K-12 teachers to inspire and to pursue professional development through innovation.

“This big truck is a kind of rolling ambassador for the maker movement,” said Katie Krummeck, director of SMU’s Deason Innovation Gym. “If you’re not familiar with it, the maker movement is all about sharing creative challenges with people from very different backgrounds to build things.“

Krummeck said the truck will be a big boost in maker education.

“The explosion in easily available digital tools and software is fueling the fire, and it turns out that this kind of hands-on maker-based instruction is a great way to engage students in whatever subject they are learning,” she said.

SMU students will retrofit the truck to ensure that its educational mission is supported by things such as workflow, storage, and comfort.

During its journey from California, the truck carried this message on its side: “This is not a maker truck” — yet.

Krummeck is familiar with the truck. She managed the SparkTruck program at Stanford before coming to SMU in 2015.

“We’re going to develop teaching frameworks, open-source curriculum, tools, and resources as well as some really engaging professional development opportunities for educators,” Krummeck said in a release. “And we’re going to deliver these resources and experiences out of the back of this mobile makerspace. We’ll know what to call it after our students put their heads together during the design challenge we have planned for May 22-26.”

Read the full story.

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Elira Kuka, SMU economics professor, appointed to prestigious national research organization

SMU economics professor wins prestigious appointment to nation’s premier organization for impartial economic research, the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The National Bureau of Economic Research, the nation’s leading nonprofit economic research organization, has appointed SMU Assistant Professor Elira Kuka a faculty research fellow.

Kuka is in the SMU Department of Economics. She will be a fellow in the NBER’s research program on children, a key policy area.

NBER, founded in 1920, is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers and business professionals.

The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) is the most prestigious and active research organization in economic policy and empirical analysis in the U.S., said University Distinguished Professor Santanu Roy, chair of the SMU Department of Economics. Several Nobel laureates and Chairs of the Council of Economic Advisers (to the White House) have been fellows of the NBER, Roy said.

“To be appointed a Faculty Research Fellow at the NBER is a tremendous recognition for a young scholar like Elira Kuka, who is just completing her second year as assistant professor after her Ph.D. It is a major boost to the SMU Economics Department’s research profile and visibility,” Roy said. “Elira’s work on several important public policy issues related to children’s health, unemployment insurance and education have started appearing in the very top journals of the profession. She is on a firm trajectory to be a star in her research field.”

NBER-affiliated researchers study a wide range of topics and they employ many different methods in their work. Key focus areas include developing new statistical measurements, estimating quantitative models of economic behavior and analyzing the effects of public policies while remaining impartial and foregoing recommendations.

Over the years the NBER’s research agenda has encompassed a wide variety of issues that confront our society. Twenty-six Nobel Prize winners in Economics and 13 past chairs of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers have held NBER affiliations.

The more than 1,400 professors of economics and business now teaching at colleges and universities in North America who are NBER researchers are the leading scholars in their fields.

Kuka joined SMU in 2015. She received an undergraduate degree from Wellesley College, Mass., and her Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Davis. Her research focuses on understanding how government policy affects individual behavior and wellbeing, the extent to which it provides social insurance during times of need, and its effectiveness in alleviation of poverty and inequality.

Her current research topics include the potential benefits of the federal Unemployment Insurance program, the protective power of the U.S. safety net during recessions and various issues in academic achievement.

Kuka’s appointment was effective May 1, 2017.

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Relentless gene hunter, NIH Director Francis Collins, to speak at SMU Commencement May 20

Collins is best known for leading the Human Genome Project, the world’s largest collaborative biological project and one of the most significant scientific undertakings in modern history.

Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., the director of the National Institutes of Health, who may be best known for leading the Human Genome Project, will be the featured speaker during SMU’s 102nd all-University Commencement ceremony at 9 a.m. Saturday, May 20, in Moody Coliseum.

Collins — whose own personal research efforts led to the isolation of the genes responsible for cystic fibrosis, neurofibromatosis, Huntington’s disease and Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome — will receive the Doctor of Science degree, honoris causa, from SMU during the ceremony. The entire event, including Collins’ address, will be live streamed at smu.edu/live.

“We are honored to have a pioneering scientist and national leader of Dr. Collins’ stature as featured speaker at Commencement,” said SMU President R. Gerald Turner. “His life is testament to a strong, unwavering commitment to the search for scientific knowledge paired with deep religious faith. He has much to share with us.”

As NIH director, Collins oversees the work of the largest institutional supporter of biomedical research in the world, spanning the spectrum from basic to clinical research. He was appointed by President Obama in 2009 and was asked to remain in the position by President Trump in January 2017. As director, he has helped launch major research initiatives to advance the use of precision medicine for more tailored healthcare, increase our understanding of the neural networks of the brain to improve treatments for brain diseases, and identify areas of cancer research that are most ripe for acceleration to improve cancer prevention and treatment.

While director of NIH’s National Human Genome Research Institute, he oversaw the Human Genome Project, a 13-year international effort to map and sequence the 3 billion letters in human DNA. HGP scientists finished the sequence in April 2003, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of James Watson and Francis Crick’s seminal publication describing the double-helix structure of DNA.

It remains the world’s largest collaborative biological project and one of the most significant scientific undertakings in modern history.

As an innovative evolutionary geneticist and a devout Christian, Collins also has gained fame for his writings on the integration of logic and belief. His first book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, became a New York Times bestseller in 2006. Since then, he has written The Language of Life: DNA and the Revolution in Personalized Medicine (2011) and edited a selection of writings, Belief: Readings on the Reason for Faith (2010).

Born in Staunton, Va., and raised on a small family farm in the Shenandoah Valley, Collins was home schooled until the sixth grade and attended Robert E. Lee High School in his hometown. He earned his Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from the University of Virginia in 1970.

In 1974, Collins received his Ph.D. degree in physical chemistry from Yale University, where a course in molecular biology triggered a major change in career direction. He enrolled in medical school at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, where he earned his M.D. degree in 1977. From 1978 to 1981, Collins completed a residency and chief residency in internal medicine at North Carolina Memorial Hospital. He then returned to Yale as a Fellow in Human Genetics at the university’s medical school from 1981 to 1984.

Dr. Collins joined the University of Michigan in 1984 as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, a position that would eventually lead to a Professorship of Internal Medicine and Human Genetics. Collins heightened his reputation as a relentless gene hunter with an approach he named “positional cloning,” which has developed into a powerful component of modern molecular genetics.

In contrast to previous methods for finding genes, positional cloning enabled scientists to identify disease genes without knowing the functional abnormality underlying the disease in advance. Collins’ team, together with collaborators, applied the new approach in 1989 in their successful quest for the long-sought gene responsible for cystic fibrosis. Other major discoveries soon followed, including isolation of the genes for Huntington’s disease, neurofibromatosis, multiple endocrine neoplasia type 1, the M4 type of adult acute leukemia, and Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome.

In 1993, Collins joined NIH to become director of the National Center for Human Genome Research, which became NHGRI in 1997. As director, he oversaw the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium and many other aspects of what he has called “an adventure that beats going to the moon or splitting the atom.”

An elected member of the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Collins was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in November 2007 from President George W. Bush. He received the National Medal of Science in 2009.