Congratulations to FY 2012, 2013 Space Grant Fellow, Pacifica Sommers, for leading a pilot project with Inner City Outings and the Mt. Lemmon SkyCenter! Sommers created a series of activities and games as part of an over night field trip for elementary and middle school students at the SkyCenter. This program gave many students a first time journey outside of Tucson city for a hands-on, science education experience.

Congratulations to FY 2011 Space Grant Intern and FY 2012 Space Grant Intern Advisor, Irene Liang, for being awarded the Udall Scholarship from the Morris K. Udall and Stewart L. Udall Foundation. In honor of the legacy of the Udalls, UA alumni, the foundation grants up to $5,000 in funding for each scholar – all students who have proven records of leadership and are committed to working in fields that center on the environment, health-care or tribal public policy.

Liang plans to study microbial methods used to monitor and treat water, which are currently expensive. With the UA Soil, Water and Environmental Science Club, Liang implemented a water-harvesting infrastructure and worked on erosion control to enable re-vegetation and reclamation of land. She also helped cleaned up trashed beaches in Mexico.

Jillian received her PhD in Biomedical/Medical at the Virginia Tech-Wake Forest University School of Biomedical Engineering and Sciences in June of 2015.  Her graduate research was primarily in understanding brain injury mechanisms.   Since earning her PhD, she has been a Research Assistant Professor at Wake Forest Baptist Health working with Joel Stitzel, PhD and   Joseph Maldjian, M.D. of the Virginia Tech-Wake Forest University Center for Injury Biomechanics Childress Institute for Pediatric Trauma, National Institutes of Health/NINDS.  Their focus is on the Kinematic Impact Data Set/iTAKL Study.

Jillian is also working on Biomechanical Basis for Pediatric mTBI Due to Sports Related Concussions, with Stefan Duma, PhD, Richard Greenwald, PhD through the Bioengineering Research Partnership: Simbex, LLC, Virginia Tech - Wake Forest University, Brown University National Institutes of Health/NINDS.

The Arizona Space Grant Consortium is proud to announce that our Ralph C. Steckler Space Grant Phase 2 Lunar Greenhouse development program and associated outreach, has received a Governor’s Excellence in Economic Development Award!

Dr. Orianna Bretschger is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Microbial and Environmental Genomics at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), San Diego. She earned her B.S. in physics and astronomy from Northern Arizona University (1999), and Ph.D. in Materials Science from the University of Southern California (2008).  Orianna began her professional career at Raytheon Missile Systems and transitioned to a research career in 2004.  Since then, Dr. Bretschger has been studying bacterial electron transfer mechanisms and how bacteria can be applied to engineered systems for optimized energy recovery from organic matter.  As a part of her research, Dr. Bretschger has developed experimental strategies and specialized equipment for the analysis of biological catalysts and is currently the principal investigator for multiple projects involving the selection and characterization of electrochemically active microbial communities from several different environments.  Her work includes collaborations with NASA Ames and Marshall Space Flight Center for the development of sustainable life support systems.

Former NASA Space Grant Intern Eric Kiang Tse became aware of the vast opportunities available to undergraduates through this program and engaged himself to build on his growing appreciation for the veracity of scientific investigation. He enthusiastically completed a search for Kuiper Belt Objects under the guidance of Dr. Andy Odell and presented results at the Colloquium for NASA Space Grant Interns in 2002. "To gain practical knowledge allowing for scientific contribution is one of the many, priceless benefits offered by this program". Upon graduation in 2005 he was offered an 'Accelerator Systems Operator' position at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC); a National Research Lab run by Stanford University for the Dept. of Energy. Currently the 'Engineering Operator in Charge' (EOIC); he is responsible for maintaining safety, expediting physics programs, guiding operators in troubleshooting the Accelerator and e- beam tuning, assisting Physicists with Accelerator measurements, coordinating Technicians and Engineers while fixing hardware, providing support, presenting daily reports,etc... All of which is necessary to provide the highest quality, brightest, shortest pulse and wavelength, X-Ray Free Electron Laser to experimental users at the only facility in the world that is capable of providing such unprecedented photon beams: the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at SLAC.

Mike Thomson, Space Grant Intern 2007-08, worked at General Dynamics C4 Systems until 2013 to help create the fastest military-grade data encryption devices in the world. During that time, he also attended Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which culminated with a Master's degree from Harvard. Mike is now pursuing a Ph.D. in computer architecture and embedded processing from the University of Texas at Austin. His academic research, with his advisor Dr. Derek Chiou, is currently focused on methods for achieving many orders of magnitude speedup in the simulation of complex microprocessors. This simulation speedup is obtained by developing a hybrid software/hardware methodology that connects fast software-based processor functional models with fast and cycle-accurate hardware-based processor timing models (using FPGAs). Despite his limited time due to his graduate studies, Mike also spends as much time as possible with his wife and two sons, to whom he indebted for their patience and understanding!

I currently work on the Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle (EKV) program that is part of the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system that is a segment of the U.S. missile defense system. The EKV is a vehicle that is carried upon a Boeing built booster and launched to intercept incoming ballistic missiles against the US or its allies.  I am a team member on a group called the Operations Test and Evaluation team. Our main task is to plan, execute, and analyze tests that are associated with the development of the EKV and GMD system, primarily flight and ground tests. I started with this team in January 2012 and my duty was to analyze post test data at ground tests performed at NASA’s White Sands Tests Facility (WSTF) in Las Cruces, NM. I primarily use MATLAB programming to analyze data, build scripts to process and plot data. The most nerve wracking and best part of the job is when the countdown starts to fire the thrusters and hope everything that you did works. I am glad to be part of this team because it contributes to the nation’s defense.

In addition to my primary work tasks, in 2011 I served as president of the Raytheon Missile Systems chapter of the Raytheon American Indian Network (RAIN), an employee resource group that is dedicated to the development of Native American employees at Raytheon and helps in career development, recruiting, and community service to the Tucson community. In parallel with my membership in RAIN, I am a professional member of the American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES). Our group helps college chapters by funding for conferences and outreach projects to K-12 students.

While a student at NAU, Dr. Gregory Mace participated in two Space Grant Internships. He worked closely with Dr. Lisa Prato at Lowell Observatory to study young, low-mass stars. This work combined almost 20 years of astronomical observations and resulted in two published papers that reveal the gravitational interactions in two- and three-star systems.

Dr. Mace earned his Ph.D. from UC Los Angeles in 2014. As a member of the UCLA Infrared Laboratory he assembled, modified, and tested MOSFIRE (the Multi-Object Spectrometer for Infra-Red Exploration).

This state-of-the-art Cassegrain instrument on the Keck I telescope allows astronomers to observe up to 46 objects simultaneously. These observations produce spectra, which reveal information about stellar composition, star formation, and distant galaxies. Working with the WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) Brown Dwarf Team at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC), Dr. Mace has observationally confirmed over 100 of the coolest brown dwarfs in the solar neighborhood. Also, as a graduate student he founded the award winning UCLA astronomy outreach group, Astronomy Live!. This student led group organizes school visits and the annual UCLA science day 'Exploring Your Universe'. For his work founding this group Gregory was awarded the Rudnick-Abelmann Scholarship by the UCLA Department of Physics and Astronomy.

In July 2014 Dr. Mace joined Dr. Daniel Jaffe's instrumentation lab at UT Austin. As the IGRINS (Immersion Grating Infrared Spectrograph) Postdoc Fellow, Dr. Mace is in charge of maintaining the IGRINS spectrograph and assisting observers at McDonald Observatory. Dr. Mace is employing IGRINS in his studies of the substellar boundary and low-mass stars.

Adam Nanouk travelled a great distance this summer--both physically and intellectually. His first trip away from his remote Alaskan village on the Bering Sea, took him all the way to Arizona to participate in Stargazer, a one-of-a-kind educational program for Native American high schoolers. Sponsored by the Space Grant Program at Northern Arizona University, Stargazer teams students with Ph.D. astronomers from Dinè (Tribal) College, Northern Arizona University, NASA scientists, and others, for an exciting week-long introduction to astronomy. News of Adam's acceptance to Stargazer stirred a great deal of excitement in his community--virtually everyone in the surrounding area attended his send-off party. The first leg of his journey--riding shuttles from home to the airport in Anchorage--was an adventure in itself. There, he reported seeing more people in one place than he could handle and nearly fainted! And that was nothing compared to what he would experience in Arizona!

Adam and his fellow students had opportunities to observe at state-of-the-art telescopes, construct and launch model rockets, and study star lore of different cultures in a star lab. They learned about astro-photography, spectroscopy, and CCD imaging, basic astronomical and physical principles, Native American astronomy, the scientific method, philosophy and ethics of science, and about telescopes, and how to use them. They took field trips to Lowell Observatory, the Astrogeology Branch of the U.S. Geological Survey, and an ancient archaeoastronomy site. Adam ate his first hamburger while on the NAU campus, saw his first ants while on a field trip, and got to wear his first NASA space suit. He said the trip opened his eyes to more possibilities than he ever imagined possible. His interest in space science was definitely sparked. Adam returned home with many stories for the people in his village--who will also, no doubt, marvel at what he has seen. We, in Arizona, anticipate seeing great things from Adam!