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Congratulations to Glinda Davidson, the 2017 recipient of the LPL Outstanding Staff Award!

Glinda is a longtime member of the LPL administrative staff, with nearly 30 years of service to the department.  She began her career at LPL in 1988 as a Business Office Clerk, advancing to Associate Accountant in 1990. From 1997-2008, Glinda supported the Boynton group and other faculty as an Administrative Associate. She continued supporting faculty as a Senior Program Coordinator before becoming an Administrative Supervisor and Budget Analyst in 2013, and then moving into the role of Grants and Contracts Manager with the LPL Business Office soon after. Her many responsibilities include review and approval of grant submissions, budget changes, no-cost extensions, and grant correspondence, as well as pre-award and post-award compliance. Glinda performs cost projections and meets regularly with the faculty and principal investigators to avoid project deficits and resolve problems. Her work extends beyond preparing and managing budgets—she helps to ensure funding continuity for students, post-doctoral researchers, faculty, and staff. Despite the frustrations that Glinda might encounter in a day she is unfailingly courteous and cooperative. She overcomes the obstacles with a smile every day.

In addition to her responsibilities as the Grants Manager, Glinda also supervises several administrative associates and two members of the business office staff. She is recognized as an outstanding supervisor and a great mentor and coach. Glinda always makes herself available to the staff regardless of other pending priorities.

In the words of one faculty member, "I don't know what my group would do without her...She enables me to be successful." Another faculty member summarizes Glinda's work in this way: "With Glinda, it is not just about balancing the books, it is about helping people and ensuring that they are well taken care of and secure in their lives. That is a tremendous responsibility and she goes out of her way to identify potential issues well in advance to make sure that everything works out for our academic ‘family’."

Glinda's outstanding work previously earned her the staff award in 2000.

Laci BrockLaci Brock is the recipient of the PTYS Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA) Award for Fall 2016. Laci was awarded for her GTA with Dr. Steve Kortenkamp in the PTYS/ASTR 206 General Education course (Natural Sciences Tier II). The nominations from her students reference her passion for helping students understand the material, not simply memorize it, her encouragement, understanding, patience, responsiveness, and availability. Laci was instrumental in designing and implementing an experimental grading structure for the course and in gaining approval from the Institutional Review Board to seek consent from students to use their records and feedback for research on the effects of the new grading structure. Laci also helped to design a new term project offered to the 206 students for fall 2016.  Moreover, her handling of the more typical GTA duties (grading, office hours, and extra workshop sessions for paper writing) was exceptional. 

Laci is a first-year graduate student currently working with Associate Professor Travis Barman. As a recipient of the Outstanding GTA Award, she will receive funds of up to $1,000 to support travel to a professional meeting of her choice. 

LPL congratulates recent PTYS graduate Michelle Thompson, who advanced to a pool of 32 candidates in the running to be one of two new astronauts with the Canadian Space Agency.

Also, images from a paper on which Michelle was the senior author appeared on the cover of the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science for the March 2017 issue.

Michelle defended her dissertation in May 2016 and is currently a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow (RA) at Johnson Space Center. 

 

 

 

Dr. Jeff Andrews-Hanna joined LPL in January as an Associate Professor. Jeff is a planetary scientist, interested in all aspects of the evolution and structure of the terrestrial planets. He joined LPL after working at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder where he was a staff scientist. Jeff earned his Ph.D. in Earth and Planetary Science at Washington University in St Louis, where he focused on the hydrology of Mars; he then pursued a postdoc position at MIT, where he worked on martian geophysics. Jeff's primary research interests are in hydrologic, tectonic, volcanic, and geodynamic processes on the terrestrial planets, making use of a combination of numerical modeling and data analysis. Ongoing research topics include the analysis of gravity data from NASA’s GRAIL mission to investigate subsurface structures on the Moon, hydrological modeling applied to the formation of sedimentary deposits on Mars, data and modeling applied to understanding volcanic eruption products on Mars, and geophysical studies of tectonics across the inner Solar System. 
 

 

Congratulations to LPL's 2017 Galileo Circle Scholarship recipients: Corwin Atwood-Stone, Ali Bramson, Hamish Hay, James Keane, Margaret Landis, Molly Simon, and Alessondra Springmann. Galileo Circle Scholarships are awarded to the University of Arizona's finest science students and represent the tremendous breadth of research interests in the College of Science.

Galileo Circle Scholars receive $1,000 each; these awards are supported through the generous donations of Galileo Circle members. The Galileo Scholars were honored at an early evening reception held on April 12, 2017.

Congratulations to all our 2017 Galileo Scholars!

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