Aerospace engineering graduate students Mike Dancer and Jason Searcy took first place in the Student Scholarship Competition session at the 21st Annual Conference on Small Satellites for their paper about the UMR SAT mission.

Cleaner transportation is coming to rural Missouri, thanks to a joint effort by UMR and several federal agencies.

Armed with a GPS unit, Michelle Marincel, NucE’06, and Brian Payne, a senior in civil and environmental engineering, bushwacked and backtracked their way through the Medicine Bow National Forest near the Wyoming border with Colorado last summer in an effort to blaze a better trail along the Continental Divide.

Waddill to chair physics Dan Waddill, professor of physics and senior investigator in UMR’s Graduate Center for Materials Research, became chair of physics Aug. 1. He took over from Paul Parris, who remains on the physics faculty.

Thomas Weigert, Motorola Fellow and vice president of the company’s Global Software Group, became UMR’s first Daniel C. St. Clair Chair of Computer Science on Sept. 1.

Thulasi Kumar, former director of institutional research at the University of Northern Iowa, started work as director of institutional research and assessment at UMR on July 1.

The 2006-2007 school year was a record-breaker for the UMR Career Opportunities Center.