The Graduate College is pleased to announce its 2019-20 award winners.  UNLV Graduate College Outstanding Thesis & Dissertation Awards Each year the Graduate College presents four awards for outstanding theses and dissertations (within each category, one for STEM and one for non-STEM). This year’s winners are: Outstanding Thesis (STEM…

Natalie Johns (Biochemistry) was recognized for an abstract that she submitted to the American Society of Radiation Oncologists (ASTRO). A senior, Johns was selected to present her work, "Comics for Pediatric Oncology Patients & Families: Education & Empowerment," at the annual meeting in October in Miami. The abstract…

The Graduate College is pleased to announce the Spring 2020 Graduate College Medallion recipients. Graduate College Medallion recipients are exceptionally involved during their time as graduate students at UNLV. Medallions are given in the semester students graduate.  This semester's recipients are: Austin McKenna, Biological…

Min Li (Physics and Astronomy) will have a new study appear in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society — a major international astronomy journal. She and her collaborators, UNLV's Jason Steffen, Zhaohuan Zhu (both Physics and Astronomy), and Shichun Huang (Geoscience), as well as Misha Petaev at Harvard, combined simulations of a…

Cassara Higgins (Chemistry and Biochemistry) was recognized for a paper that she presented at the International Youth Nuclear Conference in Sydney, Australia, in March. A third-year student in the radiochemistry PhD program, Higgins wrote about "The Reduction of Uranium Hexafluoride with a Room Temperature Ionic Liquid (1-methyl-1-…

PhD student Randall Dannen (Physics & Astronomy) has recently demonstrated a novel method to create clouds around black holes. To appear in May as a letter in the prestigious Astrophysical Journal, the work led by Dannen was co-authored with astronomy professor Daniel Proga (his PhD adviser), UNLV postdoctoral researcher Tim Waters,…

Donald Price (Life Sciences) recently published two scientific articles describing research aimed at understanding the genomic changes that are associated with the invasion of the fruit fly, Drosophila suzukii.  D. suzukii is originally from Asia, established in Hawaii in the 1980’, and recently expanded into the Americas and Europe…

Cindy Kha (Life Sciences) is the recipient of the next year’s President’s UNLV Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. This is the second consecutive year that a life sciences graduate student has been awarded this prestigious fellowship. Kha is a doctoral student whose advisor is professor Kelly Tseng. 

Erin Cassin (Life Sciences), a graduate student studying under professor Boo Shan Tseng, was awarded an honorable mention for her National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program application. This program is highly competitive, and an honorable mention is a significant national achievement.

Boo Shan Tseng (Life Sciences) received an NIH/NV-INBRE Developmental Research Project (DRP) award to study how Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a bacterial pathogen that causes lung infections in immuno-compromised humans, forms antibiotic-resistant aggregates. The DRP award is for up to two years and a total amount of $223,000. 

Lawrence "Lars" R. Walker (Life Sciences) recently published a book, Comparative Plant Succession among Terrestrial Biomes of the World, which provides a comparative approach to plant succession among all terrestrial biomes and disturbances, helping to reveal generalizable patterns.  The Ecology, Biodiversity, and Conservation series presents…

Cory Rusinek (Chemistry) received an NIH/NV-INBRE Developmental Research Project (DRP) award. This NV INBRE DRP will use diamond microelectrodes for the detection of analytes associated with oxidative stress. In the long-term, this research hopes to lead to fundamental understanding of the role of oxidative stress at the cellular level and…