Category: Research

Four faculty members from the College of Arts and Sciences just received a $2.5 million National Science Foundation (NSF) Grant. This grant will provide scholarships to 45 full-time undergraduate students who are pursuing bachelor’s degrees in biology, chemistry, earth sciences, mathematics or physics. The overall goal of this project is to increase STEM degree completion for low-income, high-achieving undergraduates with demonstrated financial need.

The team leading this endeavor are Amy Chambers/Math, Wendy Smith/Math, Janet Coonce/Chemistry and Hannah Kinmonth-Schultz/Biology. Collectively they, “believe that there is an untapped pool of talent in Tennessee, particularly in the Upper Cumberland region. We are excited to see what students will be able to do when significant financial barriers are removed, and our planned wrap-around resources are poured into helping them be the absolute best they can be.”

Resources provided to students include academic tutoring and guidance, peer and career mentorship, cohort building, leadership training, and career development.

This project is funded by the NSF’s Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics program.

A new research network called Science DMZ is set to launch at Tennessee Tech.

The official opening and an orientation session for users will take place July 26 from 3:30-4:30 p.m. at Stonecipher Lecture Hall room 126. Researchers and administrators are invited to attend the ribbon-cutting ceremony and learn about accessing this specialized network.

“The Science DMZ is an advanced network architecture designed to optimize data transfer and collaboration among researchers, institutions and external partners,” Computer Science Assistant Professor Susmit Shannigrahi said. “It offers an efficient, secure and high-bandwidth pathway for transferring large datasets.”

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Three Tennessee Tech Physics majors accompanied by Dr. Mary Kidd attended the Partnerships for International Research and Education: Germanium Materials and Detectors Advancement Research Consortium (PIRE-GEMADARC) Summer School hosted by Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan. Pictured are Joel Watson, Caleb Eldridge, Mary Kidd, and Ethan White at a scenic overlook on the east coast of Taiwan. Starting in 2018, PIRE-GEMADARC has hosted a summer school and international undergraduate research experience. The summer school specializes in teaching about the uses of germanium detectors in physics experiments involving double-beta decay and the direct detection of dark matter and is attended by students worldwide. Participants attended seminar-style lectures on germanium detectors, neutrino physics, dark matter, and cosmology. In addition, our hosts planned multiple cultural and scientific excursions. The students will remain in Taipei completing their research experience until July 21!

Notice: This event has been postponed due to the Data Center outage.

A new research network called Science DMZ is set to launch at Tennessee Tech. The official opening and an orientation session for users will take place June 27, 10-11 a.m., at Stonecipher Lecture Hall 113. Researchers and administrators are invited to attend the ribbon-cutting ceremony and learn about accessing this specialized network.

“The Science DMZ is an advanced network architecture designed to optimize data transfer and collaboration among researchers, institutions and external partners,” Computer Science Assistant Professor Susmit Shannigrahi said. “It offers an efficient, secure and high-bandwidth pathway for transferring large datasets.”

The network was funded through a two-year, $263,000 grant from the National Science Foundation and implemented by Tech’s Information Technology Services Assistant Director for Network Operations David Hales and HPC Systems Administrator Mike Renfro. Shannigrahi serves as the principal investigator alongside co-PI Mike Rogers, associate professor of computer science.

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Tennessee Tech’s Department of Computer Science collected awards and presented research papers at the 36th International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society conference.

Tech participants included computer science professors Doug Talbert and William (Bill) Eberle, master’s candidate Mateo Gannod and undergraduate students Kate Phillips, Matthew Beech and Ethan Owens.

“FLAIRS is a great conference for introducing students to AI research,” Talbert said.

Phillips received the Best Student Paper Award for her research paper titled “The Complexity/Accuracy Tradeoff and Group Bias in Machine Learning-Based Trauma Triage Models,” which she presented at the conference.

Eberle received the Douglas D. Dankel II Award for his leadership and support of FLAIRS since 2008.

Gannod presented his paper, “Semantic Segmentation with Multispectral Satellite Images of Waterfowl Habitat.”

Read more:  https://www.tntech.edu/engineering/news/articles/research/2023.05.25-tennessee-tech-wins-awards-presents-research-at-florida-artificial-intelligence-conference.php

Tennessee Tech’s College of Education and Exceptional Learning Ph.D. program were well represented at the 19th Annual International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry at the University of Illinois May 17-20, 2023.

Students and faculty presented on a wide range of topics, including: special educators’ job satisfaction, athletic trainer education transitions, teacher stressors and burnout, female college athletes’ relationships with their bodies, low-income first-generation college student persistence, overseas student teaching experiences, and children’s summer literacy.

Pictured from left to right include Samantha Nicole Farley, Lisa Zagumny, Bobbi Severt, Dorota Silber-Furman, Luke Anderson, Janet Kesterson Isbell, Allison Barlow Coutinho, and Angie Clark. Presenters not pictured are Holly Anthony and Larissa Rector.

For more information, please email the college at education@tntech.edu.

Please join us this Friday for an Undergraduate STEM Research Seminar given by Sydney Beltran from TTU’s Department of Earth Sciences. Sydney has been studying the geology of Mars using the HiRISE instrument on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. By comparing features observed on Mars to features found on Earth, Sydney is able to probe Mars’ paleoclimate transition from “warm and wet” to “cold and dry”. Sydney’s talk, Svalbard Terraced Fan-Delta as a Terrestrial Analog for Tyras Vallis’ Fan-Delta, Xanthe Terra Mars, will be this Friday at 4pm in Bruner Hall 210. (Snacks will be served starting at 3:30pm.) These seminars are geared for undergraduates from any STEM major, but graduate students and faculty are encouraged to attend! For questions, contact aholley@tntech.edu

All are invited to come out to Memorial Gym on Thursday, April 20th, from 9:00 – 11:00 to get a glimpse into some of the exciting research being done by TTU students.  This year’s event features posters and papers generated from 226 submitted abstracts on topics as varied as the 24 fields of study from which they originate.  You are also welcome to attend the award ceremony which will begin at 11:00. Please take some time to stop by and show your support! For questions, visit https://www.tntech.edu/research/research-day.php

Join Rural Reimagined in celebrating the research of Dr. Dennis Fennewald (School of Agriculture) and his student assistants Macy Johnson and Holden Cornett. Their research titled “Comparison of Regenerative and Traditional Beef Production Business Models” studied three herds sizes for differences in monetary gain and investment return among the Regenerative Agriculture and the Traditional production methods. They determined that because Regenerative Agriculture farms rely little on “off-farm inputs, and the return on investment is higher, these farms should have more economic resiliency” than the Traditional method. Dr. Fennewald and his team plan to present their findings at the Research and Creative Inquiry Day on campus. To find out more about Dr. Fennewald’s team’s research, visit their poster on Inquiry Day or check out our related Newsroom story. Rural Reimagined encourages other faculty members to share their research with us! Wings up!