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Rita Colwell, Physics, was elected to the Governing Council of the National Academy of Sciences. Colwell is one of only twelve elected councilors who will play a key role in charting the future of this important national institution.

Ruth DeFries, ESSIC and Geography, was elected a Fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). She was recognized at the Annual AAAS Fellows Forum meeting in Boston on February 16th for her contribution to science and technology.

Arpita Upadhyaya, Physics, IPST and IREAP, was selected as a 2008 Sloan Research Fellow

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Hoseok Ahn, IPST, $111,113, NASA; "Final ATIC LDB Flight Analysis"

Thomas Antonsen, Physics, ECE and IREAP, $300,000, DOE; "Wave Chaos and HPM Effects on Electronic Systems"

Richard Ellis, Physics and IREAP, $478,000, DOE; "The Maryland Centrifugal Experiment"

Nicholas Hadley, Physics, $1,548,000, DOE; "High Energy Accelerator and Colliding Beam User Group"

Douglas Hamilton, Astronomy, $109,219, NASA; "Dust Dynamics at Saturn: Spokes in the B Ring"

Jeffrey Hollingsworth, CS and UMIACS, $240,000, DOE; "Performance Engineering Research Center"

Bruce Kane, Physics, $1,352,000, DOD; "Quantum Devices Research"

Steven Salzberg, CS and UMIACS, $2,481,394, DOI; "Bioinformatics Tool for Rapid Pathogen Detection"

Surjalal Sharma, Astronomy, $117,933, NASA; "Thin Current Sheets and Magnetic Reconnection"

VS Subrahmanian, CS and UMIACS, $100,000, SAIC; "Integrated Crisis Early Warning System"

Jessica Sunshine, Astronomy, $161,563, Brown University; "Moon Mineral Mapper"

John Trasco, Astronomy, $1,729,951, NASA; "The Goddard Center for Research and Exploration"

Stephen Wallace, Physics, $735,000, DOE; "Theoretical Studies in Hadronic and Nuclear Physics"

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An international conference in honor of Michael Brin on the occasion of his being 60 will be held March 15-18 at the University of Maryland. There will be over 100 participants, representing over 50 schools and 10 countries, and at this meeting, the first Michael Brin Prize in Dynamical Systems will be awarded. The Prize carries an award of $15,000.

This conference will be the 34th meeting of the Maryland-Penn State Dynamics Workshop, one of the longest running dynamics meetings in the world. The Center for Scientific Computation and Mathematical Modelling, and the Mathematics Department are hosting an international conference on "Hyperbolic Problems: Theory, Numerics and Applications" at the University of Maryland, June 9-13, 2008. This is the twelfth meeting in a bi-annual series of international conferences, initiated in 1986 at St. Etienne, France, which during the past twenty years has become one of the highest quality and most successful international conference series in Applied Mathematics. More than 200 participants are expected to attend, led by a world renowned list of plenary and invited speakers.Information can be found at http://hyp2008.umd.edu

The College of Computer, Mathematical and Physical Sciences, ESSIC and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) will collaborate on climate research and education at the University of Maryland's M-Square Research and Technology Park. The research complex will house 800 people, including staff from the National Centers for Environmental Prediction, NOAA's Satellite and Information Service and the Air Resources Laboratory. The center will generate oceanic and atmospheric forecasts, including hurricane predictions.

Antonio Busalacchi, AOSC and ESSIC, met with Governor O'Malley and participated in his press conference on February 19th in support of the Global Warming Solutions Act. Later that afternoon Busalacchi testified to the State Senate on the topic of "Climate Change: State of the Science."

Michael Fisher, IPST and Physics, served as leader of the opening session of a workshop entitled "Is there a Physics of Society?" which was held at the Santa Fe Institute on January 10. His remarks were entitled "The role of Theory and Reality in Physics". The Workshop was co-organized by Michelle Girvan, Physics and IPST.

Raj Roy, Physics and IPST, has accepted a second term as Director of the Institute for Physical Science and Technology, beginning on July 1, 2008 and ending on June 30, 2013.

Raj Roy, Physics and IPST, Dan Lathrop, Physics, Geology, IPST and IREAP, Chirag Kalelkar, Physics, and Physics graduate students Adam Cohen and Bhargava Ravoori, were part of the Winter School for "Hands-On Research in Complex Systems" held in Gandhinagar, India in January.

Ross Salawitch, AOSC, was one of the contributors to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. The Nobel citation for the IPCC praises two decades of scientific reports that have created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming.

Ben Shneiderman, CS and UMIACS, had a patent of his sold by the University of Maryland. The patent sale is the first ever by the University of Maryland. It was sold to a private company for $133,000.

Jan Sengers, IPST, testified at a hearing of the Netherlands-Flemish Accreditation Organization in Antwerp, Belgium, on January 23, in his capacity as Chair of the International Review Committee for physics education at the Universities of Flanders. On January 24 Dr. Sengers was an invited lecturer at the Ornstein Colloquium of the Debye Institute at the Utrecht University, The Netherlands on "Thermal fluctuations in
nonequilibrium thermodynamics."

The Norbert Wiener Center for Harmonic Analysis and Applications hosted the fourth annual February Fourier Talks on February 21 - 22, 2008, featuring talks by leading researchers in academia and government industry labs. The schedule, titles and abstracts may be found at http://www.norbertwiener.umd.edu/FFT/FFT08

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Michael A'Hearn, Astronomy, was mentioned on SpaceDaily.com on February 8 in an article about Deep Impact's next mission, Epoxi. The Deep Impact spacecraft is aiming its largest telescope at five stars in a search for exosolar planets. The story and A'Hearn's comments were also picked up by the Pasadena Star-News on February 12 and the Baltimore Sun on February 16.

Ben Bederson, CS and UMIACS, was featured on WYPR Radio Baltimore on February 8. Bederson was part of a new study that shows that human error is the most important factor in the accuracy of elections.

Ben Bederson, CS and UMIACS, was featured in Wireless Week on February 20 in an article about his company Zumobi. Bederson announced that their new software for mobile devices is out of beta tests and is now available for public downloading.

James Carton, AOSC, was quoted in the Baltimore Sun on February 15 in an article about the health of our planet's ocean's and the human factor involved with their degrading state.

Rita Colwell, UMIACS, was mentioned in an article on NPR.com and in the segment "All Things Considered" on February 26 about the impact of climate change on the outbreak of disease. In 1991 a cholera outbreak in Peru was fueled by a change in ocean temperature. Now two scientists who worked with Colwell are continuing to do research to prepare for another outbreak due to new climate change.

Dave Doermann, UMIACS, was quoted in eschoolnews.com on February 7 in an article about software for smart phones that could be used by the military for translation and by the visually impaired. Doermann hopes the software will be ready by mid 2009.

William Dorland, IREAP, CSCAMM and Physics, was one of thirteen authors who produced a report for the American Association for the Advancement of Science on nuclear forensics. Dorland was mentioned on eurekalreart.com on February 16.

James Drake, Physics, IREAP and IPST, was quoted on Phys.org on January 24 and Yahoo News and Space.com on February 6 in an article about new discoveries regarding magnetic field lines and the first-ever direct observation of their reconnection in space. These discoveries are offering hope that scientists will learn how to unlock fusion power as an energy source in the future.

Alison Druin, UMIACS and CLIS, was featured in an article in MIT's Technology Review March 2008 edition. The article focuses on the accomplishment of Druin and the HCIL lab.

James Gates, Physics, was featured in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel on February 29. Gates was an invited lecturer at Menomonee Falls High School on February 28 and gave a talk on his love of physics and science. This was a side stop as Gates was giving a lecture at Marquette University later that night.

Thomas Holz, Geology, was quoted in Science on February 1 in an article about the sale of a giant four-tusked skull of a mastodon by a creationist museum. Researches have not been happy with the state of commercialization of fossils.

Thomas Holtz, Geology, was quoted in National Geographic on February 11 about a new species of miniature flying reptile that lived more than 120 million years ago has been unearthed in China. Holtz said that the discovery of the new fossil adds to evidence that the massive pterosaurs of the late Cretaceous evolved from smaller tree-living ancestors.

Alan Kaufman, Geology, was quoted on sciencedaily.com on February 26 in an article about a new study, co-authored by Kaufman, showing that the rise of oxygen and the oxidation of deep oceans between 635 and 551 million years ago may have had an impact on the increase and spread of the earliest complex life.

Stacy McGaugh, Astronomy, was quoted in the New Scientist on February 6 in an article about dark matter and its possible absence from some galaxies according to new research.

Coleman Miller, Astronomy, was quoted in the February edition of Sky and Telescope in the article "Monster Black Holes Soon to Collide?"

Derek Richardson, Astronomy, was quoted in an online Sky & Telescope article on February 14 about the discovery of the first triple near-Earth asteroid. The title of the article is "A Triple Threat."

Roald Sagdeev, Physics and IPST, was mentioned in Popular Science on Februray 15 and Ars Technica on February 16 in articles about the AAAS' celebration of "50 Years in Space." Sagdeev was on a panel of distinguished scientists who have played a significant role in space science over the past 50 years.

Steven Salzberg, CS and UMIACS, was mentioned on GenomeWeb Daily News on February 15. Salzberg, like many scientists, are significantly worried about the spending cuts for biomedical research proposed by President George Bush in his budget request for 2009, saying the future of US medical research is being sold short.

VS Subrahmanian, CS and UMIACS, was featured articles in the United Press International, Computerworld Magazine, IT Week, UPI News Track Top News, Network World, Digital Trends News, Government Computer News, Tech Tree India, and Eurekalert.com on February 26. The articles discuss the Stochastic Opponent Modeling Agents, or SOMA, Terror Organization Portal, developed by Subrahmian and his team of researchers. SOMA will allow analysts to query automatically learned rules on terrorist organization
behavior; forecast potential behavior based on those rules and communicate with other analysts examining the same subjects. The story was also covered on over 100 public radio channels, Canadian TV, and received top news coverage in India, Australia, UK, Estonia, and Malaysia.

Ning Zeng, AOSC, was published in Science on February 8. His research on China's carbon dioxide emission rate and economic growth show a scary link that will substantially affect the goal of avoiding dangerous climate change. Zeng was also featured on sciencemag.org on February 8 relating to his Science publication.

The International Children's Digital Library, created by the Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Lab, was featured in the School Library Journal on February 27 as the organization announced that it will team with the
Boston Public Library to provide digital access to hundreds of titles from the library's Alice M. Jordan Collection. The collection encompasses such titles as Robinson Crusoe, Little Red Riding Hood, Mother Goose rhymes, Aesop's Fables, Grimm's fairy tales, and Hans Christian Andersen's stories.

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Sergey Brin, BS, '93, Mathematics and CS, was quoted in the International Herald Tribune on February 23. The article was about the Google Lunar X Prize, a competition sponsored by Google with $30 million in prizes for the first two teams to land a robotic rover on the moon and send images and other data back home.

Julian Mestre, Ph.D.,'07, CS, Advisor Samir Khuller, CS and UMIACS, won the best paper award at the SODA ACM/SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms one of the top conferences in algorithms. Julian joined the Max Planck Institute in Germany on Oct. 1, but the paper is based on his work at Maryland.

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COLLEGE OF COMPUTER, MATHEMATICAL AND PHYSICAL SCIENCES

Astronomy Department - Dr. Stuart Vogel, Chair
Atmospheric and Oceanic Science Department - Dr. James Carton, Chair
Computer Science Department - Dr. Larry Davis, Chair
Geology Department - Dr. Michael Brown, Chair
Mathematics Department - Dr. James Yorke, Chair
Physics Department - Dr. Drew Baden, Chair
CSCAMM - Dr. Eitan Tadmor, Director
ESSIC - Dr. Antonio Busalacchi, Director
IPST - Dr. Rajarshi Roy, Director
IREAP - Dr. Dan Lathrop, Director
UMIACS - Dr. V.S. Subrahmanian, Director

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