Our inaugural visiting mentor

I am pleased to announce that Dr. Zuleyma Tang Martinez will be our REU program's first visiting mentor, and will be a featured speaker at the HESTEC Science Symposium, and participate in Latinas' Day.

Zuleyma studies animal behavior, particularly social behavior and communication. She was born in Venezuela and has been affiliated with the University of Missouri-St. Louis since 1976, where she has published over 20 journal articles, edited several symposium proceedings, given over 75 conference presentations, and over a dozen invited presentations.

Zuleyma served as President of the Animal Behavior Society in 1993-1994, and founded the society’s Latin American Affairs Committee in 1996. This year, she was given the society’s Distinguished Service Award (pictured) for her efforts to diversify the Animal Behavior Society and increase participation of Central and South Americans.

Dr. Martinez’s other awards include being named O'Neil Ray Collins Distinguished Minority Scientist, at University of California, Berkeley in 1995, and receiving the Educational Equity Teaching Award for Higher Education, 1995 from the St. Louis Educational Equity Coalition.

Zuleyma is an outstanding scientist, and will be a fantastic guest for HESTEC. I couldn't be happier with having her as the first person to visit UTPA as part of our REU program.

We will, we will, doc you

Brian May of Queen, international rock star, defended his Ph.D. in astronomy yesterday. 37 years after he started.

Congratulations!

Note to students in our program: You are expected to graduate with your graduate degrees on a significantly shorter timeline.

Confirmed, plausible, or busted?

Dude! The MythBusters are slated to come to HESTEC. These guys are doing some of the best television – never mind science television or education television – on American screens right now.

It's going to be a challenge to make our REU program's contribution to HESTEC top that. But we'll try!

A Queen among grad students

Brian May, of the legendary band Queen, has finished writing his doctoral thesis on space dust. Thirty years after he started it.

Good luck on the defense!

Los Arcos

The REU program is featured in the new issue of Los Arcos, the university's alumni magazine. It just hit my mailbox today. Click on the image to read it.

(The edges are a little cut off because the magazine is printed in an oversized format. The pages literally don't fit on my flatbed scanner!)

The first cohort of students officially start their program tomorrow!

Drumroll...

Our first cohort of students is:

Cassandra Rivas
Tracy Muniz
Natali Mejia
Maria Calagui
Derek Martinez
Michael Torres

More about these students soon!

Writing a personal statement: Part 2

Make sure your name is on your personal statement. On every page.

Sometimes pages get separated in the course of handling paper. Or maybe they aren't filed immediately. Or correctly. You do not want someone working though applications to find pages that they just couldn't associate with any one person. That's not good.

You might think, "I stapled the pages of my personal statement together, so I only need my name on one page." The problem there is that quite often someone might want to make copies of your papers. And often the fastest way to do that is to take out the staples and run the papers through the photocopier autofeed.

After all, it's called a personal statement for a reason -- and what's more personal than your name?