The Department of English and Chemistry Associate Professor Thomas Schmedake have earned awards of excellence from Provost Joan Lorden for their commitment to students and citizens of the region.

Lorden presented the Award for Excellence in Teaching to the English Department and the Faculty Award for Community Engagement to Schmedake. She also awarded the Excellence in Undergraduate Academic Advising to the College of Arts + Architecture advising team.

“The University has had a long-standing commitment to teaching excellence,” Lorden said. “As UNC Charlotte grows and diversifies, the way we educate and engage students also changes.” She recognized how the English Department has worked together to maintain high-quality teaching in this changing and increasingly diversified environment.

The teaching honor comes with a $5,000 award from the UNC Board of Governors and the Provost’s Office, as well as a plaque for departmental display.

The English Department earned accolades for its ability to increase its number of majors and for revamping its curriculum to provide students with more exposure to diverse combinations of sub-disciplinary areas, which include literature, and language and writing, combined with cutting-edge work in diversity studies, eco-studies and digital humanities.

The department also has increased its online and hybrid course offerings at the undergraduate and graduate levels to make its curriculum more accessible to students. This demonstrates that the department is making efforts to broaden its course delivery methods to cater to the demands of the 21st century student.

With the second honor presented, the Provost’s Faculty Award for Community Engagement honors a tenured faculty member whose teaching, research and service epitomize the University’s commitment to civic involvement.

Schmedake was cited for leading workshops to help K-12 science teachers develop effective ways of demonstrating chemical concepts and engaging students in hands-on activities to help them better understand chemistry. He engages K-12 science students through exciting demonstrations and by mentoring high school students in his research laboratory. As the UNC Charlotte coordinator for Project Seed, Schmedake oversees a program that provides paid internships for economically disadvantaged students to pursue laboratory research with college professors.

As a member of the planning committee for the UNC Charlotte Science and Technology Expo each year, Schmedake volunteers to promote, organize and execute this annual event that brings thousands of people onto campus. His popular chemistry demonstration is a highlight of the expo. He also works with Discovery Place on community engagement educational activities, such as NanoDiscovery Day.

The Provost’s Faculty Award for Community Engagement comes with a $2,500 prize for the recipient to use to expand his or her work. Starting fall 2018, this award will be the Bonnie E. Cone Distinguished Professorship in Community Engagement. Nominations for this award are being accepted through 5 p.m., Friday, Oct. 20, 2017.

Images: Wade Bruton (English Department and Schmedake at the awards event) and Lynn Roberson (Schmedake at the Science and Technology Expo).

The Russian Academy of Science’s Sobolev Institute of Mathematics has awarded its 2017 Gold Medal for distinguished impact in mathematics to Mikhail Klibanov, a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at UNC Charlotte. This award is considered a lifetime achievement award in the field of mathematics.

“I am greatly honored to be recognized with this award,” Klibanov says. “To be recognized in this way is humbling. My heart is full.”

Klibanov joined the faculty at UNC Charlotte in 1990, after serving as an associate professor for the Department of Mathematics at The Samara State University in Samara, Russia from 1977 to 1990.

“This award is an important recognition of Dr. Klibanov’s work,” says Yuanan Diao, chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. “This medal recognizes his work throughout his career, including the solutions he has discovered to crucial mathematical problems and also the contributions he has made over the years to sharing his solutions through extensive publishing, which has helped others in their research.”

Klibanov has solved ten different long-standing important problems in the field of “Inverse Problems for Partial Differential Equations,” including the development of globally convergent numerical methods for coefficient inverse problems, uniqueness of Phase Problems in Optics, and uniqueness theorems and reconstruction methods for 3-d Inverse Scattering Problems without the phase information.

He possesses substantial experience in research including inverse problems arising in microwaves and nano science. His work in the complex and difficult field of inverse problems began in 1973, when he was a graduate student. He has continued that research as a professor, with funding from the U.S. Army Research Office in reference to the detection and identification of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) in Iraq and Afghanistan. Other funding comes from the Office of Naval Research to support research into the phase reconstruction problem.

As an example of real-world implications for his research, his algorithm regarding globally convergent numerical methods for coefficient inverse problems holds implications for determining the materials in potentially explosive devices, which in turn can save lives.

Klibanov is widely published, with 143 publications – including two books – and 1,432 citations by other researchers noted in MathSciNet, a searchable online bibliographic database created by the American Mathematical Society in 1996. Google Scholar has documented almost 5,000 citations of his work by other scholars.

As part of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Science, the Sobolev Institute of Mathematics in Novosibirsk includes about 500 researchers who carry on fundamental investigations in mathematics, mathematical physics and informatics.

Words: Haley Coley, CLAS Student Writer | Images: Lynn Roberson, CLAS Communications Director

The Bank of America Award for Teaching Excellence was first presented in 1968 to recognize outstanding faculty members at UNC Charlotte. Through the years, dozens of College of Liberal Arts & Sciences faculty have received the top award, reflecting their commitment to stellar teaching.

It was established in response to a suggestion by the staff of the student literary magazine. Bonnie E. Cone and W. Hugh McEniry, vice chancellors at the time, endorsed the students’ proposal for the annual award and presented it to Chancellor Dean Colvard. He found financial support for the award through the generosity of Addison Reese and NCNB, a predecessor to NationsBank and Bank of America.

Mathematical equations cycle through Kevin McGoff’s mind, as he pedals his bike on the system of greenways in north Charlotte.

The UNC Charlotte mathematician’s thoughts shift into gear, centered on problems associated with his field of study – dynamical systems. Dynamical systems serve as important mathematical models for a wide array of physical phenomena, relating to things such as weather modeling, systems biology, the spread of disease, and statistical physics, for example.

In mathematical terms, such a system consists of a state space, in which a point represents a complete description of the system, and a rule governing the evolution of the system from one state to another. These basically are units whose state evolves over time according to a kind of logic or rule.

On this day on the greenway, the verdant greenery that envelops McGoff, the ground beneath him, and the air he breathes, are all parts of a massive dynamical system – the Earth itself. In McGoff’s case, curiosity about Earth as a system was the original spark for what has grown into a research focus with implications for disease and other societal issues.

In one area of research, McGoff collaborates with epidemiologists who are studying the spread of diseases in populations and the dynamical effects that come into play within organisms. He currently is working with biologists to study malaria, work that grew from seeing system similarities through work with dynamical systems associated with circadian rhythms.

“You have these parasites that get into your body, and they essentially overwhelm your immune system in a dynamic way,” he says. “They all burst out of their cells at the same time, and then they swarm your immune system, and that’s when you get these spiking high fevers. That happens periodically.”

Researchers need to understand how this happens. “There must be some underlying dynamical system which tells them when to burst out.,” McGoff says. “If we can now study these parasites through observations of their genetic behavior over time – dynamic signatures of their genetics – the hope would be that we could understand what program is encoded in their DNA that allows them to coordinate their behavior. Of course, if we can understand what’s making them work, then the next step is how to break it.”

McGoff and colleagues have published in journals including Genome Biology, The Annals of Probability, and The Annals of Statistics and other publications. He continues to explore the theoretical side of dynamical systems, while he also collaborates on practical applications. Both have a place in research in this field, he says.

“Beginning with concrete examples of systems and then abstracting the relevant properties is often a good way to find interesting theoretical questions for further study,” he says.

McGoff has received National Science Foundation funding to focus on characterizing when traditional statistical procedures may be effectively applied in the context of dynamical systems.

“Imagine that you’re a scientist, and you want to understand the way a certain system works,” McGoff says. “You might have some form of equations that you think makes sense, but you want to know what exact parameters should I choose for this, or at a bigger level, what form of equations should I even select as a model for my data?”

In many cases, the underlying models that people try to use are dynamical systems. “This effort brings my knowledge of dynamical systems to bear on these statistical inference problems, going from observations of a system and trying to reconstruct the model,” he says. “So, how do you use the information you get from your observations in an intelligent way to understand the underlying dynamical system?”

In one discovery, McGoff has found a way to describe what he calls a random dynamical system.

“You basically have a big bag of dynamical systems,” he says. “And, a lot of what has been done in the past has been to pick one out specifically and look very carefully at it and understand how it works. One approach I looked at in specific cases was to select one at random and ask, “What does that one look like?” This helps to characterize what typical systems do, which can have more relevance for the real world. If you looked out into the world, what behavior would you expect to see? You would expect to see typical behavior. But, what is that? You need some way of choosing a system at random and then asking what it does.”

As McGoff works with undergraduate and graduate students, he reminds them of the need to continue to take varying views of problems and to consider things for different perspectives.

“Always take a different approach,” he says. “When an approach works, it just flows. An idea can come at a completely random time, like the shower in the morning or on a bike ride. When you have an idea, and the consequences just start flowing, and when you get that cascading effect of ideas, you know you’re onto something.”

Words and Images: Lynn Roberson, CLAS Communications Director | Illustration: Ashley Plyler, CLAS Graphic Designer

For 50 years, the UNC Charlotte Botanical Gardens has been a living classroom for students and a horticultural and botanical asset for the campus and greater community. Botanical Gardens Director Jeff Gillman describes how support through Exponential will sustain the future of the gardens, including its educational curriculum and ongoing research. Plans call for building a new welcome center that will serve as a gateway to the green heart of UNC Charlotte’s campus. This sustainable facility will draw students,faculty, staff and the public to an open and inviting teaching facility, working greenhouse and surrounding plaza, all designed to serve generations to come.

Former Army finance specialist Tyler Crone served in Afghanistan and later taught high school computer science. Now, Crone is earning his master’s degree in Mathematical Finance, confident that this will be the gateway to a challenging career.

The nationally ranked Mathematical Finance program is a joint program of the Departments of Finance and Economics in the Belk College of Business and the Department of Mathematics and Statistics in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. Students take courses from all three departments in an integrated curriculum and may use electives to tailor the program to their specific interests.

College of Liberal Arts & Sciences alum Dave Martin is using his biology degree creatively at Olde Mecklenburg Brewery – blending science and art! Martin (’10) is the director of brewing operations at The Olde Mecklenburg Brewery in Charlotte.