News Briefs

UNC student Harper Guagliardo taught other students how to fight on stage for the production She Kills Monsters, which was UNC’s opening theater production of the fall 2018 semester. She received training from professional fight director Ava Kostia, who specializes in teaching others about stage combat. Guagliardo also codirected Greeley Central in that school’s own production of She Kills Monsters in November.

UNC Professor Hortensia (Tensia) Soto, Ph.D., took office in August 2018 as the associate secretary of the Mathematical Association of America, the world’s largest community of mathematicians, students and enthusiasts. She’ll lead two national meetings of the association each year. “My goal is to continue to bring new, inclusive and thought-provoking programming to the MAA’s meetings,” she said. Her first meeting as MAA associate secretary will be the Joint Mathematics Meetings from Jan. 16-19 in Baltimore.

A global initiative called Homeward Bound has selected Professor of Meteorology Cindy Shellito, Ph.D., to join an international group of 80 female scientists on a three-week expedition to the Antarctic Peninsula. The expedition, departing from Ushuaia, Argentina, on Dec. 31, aims to elevate the status of women in science and empower them to take a leadership role in issues related to climate change and sustainability. Shellito has studied climate change for nearly 25 years. “Warming is not a new thing for the earth,” she said. “But it is new for us. We evolved, and our civilizations evolved, in some of the coolest climates of the past 65 million years. And now, our activities are warming the Earth at a rate that is much faster than anything we’ve seen in the geologic record.”

Senior Zach Arnegard received a nice payday in July after he appeared on an episode of the “Price is Right” in early June. Arnegard played the popular game Plinko and won $11,000. He said he used the money to pay down his student debt and help cover the cost of completing his degree in Sports Coaching. “I grew up watching the show with my family, so to be a contestant was really a great experience,” he said. Arnegard competed on the show during a spring break mission trip to Los Angeles.

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The Campus Compact of the Mountain West — a community engagement organization of college and university presidents in Colorado and Wyoming — has awarded funding for a partnership between UNC and Greeley-Evans School District 6. They will work together as part of the K-H Civic Futures AmeriCorps Program, which will engage 70 AmeriCorps members focused on developing and supporting community-based learning for youth from kindergarten through graduate school, connecting academic content with real-world issues in a way that allows youth to be part of a solution for change.

“The Office of Engagement at UNC is proud to have been selected to participate in this initiative,” said UNC Professor Deborah Romero, Ph.D., who directs the Office of Engagement. “It will bring added resources and opportunities for our students to engage in high-impact projects that will shape their learning and experience at UNC, while also paying it forward with local youth and our partners to address civic learning and democracy.”

Through the Civic Futures program, K-12 and higher education institutions will strengthen pathways for civic learning and engagement, creating opportunities for youth to be meaningfully involved in their communities.

UNC’s chapter of the National Collegiate Hispanic Honor Society was one of only 10 chapters nationwide to be named an “Honor Chapter” for outstanding activities in 2017-18. Each summer, the 615 chapters of Sigma Delta Pi across the U.S. are asked to submit an annual report detailing their numerous activities and projects from the academic year.

In September, the Kenneth W. Monfort College of Business kicked off a yearlong celebration marking its 50th anniversary. Established as a school in 1968, then named a college in 1984, it was renamed in 1999 in honor of cattleman, benefactor and longtime Colorado statesman Kenneth W. Monfort. Five years later, the college became the first business college to receive the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, the nation’s highest honor for quality and performance excellence in organizations. “Over those 50 years, more than 12,000 students have graduated and gone on to be successful in all kinds of business endeavors, here in Colorado, in other parts of the U.S., and in a variety of international locations,” said Paul M. Bobrowski, Ph.D., dean of the College.

UNC’s Unified Athletics Club was inducted into the Special Olympics Colorado Hall of Fame in early October and was also recognized as the first-ever collegiate chapter to be named a Unified Championship School by Special Olympics Colorado. The Club’s inclusive sports, inclusive youth leadership opportunities and whole school engagement contributed to the honor. “The biggest reason the president of Special Olympics Colorado stated for our induction was not just our intramural leagues, but the club’s involvement in things like the ‘R-word’ campaign and other community outreach events,” said UNC student Kennidi Cobbley, who helped found the club. “We demonstrated that we are not just a UNC club but an organization actively participating in the community.”

The Google Doodle featured on the popular search engine’s homepage on Aug. 8, 2018, celebrated the 110th birthday of Mary Golda Ross ’38. A math prodigy, Ross was the first female and Native American engineer at Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, where she helped develop the rocket technology that launched the U.S. into space. Ross received a master’s degree in mathematics at UNC. “Math was more fun than anything else. It was always a game to me,” Ross once said. “I was the only female in my class. I sat on one side of the room and the guys on the other side of the room. I guess they didn’t want to associate with me. But I could hold my own with them and sometimes did better.”

Ross was a member of the Cherokee Nation, and taught math and science in rural Oklahoma during the Great Depression. Lockheed hired her in 1942. There, she worked on the Agena Rocket project and was one of the authors of the NASA Planetary Flight Handbook Vol. III about space travel to Mars and Venus. She died in 2008 at the age of 99.

UNC has saved more than $1.5 million in energy costs since 2016 through a campus-wide energy conservation program called powerED that rolled out in partnership with McKinstry, a national company that focuses on energy and operation efficiency in existing and new buildings. In total, UNC has reduced energy consumption by 27 percent including an 18 percent decrease of electricity use, 29 percent decrease of natural gas use and 12 percent decrease of water use. Also in the works is the installation of a solar project on Parsons Hall funded through the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s Supplemental Environmental Projects Program. The system is expected to be operational in the spring and will produce close to 4.7 million kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity with estimated savings of $176,500 over the expected 20-year life of the system.