Provost's Newsletter April 2023 cont...
ARCS Celebrates Annual Event for Convergent Research
CSUN’s Autonomy Research Center for STEAHM (ARCS) 2023 Lift Off Event took place April 7th. More than 300 students, faculty, and staff came together to share 35 multidisciplinary research projects and network with industry stakeholders including NASA/JPL, Aerospace Corp, Medtronic, and Ecotelesis. VIP attendees included CSUN Provost Dr. Meera Komarraju and Keynote speaker and Aerospace Corp Vice President Dr. Debra L. Emmons. Provost Komarraju remarked that, “college education does not just benefit the student, it also benefits the communities the students come from. I see CSUN doing that.”
Among the research projects, ARCS Associate Director Joe Bautista and team members Ali-akbar Agha-mohammadi, JPL, and students Roslene Villalon, Erica Bettencourt, Andila Wijekulasuriya and Youjin Shin presented on “CoStar/Nebula Science Communication.” This project’s goal is to explore AI concepts in the NeBula system and to address the uncertainty of elemental differences in missions. Concerning research for the upcoming year, ARCS Director Dr. Nhut Ho remarked that, “our prospects for next year are to form more industry leader partnerships and continue to provide CSUN ARCS fellows with internship opportunities at JPL.”
To learn more about becoming an ARCS fellow and the work our faculty and students are doing with industry leaders in aerospace and medicine, please contact ARCS at arcs@csun.edu or (818) 677-5780.
Meet the Dean: Jeffrey Tadór Reeder, Ph.D. , College of Humanities
What brought you to CSUN and how long have you been Dean?
I came to CSUN last August from Spain, where I was the CSU’s Resident Director for study abroad. In Spain I got to work with quite a few CSUN students who genuinely seemed to understand and appreciate that CSUN is a special place with many opportunities for rich educational and cultural experiences. Due to a very fortuitous alignment, the Dean of Humanities position that I’m in now came open right at the same time that my Resident Director term in Spain was coming to an end, so here I am, grateful and happy!
What do you like most about your position?
I learn so much, every single day! I honestly do learn dozens of things every day, and sometimes I almost feel like I should be paying tuition or something because my work is right in the center of such an amazing learning environment. I get to be surrounded by brilliant, purposeful, and dedicated people who are so knowledgeable and passionate about what they do because we share the understanding that our work has a very real and very meaningful positive impact on peoples’ lives and on society.
What would people be surprised to learn about you?
Oh, I don’t know… but people do always seem to have a reaction when they learn that my K-12 education was a crazy jumble of 14 different schools: public, religious private, secular private, and homeschool, in four different countries and in four US states. I still remember every single one, whether it was the two-room schoolhouse surrounded by farmland or the seven-story concrete building surrounded by even taller buildings. Some of those schools were truly wonderful in so many ways, others were just as truly horrible and awful. Either way, all of them played a role in who I am today. Oh yeah, another surprising thing people learn about me is that one summer I rode a bicycle from Mexico to Canada - that’s even kind of surprising to me when I think about it.
Is there anything else you would like to share?
Yes, I’d like to share an invitation: I’d like to invite you to please invite me for a mid-day walk around campus, or perhaps for coffee! I love meeting people, hearing your stories and listening to your perspectives!