Volume 12, Issue 1 | October 12, 2023

Fall 2023 Newsletter

Welcome to the School of Science & Technology's Spring newsletter!

SSU's Incitti earns 2023 CSU Trustees' Award

The California State University has selected 23 students who have demonstrated superior academic and personal achievement to receive the 2023 CSU Trustees' Award for Outstanding Achievement.

Sonoma State University’s honoree is Angelo Incitti, who was recognized as the Trustee Emeritus Kenneth Fong Scholar.

Incitti, whose academic concentration is in Physiological Ecology, was hired as a farmhand at Curbstone Valley Farm in the midst of the pandemic. There, a veterinarian and celebrated research scientist mentored him, providing Angelo with as many scientific papers to read as stalls to clean. This fueled his passion to be a research biologist motivated by the desire to care for animals.

Now a Sonoma State graduate student in biology, he works with the National Marine Mammal Foundation to understand the physiological impact of environmental disturbances on marine mammals.

Kinesiology hosts SSU's first National Biomechanics Day

On April 5th, the Department of Kinesiology played host to an international educational event - National Biomechanics Day (NBD) – a first for us. This distinguished initiative in Biomechanics STEM outreach is celebrated worldwide, offering a variety of engaging activities tailored to high school students. For this special occasion, our department extended an invitation to 28 high school students from Technology High School.

In a collaborative effort with the Department of Engineering, we carefully curated a series of immersive biomechanical hands-on activities. Our aim was not only to educate but also to inspire young minds. The event was structured into four informative sessions. Two of these sessions were generously provided by the Department of Kinesiology, focusing on the application of physics in describing human movement. Specifically, high school students had the opportunity to use a force platform to estimate their jump height based on the impulse-momentum theorem, as well as calculate their peak power through their jump height. The other two sessions were skillfully led by the Department of Engineering, covering topics such as the processing of medical images using MATLAB and soldering an electric circuit.

We were delighted to receive positive feedback and favorable impressions from the high school students. One student exclaimed, "It's a great field trip to learn something new and acquire more knowledge," while another shared, "It's a fantastic opportunity to see if Sonoma University is the right fit for me."

The success of this event extends beyond mere outreach; it serves as a testament to our institution's commitment to education and as a means of promoting our school. With such positive outcomes, the Kinesiology Department hopes to continue collaborations with other departments to make National Biomechanics Day a regular annual event. --Dr. Youngmin Chun

Eclipse Megamovie 2024

Dr. Laura Peticolas and Prof. Tom Targett received a 3-year NASA grant with Dr. Juan Carlos Martinez Oliveros, from the University of Berkeley to study plasma transients in the solar corona during the total solar eclipse on August 8, 2024. The project, titled Eclipse Megamovie 2024 (EM2024), is a citizen scientist project using two methodologies for engaging community members throughout the U.S. The primary goals of this project’s research are:

collecting images of the solar corona during the total solar eclipse and
using Machine Learning (AI) and a competition on the Kaggle coding platform to support analysis of the images that will reveal plasma transients within the collections of photographs.

Photographers will be trained to use their own cameras to obtain scientific data, leveraging over 100 volunteers who participated in the Eclipse Megamovie 2017 project. Computer programmers and scientists will support the analysis work, together with the SSU and Berkeley teams, including SSU Physics alumnus, Hunter Mills.

Visit the website to learn more and to sign up as a volunteer!

EM2024 builds on our previous project, Eclipse Megamovie 2017. The goal of that project was to create a movie of the solar corona with photographs taken by photographers across the path of totality, which stretched from the West coast of Oregon to North and South Carolina over the course of a 90-minute period. For EM2017, an extensive outreach effort was undertaken for more than a year, touring towns in the path of totality, outreach presentations, articles in popular science magazines, news interviews, and a website. Approximately 2,000 volunteers submitted 50,000 images soon after the 2017 eclipse. Images were not rotated to align with the solar coronal structure in the first movie release, which was released just a few hours after the Moon’s shadow left the Earth. Several months later, another movie was released once the science team could rotate images to align with the star Regulus, which was visible through the solar corona in the images taken during the 2017 eclipse. Over several years, further image processing was implemented to create High Dynamic Range (HDR) images to capture the structures within the HDR range of the solar corona from the Sun’s photosphere out ~3 solar radii. A plasma plume has been identified within the HDR images, as seen by other DSLR camera research from 2017. The new grant will enable the team to publish these results and improve on the 2017 process and data collection effort, making the 2024 total solar eclipse more exciting than ever! --Dr. Laure Peticolas

Biology Graduate Student Receives Research Award

Biology graduate student Bella Boggio (left) received a 2023 Research Award from the Milo Baker Chapter of the California Native Plant Society to support her research on Oak Recruitment and Regeneration in Woodlands with Exotic Grazers. Bella is working in collaboration with Dr. Derek Girman from the Department of Biology and the Safari West Wildlife Preserve to provide critical insights on management strategies for the maintenance of this important ecosystem resource.

CS Students Receive Inaugural Future STEM Teacher Awards

The Sonoma State STEP Center and MESA Program awarded Erika Ramirez and Benito Sanchez, both computer science students, with the inaugural Williamson

Family Scholarship for Future STEM Teachers. The scholarship supports School of Science and Technology undergraduate students, from historically underrepresented communities, in becoming credentialed math or science teachers through the Sonoma State University’s Single Subject Credential Program.

Engineering Student Shine at Sunstone CSU Startup Launch Event held at San Jose State

SAN JOSE, CA, (May 15, 2023) Electrical and Computer Engineering student Sokiyna Naser was among those who received top honors at the recent Sunstone CSU Startup Launch competition, the premiere platform for showcasing the entrepreneurial potential within the CSU system.

Kinesiology Students Win 2nd Place at CSU Research Competition

Kinesiology undergraduate students Kendall Hernandez, Sophia Winchell, Emily Coons, Ellen Freeman, and Leslie Gaona won second place at the 37th Annual CSU Research Competition at SDSU in the Health, Nutrition, and Clinical Sciences category. The students were advised by Dr. YJ Ryuh.

The California State University Systemwide Student Research Competition is an annual event that brings together scholars from the 23 campuses of our California State University system. The competition showcases undergraduate and graduate research, scholarship, and creative works by recognizing outstanding student accomplishments. Undergraduate and graduate student participants from all disciplines are judged by experts for their oral presentations and written abstracts. Students who compete in the CSU Student Research Competition can win $500 for first place and $250 for second place recognition in their session.

CS paper at SIGCSE

CS majors Aundré Barras, Brennan Freeze, Paris Osuch and Soren Richenberg worked with faculty mentor Dr. Suzanne Rivoire as part of the Koret Scholars program on an open-source Python library for the flexible simulation and visualization of quantum computing circuits for education. In Spring, these students presented their research at the SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, the main ACM conference for computer science education in Toronto, Canada (March 15 - 18, 2023).

Engineering Students Shine in NASA MINDS Competition

A group of three undergraduate electrical engineering students, Jason Knight-Han, Andrew Terrazas, and Blake Janowicz, have recently achieved recognition in a NASA competition due to their exceptional work on their senior design project. Guided by Dr. Nansong Wu, their project centered around the concept of Wireless Power Transfer based on Strongly-Coupled Magnetic Resonance, with the aim of enabling power transfer between ground and aerial vehicles.

Outstanding Stormwater Science Project

Claudia Mayo, Environmental Science, Geography & Management student, advised by Jackie Guilford, adjunct Biology faculty, received the Outstanding Stormwater Science Project or Program: Student by California Stormwater Quality Association (CASQA) for their project, Analysis of Water Quality Near Areas of Homeless Activity on Santa Rosa Creek and Russell Creek. The project lays the foundation for future analysis of the impact of homeless encampments on water quality in stormwater entering urban creeks. Water quality was tested upstream and downstream of areas with frequent homeless encampments on Santa Rosa Creek and Russell Creek. The project was part of a partnership between SSU’s Water Research Methods class and Santa Rosa Water.

New Faculty in SST

Dr. Richard Beer, Visiting Professor, Computer Science

Dr. Anupriya Vysala, Visiting Professor, Computer Science

Dr. Anne-Marie O'Brien, Associate Professor, Nursing

Dr. Richard Fiddler, Associate Professor, Nursing

Glenn Carter Retirement

The CS Department is celebrating the long and remarkable career of Glenn Carter, a lecturer in our department from 1992 until his retirement in Spring 2023. Glenn primarily taught CS 101, an introduction to computing intended for general audiences, reaching over 16,000 SSU students in his thirty years on our campus. Glenn’s background in K-12 education and in educational technology made him passionate about reaching every student, and his inclusive introduction to computer science was a gateway to the CS major and to careers in computing for a large, diverse group of students. Join us in continuing to celebrate Glenn’s retirement and legacy by leaving a message for him on this Kudo Board.