Dr. John N. Louie, Professor at the Nevada Seismological Laboratory at the University of Nevada, Reno, has over forty years of university teaching and research experience in geophysics and seismology. He has published with students several well-cited papers on innovations in seismic imaging of earthquake faults in California, Nevada, and New Zealand. Over the last 25 years, Dr. Louie has developed a faster and more efficient site-assessment survey technique for earthquake-hazard evaluation, Refraction Microtremor. Research on this technology continues, measuring thousands of sites in California, Nevada, and New Zealand; and on using geological and geotechnical measurements to predict earthquake shaking from 3D wave physics, and improve communities’ resilience to disasters.
Thomas Herring
As director of the Jack C Davis Observatory I engage in a variety of astrometric and photometric measurements. Recently I have focused on double star astrometry. I also have experience in developing Arduino based sensor suites for high altitude ballooning through the NV Space Grant CoP group at WNC.
Gary Swift
I’m not officially a researcher, but I have many years of Applied Engineering experience. 5 years in the Navy as a nuclear submarine officer, 13 years at Southern California Edison as a Shift Technical Advisor and NRC Licensed Operator training instructor, 2 years as a high school Physical Science teacher, 15 years as a Technical Editor, Curriculum Developer and Trainer of Machinery Condition Monitoring, and a couple more years as a Tech Writer.
Laura Rosales-Lagarde
Laura Rosales-Lagarde is a geoscientist interested in processes and phenomena occurring at the intersection of different environments. She finished her bachelor in chemistry, master and doctorate in geology. Previous research has focused on: the geochemistry and stratigraphy of a volcanosedimentary Paleozoic sequence in Mexico; the hydrogeology and subsurface water-rock interactions and speleogenesis at northern Sierra de Chiapas. Current research focuses on air quality and environmental instrumentation using open-sources. Dr. Rosales is passionate for the implementation of sustainability as a tool to provide justice, equity, diversity and inclusive opportunities for everyone.
Sungju Moon
My research interest lies in applications of dynamical systems, more specifically, the study of nonlinear ODEs to model complex systems. Of particular interest is the Lorenz system, well-known for the so-called “butterfly effect”. Broadly, I am open to new ideas for applying dynamical systems to model real world scenarios.
My PhD project was concerned with deriving and exploring chaotic properties of new high-dimensional extensions of the Lorenz system, viewed as closer approximations of the Boussinesq fluid model for Rayleigh-Benard convection. Beyond the initial motivation for considering additional physical contexts under specific scenarios such as the presence of vertical gradient in scalar concentrations as in atmospheric aerosols or ocean water salinity, this project evolved into a quest to answer more fundamental questions about the chaotic nature of weather and fluid systems, leading to the derivation of a generalized high-dimensional Lorenz systems capable of furnishing an ODE system that represents a fluid system with arbitrarily high harmonic orders. Some interesting phenomena discovered along the way include a novel type of chaotic attractor, coexisting attractors, and synchronization of chaos, which led to some immediate applications in different fields such as image encryption technology and data assimilation in the context of numerical weather prediction. My ongoing research explores how different network configurations could change the synchronization properties, with certain configurations more prone to rare catastrophic events than others.
As a member of the Mathematics Public Health (MfPH) network at The Fields Institute, I had the opportunity to work on agent-based models for epidemic curves of a rapidly spreading infectious disease such as COVID-19. I focused on developing co-circulation models having two or more viral strains, utilizing both the traditional ODE-based approach (SIR) and the agent-based modeling (ABM) approach. My ongoing research in this area is focused on exploring how the infection network heterogeneity affects the epidemic curves and whether these effects can better be simulated using ABMs rather than ODEs.
El Hachemi Bouali
I am an applied geologist by training and an opportunistic scientist in practice, meaning I love geology but am interested in many areas of the natural sciences. I can abbreviate my research focus with the acronym GASP: geophysical and surface processes.
Geophysical Processes. I use geophysical and remote sensing instruments to study changes on the Earth’s surface and within the shallow subsurface. I will be starting a research project (early 2023) on utilizing passive seismic methods to map bedrock depth (or sediment thickness) as an indirect approach to identify buried faults and to study extensional tectonics of the Las Vegas valley.
Surface Processes. I use an interdisciplinary approach to study our dynamic Earth. A major research project I am currently working on (2021-future) is titled Analyses of spring water chemistry and microbiology in the Spring Mountains, Nevada. I use field and laboratory methods across multiple disciplines (geology, biology, and chemistry) to quantify physical properties of high-elevation springs and analyze microbial communities found in these springs.
I teach courses that are required or electives for the BS in Environmental & Resource Science and BS in Biology. I teach the following courses at Nevada State:
–GEOL 101A/L Exploring Planet Earth Lecture and Lab
–GEOL 333 Principles of Geomorphology
–GEOL 405 Geology of the National Parks
–NRES 322 Soils
–NRES 467 Regional and Global Issues in Environmental Science
–BIOL/ENV 494 Biology and Environmental Science Colloquium
I received a Ph.D. in Geology from Michigan Technological University, an MS in Geosciences and BS in Geophysics from Western Michigan University, and an AS from Kalamazoo Valley Community College. I was the Postdoctoral Fellow in Environmental Science at Trinity College (Hartford, CT) and a NASA Earth and Space Science Fellow while earning my Ph.D. I have also worked as a Geological Mapping Technician for two summers at Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan where I assisted with the creation of ten surficial geology quadrangle maps by acquiring near-surface geophysical data and auger samples.
Douglas Sims
Douglas Sims is Dean, School of Science, Engineering, and Mathematics at the College of Southern Nevada. He leads a school of more than 280 staff (FT and PT) serving 18000+ students. His focus is in sediments, geochemistry, environmental chemistry, and paleohydrology in the Southern Great Basin and Mojave Desert. Current projects are paleohydrology of desert playas, trace metals scavenging by rock varnish, surface water quality, and sediment migration and transport of trace metals in agricultural soils.
Andrew Zuza
I am a field-based structural geologist that studies how the Earth’s continental crust deforms. My research primarily involves detailed field mapping coupled with quantitative analyses, such as mineral/rock dating, examination of rocks in microscopes, and geochemical analyses.
Jun Yong Kang
Dr. Kang’s research interests include the development and synthesis of novel organocatalysts, new reaction discovery, synthesis of biologically active organic compounds and biocompatible biomaterials. Especially, N-hetero phosphines will be used as a platform for the synthesis of highly efficient bi-functional organocatalysts. The organocatalysts will be employed for the discovery of new cascade reactions such as asymmetric tandem annulation reaction via a new mode of reactivity, asymmetric fluorination, and the synthesis of biocompatible polymers through Ring-opening polymerization. The developed methodologies will be future applied to the synthesis of biologically active complex molecules.
Bernhard Bach
I am involved in the support and development of various research programs. At the Nevada Terawatt Facility I am involved in the development of optical and x-ray diagnostics for two research programs. As a Co-Pi for the American Climber Science program I am involved with the development of optical instrumentation for field measurements of snow and ice.
Prior to my employment as Undergraduate Lab Director at the University of Nevada, I was owner and/or founder of two optical manufacturing firms. As a business owner I worked closely with various university research programs as well as foreign (ESA, DESY) and national laboratories (NASA, NIST, LBL, etc.). Optics that I have had a hand in designing and or fabricating have seen use in space flight programs –– Scimachy, Venus Express Missions and the James Webb Telescope, for example ––and in synchrotron beamlines, SRC, ALS, NSLS and DESY. . I still maintain close ties with industry, consulting with aerospace firms developing optical elements for space flight and aiding high-tech firms in developing novel optical instrumentation. From 2004-2005 I sat on the industrial advisory board for NSF’s Engineering Research Center For Extreme Ultraviolet Science and Technology’s