Harriet Wood Bowden, assistant professor of Spanish, has been awarded a Chancellor’s Grant for Faculty Research. She will receive a one-course release in Spring 2010 in order to write external grant proposals for her research. She also had a paper accepted in the journal Language Learning, to be published in March. The title of the article is “Verbal Inflectional Morphology in L1 and L2 Spanish: A Frequency Effects Study Examining Storage versus Composition.”

Glen Tootle, assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, recently assumed the position of Commanding Officer for the United States Navy Seabee Battalion. Tootle will oversee all operations of the 580 member battalion. The elite “We Build, We Fight” Seabees were formed during World War II and provide engineering and construction support to combatant commands throughout the world.

Chuck Melcher, research professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and director of the Scintillation Materials Research Center, recently gave a plenary talk to open the 2009 IEEE Medical Imaging Conference.

Jimmy Mays, professor in the Department of Chemistry, has been selected to receive the 2009 Southern Chemist Award of the American Chemical Society. The award, sponsored by the Memphis section of the society, acknowledges outstanding achievement in chemistry and scientific contributions that have brought recognition to the South.

Ivan Maldonado, associate professor in the Department of Nuclear Engineering, led a UT/ORNL team that provided tutorials and lectures at the 4th Russian International Conference on Nuclear Material Protection Control and Accounting in Obninsk, Russia. The team also gave lectures at the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute in Moscow.