UTA In The News — Monday, January 3, 2022
Graduation trials
KXAS NBC 5 featured a report about UT Arlington’s Jacob Reich, a December 2021 mechanical and aerospace engineering graduate who overcame a serious bicycling accident to graduate on time. Reich credited the UTA Student Access & Resource Center, which helps students overcoming disabilities, for part of his success in graduating on time. Reich will start work at Lockheed Martin later this month. The story also aired on NBC 5’s Carter in the Classroom.
Reviewing 2021 politics
Rebecca Deen, UT Arlington associate professor and chair of political science, reviewed the biggest political news of the year on Texas Standard. Deen and James Barragan, politics reporter for The Texas Tribune, discussed the new president, new Texas speaker of the house, the deadly winter storm, the legislative session and the pandemic.
New guidance for pandemic
Erin Carlson, UT Arlington professor of public health, said she agrees with the new guidance concerning the omicron variant of COVID-19, The Dallas Observer reported. “We needed new guidance to take into account where we are scientifically with this newly dominant variant,” she said.
Schools prepare for return
Most schools plan on mirroring their fall semester guidance but will monitor COVID-19 cases and make decisions as the year unfolds, The Dallas Morning News reported. The University of Texas at Arlington is requiring all students and employees coming to campus to take a COVID-19 test by Feb. 4, 2022, said spokesman Jeff Carlton.
Bridge app developed
The Texas Department of Transportation’s Fort Worth District has awarded Nur Yazdani, a UT Arlington civil engineering professor, a two-year contract worth more than $600,000 to develop a database and mobile app that will catalog the GPS coordinates and features of Texas bridges, making information easily accessible from an office or cellphone, Information Technology Business Daily reported.
Using crowdsourcing
Michelle Hummel, an assistant professor in UTA’s Civil Engineering Department, was awarded a $396,200 grant from the National Science Foundation to test how crowdsourcing can help assess and build resilience in communities susceptible to natural disasters, Politics & Government Daily reported.
Virtual reality could help
Sharareh “Sherri” Kermanshachi, a University of Texas at Arlington associate professor of civil engineering, received $946,000 from the Texas Department of Transportation to address workforce development needs, along with virtual reality and other technologies that could result in safer work-zone environments, Transportation Daily News reported.
Coping with large storms
Nick Fang, a UT Arlington civil engineering researcher, has received a grant from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Fort Worth District, to develop better methods to characterize, predict and cope with large Texas storms growing more unpredictable due to climate change, Mirage News and U.S. Fed News reported.
New health certificate
The University of Texas at Arlington has launched a new certificate program to prepare undergraduate students to understand the fields of telehealth and health informatics, D Magazine reported.