Welcome, Faculty & Staff

Retha Mecikalski, a doctoral student in atmospheric science at UAH, won the best student presentation award at the seventh Conference on the Meteorological Applications of Lightning Data during the recent 2015 American Meteorological Society annual meeting in Arizona.

February 28 will mark the 22nd annual Science Olympiad Regional Tournament to be held at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). As in years past, the daylong event will task more than forty teams of middle and high school students from across Northern Alabama with solving educational challenges that range from designing a device that can launch a projectile to building and testing a Rube Goldberg machine.

"It's a great way to increase science awareness among middle and high school students and we believe it encourages out-of-the-classroom engagement of science," says Carey Snowden, Outreach and Events Coordinator for UAH's College of Science, which has long been a sponsor of the Science Olympiad.

Vanessa Colebaugh, UAH's Tournament Director, agrees. "The students are gaining skills they might not get in the classroom, like teamwork and problem-solving," she says. "But at the same time, since anyone is welcome to come watch, the atmosphere is like a sporting event with supporters cheering for their teams."

UAH student landed a $400,000 competitive grant from the Dept. of Defense High Energy Laser Joint Technology Office (JTO) for a team effort to develop and test diode-pumped xenon laser technology for the U.S. military.

UAH's Amanda Black Clark is a doctoral student in Optical Science and Engineering who also works for the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command/Army Forces Strategic Command (SMDC-ARSTRAT) Technical Center's Directed Energy Division. She was the lead author of the awarded proposal and successfully defended it in Albuquerque, NM, in December. Her UAH advisor is Dr. Don Gregory, a distinguished professor of physics.