This week in Highlanders in the News: Ben Carlin ’12 and his brother, Jonathan, scale the heights of YouTube with their popular channel; chemistry professor Kimberly Lane, Ph.D., weighs in on the recent emergence of a formidable designer opioid; and the Radford University Emergency Management office takes part in active threat training.

Over the course of a week, the STEM campers were in labs and classrooms all around the Center for the Sciences. They watched a show at the state-of-the-art Radford University Planetarium, learned about the chemistry of space, piloted drones, built surface rovers, launched rockets and engaged with women who work in science careers at Novozymes Biologicals and TORC Robotics.

Following an extensive national search, Radford University has selected Steven Bachrach, Ph.D., for the role of dean of the Artis College of Science and Technology. 

An opportunity to use human cadavers to teach anatomy and physiology is what first persuaded Orion Rogers, Ph.D., to pursue a faculty position at Radford University. However, the “driving force” that has kept him at the university for the past 28 years, he said, has been the daily opportunities to make an impact on the lives of others.

Radford University hosted a two-day James Webb Telescope Community Event on campus June 10 and 11 in the Center for the Sciences that offered fun, games and plenty of learning opportunities for science enthusiasts of all ages. 

Two Radford University students have been awarded the U.S. Department of State’s Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship to apply toward their study abroad programs this summer and fall in France.

As a dendrochronologist, Associate Professor of Geospatial Science Stockton Maxwell focuses much of his research on vegetation dynamics and fire disturbance history using tree-ring analysis. He’s cored trees for research all across the United States, from Virginia to Maine to California, and exotic locations around the world, helping with efforts in Peru, Brazil and Zambia. Maxwell is a teacher, too, willing to talk with anyone, of any age or stature, about the science that captured his imagination nearly 20 years ago. 

This week in Highlanders in the News: Science students Kaleb Martin and Sam Williams have written about the ways in which teaching can be educational, and geography professor Grigory Ioffe, Ph.D., evaluates how the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine affects neighboring Belarus. 

Excitement is building over the first images NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope will send back to Earth this summer, and the Radford University Planetarium is giving astronomy and science enthusiasts of all ages a chance to learn about the telescope – plus a whole lot more. The planetarium is joining hundreds of sites across the United States on June 10-11, 2022, to celebrate test images released from the telescope, which NASA launched in 2021 as its next great science observatory.