Highlanders in the News: Week of March 11, 2024
Every other week, our Highlanders are using their education to do extraordinary things. Here, we’ll highlight some notable mentions from local, regional, national and international news media. Whether our students, alumni, faculty and staff are featured as subject matter experts in high-profile stories or simply helping make the world a better place, we’ll feature their stories.
Sister act
Across the entirety of NCAA Division I women’s basketball, there is but one team whose roster boasts a trio of sisters.
That would be the Radford Highlanders, and the siblings in question are sophomore guards Ashlyn Traylor-Walker and Pa’Shence Traylor-Walker, with freshman guard Adelyn Traylor-Walker.
In 2022-2023, Ashlyn enjoyed a record-breaking first season, starting in 28 games but appearing in all 31, and becoming Radford’s first freshman to total 400 points and 100 assists within the same season. She currently averages 16 points per game.
This year, the Indiana native was joined on the Highlanders by sisters Pa’Shence and Adelyn, and they sat down with Roanoke Times sportswriter Mark Berman for a lively March 7 roundtable interview.
The Q&A covered such topics as how much off-the-court time they spend together, if being teammates deepened their familial relationship and whether they had any qualms about playing for the same team.
Their interview ran the same day the third-seeded Highlanders advanced through the Big South quarterfinals by beating Winthrop. On March 9, they also prevailed over USC Upstate, but the following day lost to Presbyterian, which left them just one win shy of reaching this year’s NCAA Tournament.
Berman’s March 10 article about that heartbreaker quoted another noteworthy Highlander – sophomore point Olivia Wagner, who viewed the loss with optimism and constructive pragmatism.
“I think we’re really just going to have to take it as fuel,” Wagner said of the outcome.
“We came this far, and we were pretty much a brand-new team,” she added, “So I don’t doubt that we’ll be back next year.”
True Elective
The fourth and latest season of HBO’s popular series “True Detective” centers around a research lab set in a part of Alaska that’s inspired by the actual North Slope Borough, the northernmost county within the United States and home to the city of Utqiagvik.
Most of the icy landscapes in “True Detective,” however, were actually filmed in Reykjavík, Iceland, and the showrunner has said in interviews that the production choice was made because the Icelandic climate is much milder and “the area of Alaska that we needed to go to is sort of inaccessible.”
Such difficulties haven’t hampered Professor of Physics Rhett Herman, who, each year since 2006, has taken groups of Highlander students to frigid Utqiagvik – about 300 miles above the Arctic Circle – between February and March.
While there, the Radford researchers conduct geophysical research projects under rare and extreme conditions. Herman’s “field trip” was recently the subject of both a Roanoke Times article from March 4 and a March 7 spot on WSLS-TV.
“Anything that we can learn about the Arctic environment, anything that we can learn about Earth’s environment, is something that adds to the body of knowledge, which tells us about our possible future,” Herman told WSLS-TV.
The Times also spoke with two Radford physics majors: Athena Smith, who’s researching the behavior of wind over sea ice, and Kaleb Martin, who is studying the Ionosphere.
“This project has been a long journey,” Martin told the newspaper. “It’s a great opportunity to see something very different.”
Before physics major Michael Ziegenfus left for Alaska in early March, he talked about why he chose to become a Highlander.
“Radford is very supportive of independent research and developing students’ scientific pursuits,” Ziegenfus said.
Chipping away
Assistant Professor of Management Zachary Collier has long been recognized as an expert on the global semiconductor industry and has written more than 50 journal articles, chapters and conference papers in his field.
He was quoted in a March 11 article on CBN.com about ongoing concerns that the United States needs to make greater strides in the production of the components or chips.
“One of the most popular kinds of chips are called GPUs, ‘graphical processing units’. They’re the same kind of chips that are used as graphics cards in your computer,” Collier told the network.
“They turned out to be well-made to run the sort of calculations and things that AI requires. And so, there’s a shortage of these because everybody is trying to use them for their own AI applications.
“The chip industry does use a lot of resources – it’s a resource-intensive thing to make a chip. It takes lots of different chemicals, it takes lots of water and it takes lots of energy.”
Last year, Collier received the Dalton Eminent Scholar Rising Star award for 2023.
Links to some of his other writings, accolades and media appearances can be found here.