There’s more to being a professor than attending class and teaching students everything they need to know to be successful. There are also papers to publish, conferences to attend, programs to present, and competitions to prepare for.
Several professors from the various departments in the College of Science and Technology at Southern Arkansas University, Magnolia, have recently published papers and attended conferences.
Dr. Pierre Boumtje, assistant professor of agriculture, is the senior author of an article published in the recent 2005 issue of the international journal Food Policy.
The article, “Dietary Habits, Demographics, and the Development of Overweight and Obesity among Children in the United States,” involved the collaboration of three other agricultural scientists from the University of Georgia, the University of Florida, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C.
The work included analysis of 26 different variables comparing children between ages 5-11 with children in the age group 12-18. Some of the findings indicate that poverty is a major variable that is positively associated with overweight school-age children. Other significant variables included sedentary behavior and dietary behavior related to consumption of soft drinks, fat and oils, and sodium.
Dr. Yujiang Shan, assistant professor of mathematics and computer science, and his colleague Dr. Guiliang Feng of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, were among the 113 invited participants to present a program on their work in computer science before the annual meeting of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers this past summer at Stanford University. Shan was the only invited participant from the state of Arkanasas.
His and Feng’s presentation was “A Generic Algorithm to Find All Common Intervals of Two Permutations.”
Finding common intervals is a useful tool in comparative genomics and analysis of proteins. The technique has possible value to the relative new field of evolutionary medicine.
Shan also attended a special workshop on techniques to do computer models to study clustering gene expression data.
Other universities represented in presentations included Yale, Dartmouth, University of Texas, University of Chicago, University of Georgia, and numerous medical schools from the United States, Europe, and Asia. The week-long conference had more than 400 in attendance.
Dr. Joe Winstead, professor of biology and the dean of the College of Science and Technology, recently returned from Vienna, Austria, where he was the senior author of a poster presentation at the week-long XVII International Botanical Congress.
The International Botanical Congress only meets every six years and this year’s event had more than 3,800 delegates in attendance.
Winstead was one of only two scientists from the state to give a presentation. His research work presented involved a long-term study of plant colonization and succession on forest habitats disrupted by strip mining for coal in the United States. The study has involved the analysis of the vegetation in Ohio and Kentucky on abandoned strip mines.
This presentation included collaborative work by one of Winstead’s former graduate students, Dr. Mike Held of St. Peter’s College in New Jersey, and two former colleagues at Western Kentucky University. This was the fourth International Botanical Conference that Winstead has attended and made presentations.
The Computer Science team from SAU finished 33rd out of 109 colleges and universities in the Mid-Central Programming contest last year. The team finished ahead of eight other teams from Arkansas and numerous much larger colleges and universities from Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri.
Two new teams from SAU, coached by Dr. Hong Cheng, associate professor of math and computer science, will compete in the 2005 Mid-Central contest on Nov. 5 in Russellville.
The SAU Mulerider team includes Ly Phan, a senior computer science major from Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; Chris Sams, a senior computer science and mathematics double major from Magnolia; and Bradlee Landis, a sophomore computer science major from Henrietta, Texas.
The Blue and Gold team includes Luke Lowery, a sophomore criminal justice major from Smackover, Darshan Shrestha, a sophomore computer science major from Kathmandu, Nepal; and Ed Yang, a sophomore computer science major from Knoxville.
