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Beginning this year on April 27, the Research & Innovation Office will host the Rose M. Litman Memorial Lecture in Science, bringing national research leaders to ��ƷSM����ӰƬ annually. The Litman Lecture celebrates the legacy of an exceptional scientist and educator with a lifelong passion for research, and a firm commitment to keeping rigorous inquiry at the heart of university life.

The Research & Innovation Office has announced several leadership transitions within the campuswide Innovation & Entrepreneurship Initiative, with Stan Hickory stepping into the role of director of the initiative, a position held by Chris Gustavson since 2019.

The Research & Innovation Office has announced the establishment of a new Workforce Innovation Director position dedicated to helping ��ƷSM����ӰƬ fulfill local and state needs for next-level talent training, acquisition and retention for research and creative work opportunities.

The Research & Innovation Office has announced that Joe Dragavon, PhD, has been named interim director of Core Facilities and Shared Instrumentation, effective February 1. Since the departure of the previous director, Claudius Mundoma, Dragavon has played an instrumental role in maintaining the momentum of the university’s core facilities community.

The $900K award—a highly prestigious early-career grant for junior faculty members—was awarded to Assistant Professor Orit Peleg (Computer Science) to support her research into how fireflies in a swarm synchronize their lighting displays. Fireflies' elegant, distributed communication systems could eventually help us with our own telecommunications through new ideas about compressing information and distributed networks.

Corrella Detweiler, professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology, and Wei Zhang, professor of chemistry and chair of the Chemistry Department, have been named senior members of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI). Senior members of the NAI are active faculty, scientists and administrators who have been successful in patents, licensing and commercialization and have produced technologies that have been or aspire to be transformational.

A new NASA report shows that ��ƷSM����ӰƬ is the top university recipient of NASA astrophysics technology grants. The majority of this funding was granted to researchers at LASP and the Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy (CASA), a center affiliated with the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences.

The Research and Innovation Office is excited to announce its annual National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship Peer Editing Workshop Series, facilitated by RIO Proposal Writer/Editor Donna Axel. The virtual program, which begins on January 26, is designed to assist faculty in submitting a proposal to the NEH Fellowships, due April 12, 2023.

Rubén Donato, the Bob & Judy Charles Endowed Chair and a professor of Educational Foundations, Policy and Practice in the School of Education, will deliver his in-person lecture “An Elusive Quest: Mexican American Resistance to School Segregation in the United States” at 4 p.m. on Jan. 31 in the Chancellor's Hall and Auditorium, Center for Academic Success and Engagement (CASE).

Gijs de Boer—a senior research scientist in CIRES and the NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory—has been named director of national laboratory partnerships, a newly established, part-time role that will focus on expanding ��ƷSM����ӰƬ’s research collaborations with national laboratories.