Northern STEM News, Fall '11

CONGRATULATIONS to Northern Alum and PhD student John Auxier, and to engineering students Johnny Medrano and Ruben Rivera for their research poster award.

 Former Northern AMP Undergraduate Research Assistant Pursuing PhD

John Auxier, a former Northern New Mexico College undergraduate research assistant (URA), is currently attending graduate school at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, working toward a PhD in Inorganic Chemistry. John is a Graduate Research/Teaching Assistant and also holds a graduate intern position at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he also worked as an undergraduate assistant.

During his undergraduate years, John served as a URA at Northern, where he earned an Associates of Science in Chemistry, Physics, and Math in 2009. John also participated in the Community College Conference Stipend Program. At NNMC, he was President of the National Association of Corrosion Engineers (NACE) Student Chapter, Vice-President of the Phi Theta Kappa Honors Society, and he was selected to be a member of the All-USA Academic Team for Junior Colleges in 2008.

John later earned a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry and Math from Adams State College in 2010. His research experience includes participation in the 2009 ACS/DOE Summer School in Nuclear and Radiochemistry at San Jose State–an undergraduate six-week intensive course sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy. He plans to obtain a post-doc appointment at a national laboratory once he has earned his PhD.

The value of New Mexico AMP to this student is reflected in his own words:
The AMP/Conference at NMSU was excellent experience in learning how to make a poster, learning valuable skills for presenting one's work with peers and colleagues in the area of research, and in general, gaining valuable experience in learning how to maximize one's time.

 

Northern Engineering Students win poster award at the New Mexico AMP Student Research Conference at NMSU

Engineering students Johnny Medrano and Ruben Rivera recently tied for third place for their oral presentation at the New Mexico Alliance for Minority Participation (AMP) award conference at NMSU in Las Cruces. Funded by the National Science Foundation, MAP's purpose is the expand the enrollment and graduation rates of historically underrepresented groups in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, or STEM subjects.

At the conference, Medrano and Rivera presented their research on compressible fluid flow using gases. With the initial goal of writing code correctly for simulation of fluid behavior, the students first created a computer program to simulate airflow, running the program with one processor. However, their ultimate goal is to run the program with multiple processors and speed up the computation many times depending on the number of processors that are used with a parallel cluster, which Northern owns. They have been successful in running the 3D problem with two processors.

The two solved equations that predict the behavior of fluids, such as air or a gas, which are effected by various factors. The movement of air through a particular domain (e.g., heat flow through a room) is affected by temperature, density, pressure, and velocity. This research can be useful for measuring turbulence behind an object as it moves. Other practical applications include measuring aerodynamic properties, as in the movement of air around an object such as an airplane wing. During the previous summer, the two solved equations governing incompressible fluids like water and its movement around bridges.

Rivera and Medrano grew up in and near Española. Ruben Rivera, originally from Chimayo, attended Española Valley High School and is pursuing a Bachelors of Engineering in Information Technology. He plans to graduate from Northern in May of 2013. Johnny Medrano, who attended McCurdy, expects to earn his Bachelor of Engineering in Mechanical Engineering next May. Both gentlemen hope to stay in the area and work at LANL, but when asked if they would like to pursue advanced degrees, they answered in the affirmative. Their faculty mentor on the project, Dr. David Torres, explained that the grant funding for the students' research come from the Army High Performance Computing Research Center.

Sophomore Greg Padilla, who seeks a degree in Mechanical Engineering, also presented at the AMP conference.