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UArizona paleoclimatologist to receive NSF's highest early-career honor On May 5, Jessica Tierney will be the first climatologist to win the Alan T. Waterman Award since Congress established it in 1975. She is also the first from the University of Arizona to ever receive the honor. National Science Foundation and University Communications April 20, 2022 Science and Technology College of Science Faculty Institutional Excellence Science

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Read about Tierney's work in these stories:

• Women in climate change: Jessica Tierney
• Global Temperatures Over Last 24,000 Years Show Today's Warming 'Unprecedented'
• UArizona Paleoclimatologist Weighs in on 'Hot Drought' as a Lead Author on IPCC Climate Report
• Past is Key to Predicting Future Climate, Scientists Say
• Ancient Plankton Help Researchers Predict Near-Future Climate
• Green Sahara's Ancient Rainfall Regime Revealed by Scientists

Jessica Tierney, a University of Arizona geoscientist who studies ancient climates, is one of three scientists to be named a 2022 recipient of the National Science Foundation's Alan T. Waterman Award. The award, which comes with $1 million over five years, is the nation's highest honor for early-career scientists and engineers, and recognizes outstanding individual achievements in NSF-supported research.

Tierney, an associate professor in the Department of Geosciences in the College of Science, is the first climatologist to win the award since Congress established it in 1975. She is also the first from UArizona to ever receive the honor.

This is the first year the NSF has chosen to honor three researchers. The other recipients are Lara Thompson, a biomedical engineer at the University of the District of Columbia, and Daniel Larremore, a computer scientist from the University of Colorado Boulder.

"It is a great pleasure to honor these three outstanding scientists with the Waterman Award," said NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan. "They have clearly demonstrated a superb record of scientific achievements by using creative and innovative approaches that have further strengthened basic research in their respective fields. We are grateful to all of our honorees for the vital role they play in advancing the scientific enterprise. I am thrilled to congratulate each of them and look forward to their tremendous accomplishments in the future."

According to the NSF's Higher Education Research and Development Survey, UArizona's research and development expenditures are ranked in the top 4% of all U.S. universities. UArizona is ranked No. 20 among public institutions and No. 35 overall, with $761 million in total research activity.

Looking back to plan ahead

As a high school student, Tierney knew she was interested in majoring in science but didn't know which field until she started college. She enrolled in an introductory geology course that sparked her interest in Earth science. She also became interested in studying the history of Earth and, more specifically, paleoclimatology, which looks deeply into ancient climates to answer questions about what Earth's past climate was like and why.

Tierney is recognized for her outstanding advances in the reconstruction of past climate change and furthering the understanding of future climate change.

"Receiving this award signals that one of the nation's top research funders recognizes the urgency of understanding the Earth system as humans drive climate change," Tierney said. "It makes me feel like my research is important and really making a difference."

Her research focuses on understanding ancient climate change, including quantifying changes in global temperature, ocean temperature and the water cycle. The goal is to improve our understanding of what the future holds under climate change. She specializes in generating organic geochemical records of paleoclimate, derived from fossil molecules known as biomarkers that are preserved in sediments and rocks.

"Studying the past is important because it can narrow our projections for what climate will look like at the end of the century, and what sort of impacts humans will face," Tierney said.

Using novel modeling techniques combined with paleoclimate data assimilation, she has generated groundbreaking maps of past climate conditions and the system dynamics that produced the conditions. Her research has redefined the understanding of global temperature changes in the geologic past and developed a new quantitative understanding of temperature and climate sensitivity to past levels of carbon dioxide.

"Dr. Tierney has quickly made a name for herself in the climate sciences, and we couldn't be more proud that she has won this prestigious award," said University of Arizona President Robert C. Robbins. "Not only is she the first person from this university to receive this honor, but also the first person in the climate sciences. This is a tremendous honor, and we're lucky to have her incredibly valuable expertise at our university."    

The NSF has been investing in climate change research for decades, helping scientists to collect long-term, continuous data and observations. Tierney's research has been made possible through NSF's investments in the dynamics and complexity of Earth processes to piece together the entire puzzle of climate change and create new, sustainable climate change solutions. 

"It is an absolutely incredible honor to receive the Waterman Award," Tierney said. "I am so humbled to share this recognition with leading researchers across all fields of science. I'm really grateful to NSF for the support, and I hope that my research will help society prepare for, and ultimately mitigate, human-caused climate change."

Tierney earned a bachelor's, master's and a doctorate in geology from Brown University. She has been at the University of Arizona since 2015. Tierney is a Packard Foundation Fellow, an American Geophysical Union Fellow and a lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth Assessment report. 

In addition to a medal, Alan T. Waterman Award recipients each receive $1 million over five years for research in their chosen field of science.

"The funding from this award will provide key support for my students, postdocs and my lab manager, bolstering our ability to explore new research avenues," Tierney said. "In particular, this award will allow us to explore high-risk, high-reward ideas that have the potential to transform our understanding of past and future climate change."

The Waterman Award will be presented to all recipients at a ceremony during the National Science Board meeting in Washington, D.C., on May 5. The award, established by Congress in 1975, is named for Alan T. Waterman, NSF's first director.

Freshwater habitats are fragile pockets of exceptional biodiversity, study finds Ponds, lakes, rivers and streams cover only a tiny fraction of Earth's surface, yet they are home to a comparatively large number of different species, according to a study led by University of Arizona ecologists. The findings have implications for conservation efforts around the globe. Daniel Stolte and Koda Benavidez April 21, 2022 University Communications Science and Technology College of Science

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While much research has focused on the striking differences in biodiversity between tropical and temperate regions, another, equally dramatic, pattern has gone largely unstudied: the differences in species richness among Earth's three major habitat types – land, oceans and freshwater.

A new study led by ecologists at the University of Arizona reveals the origins of diverse animal and plant species richness in terrestrial, ocean and freshwater habitats at a global scale. It also explores the possible causes of these richness patterns.

Published in the journal Ecology Letters, the study was led by Cristian Román-Palacios, an assistant professor in the UArizona School of Information in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, and John J. Wiens, a professor in UArizona Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in the College of Science. It was co-authored by Daniela Moraga-López, a doctoral student at Pontificia Universidad Católica in Santiago, Chile.

"As far as we know, our paper is the first to provide a global analysis of biodiversity by habitat and provide possible explanations as to what might drive the observed patterns," Wiens said.

Despite oceans covering 70% of Earth's surface, about 80% of the plant and animal species are found on land, which accounts for only 28% of Earth's surface. Freshwater habitats cover a minute fraction of Earth's surface, about 2%, but have the highest animal species richness per area, the study revealed. 

More than 99% of known animal species were included in the analysis, as were all known plant species. The authors estimate that 77% of known living animal species inhabit land, 12% ocean habitats, and 11% freshwater habitats. Among plants, only 2% of species call the ocean home, and a mere 5% live in freshwater.

The authors were also interested in what scientists call phylogenetic diversity, which provides a measure of how closely or distantly related organisms are to each other on the tree of life. When the team looked at phylogenetic diversity per unit area of each habitat type, they found freshwater diversity to be at least twice as high as land and ocean habitat diversity, for both animals and plants. 

The high phylogenetic diversity per unit area in freshwater habitats highlights the importance of conserving freshwater ecosystems, Palacios said.

"The large-scale patterns of freshwater community composition resemble the process of creating mosaic art – where many groups in freshwater are like 'pieces' sourced from either land or marine ecosystems," he said. "Therefore, creating additional protections to freshwater habitats could help to efficiently conserve, at once, very divergent groups of animals and plants."

In contrast, animal and plant species in terrestrial habitats tend to represent only a few phyla, or taxonomic groups of organisms. Some examples of phyla include sponges, nematodes, mollusks and chordates - the group that contains vertebrates. This finding led the study authors to conclude that preserving freshwater habitats can protect more species and more evolutionary history than preserving the same amount of area on land or in the ocean.

"Insights into phylogenetic diversity afford us a great opportunity to preserve significant pieces of evolutionary history," Wiens said, adding that the distribution of phyla among habitats helps explain these patterns of phylogenetic diversity.

The researchers found that the observed patterns of species richness are best explained by differences in diversification rates among habitats, which are a measure of how many species originate and accumulate in a given amount of time. In other words, habitats where species proliferate more rapidly have greater biodiversity.
Diversification rates can be dependent on several different factors. But geographic barriers may be the most important for explaining differences in diversification rates among habitats, according to Wiens.

"Species may proliferate more rapidly on land than they do in the ocean or in freshwater because there are many more barriers to dispersal on land compared to the ocean, where organisms can move more freely," he said. "These barriers seem to help drive the origin of new species in all habitats in both plants and animals."

Alternative explanations, such as whether a habitat was colonized earlier or more frequently over time, were not supported.

"We were able to show that generally speaking, the oceans were colonized first, then species moved into freshwater habitats and lastly, onto land," Wiens said. "And that holds true for plants and animals. Therefore, the greater biodiversity of land cannot be explained by an earlier colonization of terrestrial habitats."

Biological productivity – in essence, the growth of plants – which has traditionally been considered one of the major drivers of global biodiversity patterns, turned out to have a much smaller effect than previously thought. 

"Overall productivity is similar between the ocean and land, which tells us that at the global scale, productivity is not the most important determinant of biodiversity," Wiens said.

Similarly, area does not appear to be a decisive factor, either, since the oceans have the greatest area but very limited species numbers, Wiens explained.

"We conclude that the rate of species proliferation might be the most important aspect in driving species richness across the planet." 

From connected cars to oil pipelines: Engineering innovators aim to protect 'Internet of Things' UArizona startup BG Networks is using embedded security automation solutions to keep the world safe from cyberattacks. Ryan Irene Cella and Paul Tumarkin April 26, 2022 Tech Launch Arizona Science and Technology Adaptation College of Engineering Determination Exploration Tech Launch Arizona

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Around the world, countries are on the cyber offense. Researchers from the University of Arizona College of Engineering have invented new strategies to mitigate future cyberattacks by helping make cybersecurity for the "Internet of Things" more accessible for companies and organizations of all sizes. Based on the technology, they have launched a startup, BG Networks, to bring their technology from UArizona to the public.

The Internet of Things, or IoT, is made up of interconnected sensors and devices networked with computers. While personal items like smartwatches, smart doorbells and smart speakers are all part of this network, so are many of the technologies used in the management of utility companies and oil pipelines. And if those technologies are brought down, it has the potential to significantly impact the economy and society, making them prime targets for cyberattackers.

U.S. citizens experienced the realities of such attacks in summer 2021 when attackers targeted systems at the world's largest meat processor, JBS, as well as the computerized equipment that manages the Colonial Pipeline, a 5,500-mile-long pipeline system that transports 3 million barrels of fuel between Texas and New York every day. JBS paid an $11 million ransom to regain control of its systems, and the Colonial Pipeline Company paid a $4 million ransom to restore operations. Any network-connected system is vulnerable to such attacks, including industrial control systems, autonomous vehicles and the power grid.

UArizona researchers have developed a two-part technology – consisting of a Security Automation Tool and an Embedded Security Software Architecture – that allows engineers without cybersecurity backgrounds to implement complex security protocols to prevent such attacks. The team developed security automation tools that work with open-source software to allow engineers to add IoT cybersecurity functions such as encryption, authentication and secure software updates quickly and efficiently to their systems.

"Hundreds of thousands of bad actors are at work, and the United States has already seen its share of impactful attacks," said Roman Lysecky, UArizona professor of electrical and computer engineering and co-founder of BG Networks.

Lysecky developed the technology along with BG Networks co-founder and Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Jerzy Rozenblit, graduate student researcher Aakarsh Rao, former graduate student researcher Nadir Carreon, and professor Johannes Sametinger of Joannes Kepler University Linz in Austria.

"Implementing cybersecurity has always been a complex feat," Lysecky said. "We've developed tools that enable engineers to much more easily and quickly include cybersecurity in their applications."

The team worked with Tech Launch Arizona, the UArizona office that commercializes inventions stemming from university research and innovation, to protect the innovation and develop strategies and skills to position the startup for a successful launch.

"I've been so impressed with this concept and this team," said Tech Launch Arizona Assistant Vice President Doug Hockstad, who has a background in software. "The impact that this kind of innovation is positioned to have on society to protect the people and systems we depend upon aligns with the University of Arizona's goals for research – to create impact and improve lives."

"Our vision is to enable IoT security everywhere," said BG Networks co-founder and CEO Colin Duggan, who has 29 years of international leadership, marketing and management experience in the automotive, consumer, industrial and defense markets. "We aim to remove obstacles that prevent embedded engineers from including cybersecurity in their applications."

Researchers home in on Thera volcano eruption date Tree-ring, ice core and volcano experts teamed up to identify one of the most climatically impactful volcanic eruptions in 4,000 years – Aniakchak II. In the process, they narrowed down potential dates for the Thera volcano eruption. Mikayla Mace Kelley May 2, 2022 University Communications Science and Technology Anthropology College of Science Determination Experts Exploration Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research Research Science

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Read more about Pearson's work:

• Sharpening the tools of time: A Q&A with dendrochronologist Charlotte Pearson
• Researchers Unlock Secrets of the Past with New International Carbon Dating Standard
• Tree Rings Could Pin Down Thera Volcano Eruption Date
• Dating the Ancient Minoan Eruption of Thera Using Tree Rings

A University of Arizona tree-ring expert is closer than ever to pinning down the date of the infamous Thera volcano eruption – a goal she has pursued for decades.

Charlotte Pearson, an associate professor in the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, is lead author of a new paper in PNAS Nexus that combines a mosaic of techniques to confirm the source of a volcanic eruption in 1628 B.C. While the eruption was previously thought to be Thera on the Greek island of Santorini, Pearson and her colleagues found instead that it was Alaskan volcano Aniakchak II.

The finding helps researchers narrow down when the actual Thera eruption took place.

Thera's massive eruption, known to have occurred sometime before 1500 B.C., buried the Minoan town of Akrotiri in more than 130 feet of debris. But the exact date of the eruption, along with its impact on climate, have been debated for decades.

If a volcanic eruption is large enough, it can eject sulfur and debris called tephra into the stratosphere, where both can be circulated to places very far away. The sulfur dioxide from the eruption that makes it into the upper atmosphere reflects heat from the sun and causes temperatures around the world to drop. The climatic shift is reflected in trees, which show reduced growth or frost rings that effectively mark the year in which the eruption occurred.

The sulfur and tephra can also rain down on Earth's poles, where they are preserved in layers of ice. When ice cores are analyzed, the amount of sulfate in them can also be used to estimate the likely impact of an eruption on climate. High-sulfate eruptions have greater potential to cause short-term shifts in climate. At the same time, the ice cores' tephra, which has a unique geochemical fingerprint, can be used to link the sulfur in the ice to an exact volcanic source.

Pearson and her collaborators – which included Michael Sigl of the University of Bern and an international team of geochemists, ice core experts and tephra chronologists – aligned data from tree rings and from ice cores in Antarctica and Greenland to create a comprehensive record of volcanic eruptions across the period when Thera must have occurred – 1680 to 1500 B.C. They used sulfate and tephra evidence to rule out several of the events as potential Thera dates and used high-resolution techniques to geochemically confirm through the ice cores that the eruption recorded in1628 B.C. was Aniakchak II.

The exact Thera eruption date remains unconfirmed, but the team has narrowed it down to just a handful of possibilities: 1611 B.C., 1562-1555 B.C. and 1538 B.C.

"One of these is Thera," Pearson said. "We just can't confirm which one yet, but at least we now know exactly where to look. The challenge with Thera is that there's always been this discrepancy between multiple lines of dating evidence. Now that we know what the possible dates are, this evidence can be re-evaluated, but we still need a geochemical fingerprint to clinch it."

A blast from the past

As an undergraduate student in 1997, Pearson read two papers that not only sparked her interest in tree-ring science but also marked the starting point of the larger Thera date debate.

The first paper, written by UArizona tree-ring researchers Valmore LaMarche and Katherine Hirschboeck, identified frost damage in bristlecone pine tree-rings from California that corresponded to the year 1627 B.C. The other paper, by Queen's University's Mike Baillie and UArizona's Martin Munro, identified a period of very narrow tree-rings in oak trees from Ireland that started in the year 1628 B.C. Both tree-ring anomalies indicated the sort of abrupt, severe climatic shift that occurs when volcanoes spew sulfate into the stratosphere.

Both sets of authors linked the tree ring-anomalies to Thera because, at the time of the studies, Thera was the only known eruption in that approximate time period. But Pearson's latest paper confirms those tree-ring anomalies are actually evidence of a different, unusually high-sulfate eruption – Alaska's Aniakchak II volcano.

"We've looked at this same event that showed up in tree rings 7,000 kilometers apart, and we now know once and for all that this massive eruption is not Thera," Pearson said. "It's really nice to see that original connection resolved. It also makes perfect sense that Aniakchak II turns out to be one of the largest sulfate ejections in the last 4,000 years – the trees have been telling us this all along."

The Thera eruption hunt continues

Archaeological evidence has suggested the date of the Thera eruption is closer to 1500 B.C., while some radiocarbon dating has suggested it's closer to 1600 B.C.

"I favor the middle ground. But we are really close to having a final solution to this problem. It's important to stay open to all possibilities and keep asking questions," Pearson said.

"Building evidence in this research is best compared to criminal cases, where suspects must be shown to be linked to both the scene and time of the crime," Sigl said. "Only in this case, the traces are already more than 3,500 years old."

The study also confirms that any climatic impact from Thera would have been relatively small, based on comparisons of sulfate spikes in that period with those of more recent documented eruptions.

The next step is to home in on the possible Thera eruption years and extract further chemical information from the sulfur and tephra in the ice cores. Somewhere in one of those sulfates there might be one piece of tephra that would have a chemical profile matching Thera, Pearson said.

"That's the dream. Then I'll have to find something else to obsess over," she said. "For now, it's just nice to be closer than we have ever been before."

The study is part of a European Research Council-funded project led by Sigl at the Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Bern in Switzerland. The project is named THERA, short for Timing of Holocene Volcanic Eruptions and their Radiative Aerosol Forcing. In addition to UArizona, the study was carried out by an international network of experts from the University of Bern, University of St. Andrews, Swansea University, University of Maine, South Dakota State University and University of Florence. Funding at UArizona was provided by the Malcolm H. Wiener Foundation.

UArizona part of statewide collaboration that compiled 100,000 sequenced COVID genomes The Arizona COVID-19 Genomics Union, which includes UArizona, positions the state to play a role in the planned U.S. Pathogen Genomics Centers of Excellence.   May 3, 2022 University Communications Health Science and Technology College of Science COVID-19 Research

A massive effort to track the COVID-19 pandemic in Arizona over the past two years has resulted in the genomic sequencing of more than 100,000 samples of the COVID-19 virus by the Arizona COVID-19 Genomics Union, or ACGU.

The ACGU includes the Phoenix-based nonprofit Translational Genomics Research Institute, or TGen, as well as the University of Arizona, Northern Arizona University, Arizona State University and the Arizona Department of Health Services.

This joint enterprise provides a proof of concept for building a 21st-century infectious-disease surveillance system to help prevent, detect, monitor and overcome the next pandemic.

As a result of the collaboration, Arizona is playing a major role in a growing worldwide effort to use genomics to track infectious diseases such as COVID-19. Arizona will be competing to be part of the Pathogen Genomics Centers of Excellence, a national network funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that would expand and deepen infectious disease collaborations between U.S. public health agencies and universities.

"The AGCU has really exceeded my expectations from when we founded it," said Michael Worobey, one of the union's co-founders and head of the UArizona Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Worobey is world renowned for his work on viral pandemics.

"We are among a small and elite group of U.S. states that have generated a full coronavirus genome sequence for about 1% of the total population," he added. "The future of preventing and controlling pandemics will hinge on the power of genomic epidemiology. Our system, our teamwork – the depth of our bench – means that we will continue to lead the way in these important efforts."

Genomic sequencing is the spelling out of the DNA code – or in the case of a virus, the RNA code – that makes up an individual organism. Human DNA is about 3 billion letters long, while the RNA of COVID is about 20,000 letters long. The letters of code can change, or mutate, each time the organism replicates, which in the case of COVID resulted in thousands of mutations and dozens of significant variants that changed the transmissibility and virulence of the virus.

"It is only by sequencing samples of the COVID virus – using the power of genomic technologies – that scientists here in Arizona, and our colleagues around the world, have kept track of all the mutations and subsequent COVID variants during this pandemic," said David Engelthaler, director of TGen's Pathogen and Microbiome Division, the institute's infectious disease branch in Flagstaff. The pandemic's weekly progression was documented on the Arizona COVID Sequencing Dashboard compiled by TGen.

"When it comes to genomics, compiling 100,000 sequences is huge," said Engelthaler, who supervised the collection and curation of Arizona's COVID genomes. "Never before has a feat like this been accomplished for an infectious pathogen, but it's really only the beginning of how we can use next-generation science and technology, in real time, to make a real difference."

"The 100,000 milestone represents a lot of hard work and coordination across all three state universities, TGen and ADHS (the Arizona Department of Health Services)," said Paul Keim, a TGen Distinguished Professor, the executive director of NAU's Pathogen and Microbiome Institute and one of the world's leading authorities on infectious diseases.

"Arizona was not left behind in tracking the variants of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID. As the global scientific community was identifying and tracking variants, Arizona was engaged and knew where we stood at all times," Keim said. "With our surveillance data, we could learn from global efforts, make predictions for Arizona, and respond to mitigate the pandemic as it arrived here."

ACGU provides critical data about Arizona

At the start of the pandemic in early 2020, TGen and Arizona's three publicly funded universities came together to form ACGU, an acronym that also stands for the four chemical letters of RNA. ACGU's expressed purpose is harnessing the power of state-of-the-art biotechnology and big data analysis to better understand how COVID evolves, how it is transmitted and how and where it moves through the general population.

The ACGU is one of many scientific groups across the globe working to track COVID through the rapid sharing of data and analysis, which has proved critical to the worldwide scientific, medical and public health understanding of the pandemic.

"Sequencing allows us to stay ahead of the SARS-CoV-2 virus as it evolves new variants, from the alpha variant to omicron and beyond," said Efrem Lim, assistant professor in ASU's Biodesign Center for Fundamental and Applied Microbiomics.

"This real-time surveillance makes a difference for public health responses. As scientists, we have a responsibility to care for our communities," said Lim, who helped accelerate rapid COVID sequencing and oversaw a team at ASU that has now sequenced more than 40,000 of those genomes. "The statewide ACGU team has worked together since the start of the pandemic. This has meant that Arizona has not been left in the dark. Arizona can count on us no matter what the future holds – in this pandemic or the next."

The Arizona COVID Sequencing Dashboard was developed and maintained by TGen for Arizona, the Arizona Department of Health Services and the CDC. Since its launch in February 2021, it has recorded more than 103,000 genomic sequences from Arizona COVID patients. The site has recorded more than 217,000 visits.

NASA deputy administrator: UArizona a 'crown jewel' for the US During a visit to campus, NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy discussed some of the space agency's most ambitious and impactful space missions with the UArizona scientists who pursue them. Daniel Stolte May 6, 2022 University Communications Science and Technology College of Science Grand Challenges Research Research, Innovation & Impact Strategic Plan

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NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy visited the University of Arizona Friday to meet with Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation Elizabeth "Betsy" Cantwell and eight campus researchers involved in some of the space agency's largest and most impactful missions. During a press conference immediately following the meeting, Melroy discussed the university's critical role in NASA projects.

Melroy recognized UArizona as "a huge and important partner for NASA, with a towering reputation in astronomy, planetary science and astrophysics, and world-ranked across all disciplines" and as a "crown jewel for the United States."

"As the world has become more competitive, and we are competing for technological capability around the world, our university system is still the envy of the rest of the world, and the University of Arizona is a critical piece of that," Melroy said.

She pointed out the numerous partnerships between NASA and the state of Arizona, which is ranked in the top 10 states for pursuing activities funded by the space agency, amounting to just over $900 million in economic impact and more than 5,000 jobs.

"Some of the most inspiring things and pictures that we have seen over the last couple of years have very strong roots right here," Melroy said, pointing to the James Webb Telescope, or JWST, as the most recent example. UArizona Regents Professor Marcia Rieke is the principal investigator for NIRCam, one of the space observatory's most important instruments.

JWST will provide glimpses into the early universe, during a time when the first stars and galaxies formed, potentially unlocking some of the rules of how the universe works, Melroy said.

The former astronaut, who helped assemble the International Space Station, also shared her excitement about the UArizona-led asteroid sample return mission OSIRIS-REx, and said she looks forward to getting the samples back to Earth next year.

The return of extraterrestrial samples, including moon samples, "are very much on NASA's mind right now," she said, fueled by ambitions to send astronauts back to the moon and, eventually, to Mars.

One of only two women to command a space shuttle, Melroy hinted at future scenarios in which "science is front and center" as humans and machines explore other worlds side by side, and she emphasized the critical mission that institutions like UArizona play in paving the way for such endeavors, particularly with regard to developing technology and educating the highly skilled workforce that will be up to such challenges.

Melroy said she was particularly impressed to hear that current students express an interest in studying the climate on other planets, driven by a desire to glean insights into better understanding our own planet and its potential transformations under the effects of a changing climate.

"The first person to set foot on Mars will be a scientist, and they're alive and in school today," she said.

NASA announced in April that Dani DellaGiustina, a UArizona alumna, would lead the OSIRIS-APEX mission – an extension of OSIRIS-REx mission that will visit near-Earth asteroid Apophis and, like OSIRIS-REx, yield fundamental knowledge about the origin of terrestrial planets and strategies to avoid potential asteroid impacts on Earth.

"The same thing that makes NASA unique," Melroy said, "is what makes UArizona unique: its people."

"The university has been dedicated to the highest-quality scientists, and it has been at the leading edge for a long time," she added. "Even when I was applying to grad schools, this was the place that you wanted to get into."

While on campus, Melroy also expressed her gratitude to U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly's office for helping the university's Alfie Norville Gem & Mineral Museum obtain a lunar rock sample that was picked up by astronaut Jim Irwin during the Apollo 15 mission.

The rock, which is on loan to the university, is currently on display at the museum.

"I think NASA can afford to give away a slice of that rock. because we're going back to get more," Melroy said.

During her visit, Melroy heard presentations from the following UArizona researchers: 

• DellaGiustina, assistant professor of planetary sciences, deputy principal investigator and image processing lead scientist for NASA's OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission, and principal investigator of OSIRIS-APEX, which will visit near-Earth asteroid Apophis.
• Rieke, Regents Professor of Astronomy and principal investigator for the Near Infrared Camera, or NIRCam, instrument onboard NASA's James Webb Space Telescope.
• Amy Mainzer, professor of planetary sciences and director of NASA's NEO Surveyor, a space-based survey designed to discover and measure asteroids and comets that could pose an impact hazard to Earth. 
• Carlos Vargas, assistant astronomer at Steward Observatory and principal investigator for NASA's Aspera mission, which will study galaxy evolution with a space telescope barely larger than a mini fridge.
• Kristopher Klein, assistant professor of planetary sciences and deputy principal investigator for NASA's HelioSwarm mission, a "swarm" of nine spacecraft that will set out to better understand plasma, the state of matter that makes up 99% of the visible universe.
• Shane Byrne, professor of planetary sciences and co-investigator for the High Resolution Imaging Experiment, or HiRISE, camera onboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. 
• Pierre Haenecour, assistant professor of planetary sciences and sample science co-investigator for OSIRIS-REx. 
• Erika Hamden, assistant professor of astronomy and principal investigator of Hyperion, a mission designed to observe molecular hydrogen in our galaxy to better understand how stars form

Digital media & downloads UArizona astronomers lead efforts that reveal the black hole at the heart of our galaxy The first image of the black hole located at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy, called Sagittarius A*, was unveiled Thursday by the international Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration. The discovery would not have been possible without the groundwork and heavy lifting provided by UArizona scientists and facilities. Daniel Stolte, University Communications, and Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration May 12, 2022 Science and Technology Astronomy Black Holes College of Science Experts Exploration Research Research, Innovation & Impact

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To learn more about the university's efforts to image a black hole, visit the UArizona Black Hole Experts page.

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Astronomers have unveiled the first image of the supermassive black hole at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy. This result provides overwhelming evidence that the object is indeed a black hole and yields valuable clues about the workings of such giants, which are thought to reside at the center of most galaxies. The image was produced by a global research team called the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, using observations from a worldwide network of radio telescopes. Researchers at the University of Arizona played a leading role in the effort, providing two of the eight telescopes used to make the observations and performing data analysis that resulted in the image unveiled Thursday.

The image is a long-anticipated look at the massive object that sits at the very center of our galaxy. Scientists had previously seen stars orbiting around something invisible, compact and very massive at the center of the Milky Way. This strongly suggested that the object – known as Sagittarius A*,  or Sgr A* (pronounced "sadge-ay-star") – is a black hole, and the new image provides the first direct visual evidence of it.

Although we cannot see the black hole itself, because it is completely dark, glowing gas around it reveals a telltale signature: a dark central region called a "shadow," surrounded by a bright ringlike structure. The new view captures light bent by the powerful gravity of the black hole, which is 4 million times more massive than the sun.

"We were stunned by how well the size of the ring agreed with predictions from Einstein's theory of general relativity," said EHT project scientist Geoffrey Bower from the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan. "These unprecedented observations have greatly improved our understanding of what happens at the very center of our galaxy and offer new insights on how these giant black holes interact with their surroundings."

The EHT team's results are published today in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Because the black hole is about 27,000 light-years away from Earth, it appears to us to have about the same size in the sky as a donut on the moon. To image it, the team created the powerful EHT, which linked together eight existing radio observatories across the planet to form a single "Earth-sized" virtual telescope. The EHT observed Sgr A* on multiple nights, collecting data for many hours in a row, similar to using a long exposure time on a camera.

The Submillimeter Telescope on Mount Graham in Arizona and the South Pole Telescope in Antarctica – both under the leadership of Dan Marrone, a professor of astronomy and an astronomer at the UArizona College of Science's Steward Observatory – proved that an Earth-sized telescope would work. Under the leadership of Chi-kwan "C.K." Chan, an associate research professor at Steward, the EHT team at UArizona developed powerful computational models capable of predicting what sources like Sgr A*, which change over time, would look like in the sky.

(Read more about the university's EHT involvement and the significance of the latest image in the article "Black hole scientist: Wherever we look, we should see donuts")

The Sgr A* image breakthrough follows the EHT Collaboration's 2019 release of the first image of a black hole, called M87*, at the center of the more distant Messier 87 galaxy.

The two black holes look remarkably similar, even though our galaxy's black hole is more than 1,000 times smaller and less massive than M87*.

"We have two completely different types of galaxies and two very different black hole masses, but close to the edge of these black holes they look amazingly similar," said Sera Markoff, co-chair of the EHT Science Council and a professor of theoretical astrophysics at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. "This tells us that general relativity governs these objects up close, and any differences we see further away must be due to differences in the material that surrounds the black holes."

This achievement was considerably more difficult than for M87*, even though Sgr A* is much closer to us, explained Chan.

"The gas in the vicinity of the black holes moves at the same speed – nearly as fast as light – around both Sgr A* and M87*," he said. "But where gas takes days to weeks to orbit the larger M87*, in the much smaller Sgr A* it completes an orbit in mere minutes. This means the brightness and pattern of the gas around Sgr A* was changing rapidly as the EHT Collaboration was observing it – a bit like trying to take a clear picture of a puppy quickly chasing its tail."

The researchers had to develop sophisticated new tools that accounted for the gas movement around Sgr A*. While M87* was an easier, steadier target, with nearly all images looking the same, that was not the case for Sgr A*. The image of the Sgr A* black hole is an average of the different images the team extracted, finally revealing the giant lurking at the center of our galaxy for the first time.

The effort was made possible through the ingenuity of more than 300 researchers from 80 institutes around the world that together make up the EHT Collaboration. In addition to developing complex tools to overcome the challenges of imaging Sgr A*, the team worked rigorously for five years, using supercomputers to combine and analyze data, all while compiling an unprecedented library of simulated black holes to compare with the observations.

(Read more about UArizona's role in the simulation library in the article "Making sense of the nonsensical: Black holes and the simulation library.")

"This is an exciting day for astrophysics, for the University of Arizona and for all of those fascinated and curious about our galaxy," said Elizabeth "Betsy" Cantwell, UArizona senior vice president for research and innovation. "This effort highlights not just the immense complexity of and commitment toward such a discovery, but also the ingenuity of our University of Arizona scientists and the more than 300 other researchers from dozens of institutions around the world that together make up the EHT Collaboration."

A founding partner of the EHT Collaboration, UArizona has provided significant resources and leadership in terms of the EHT's footprint, intellectual contributions and publications. In the early days of the project, the National Science Foundation funded the EHT with $28 million, a large portion of which was awarded to UArizona. Dimitrios Psaltis, UArizona professor of astronomy and physics and principal investigator of the international Black Hole PIRE Project, served as the founding project scientist. Remo Tilanus, a research professor and astronomer at Steward Observatory, serves as operations manager of the Event Horizon Telescope.

Scientists are particularly excited to finally have images of two black holes of very different sizes, which offers the opportunity to understand how they compare and contrast. They have also begun to use the new data to test theories and models of how gas behaves around supermassive black holes. This process is not yet fully understood but is thought to play a key role in shaping the formation and evolution of galaxies.

"Now we can study the differences between these two supermassive black holes to gain valuable new clues about how this important process works," said EHT scientist Keiichi Asada from the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan. "We have images for two black holes – one at the large end and one at the small end of supermassive black holes in the universe – so we can go a lot further in testing how gravity behaves in these extreme environments than ever before."

Progress on the EHT continues: A major observation campaign in March 2022 included more telescopes than ever before. The ongoing expansion of the EHT network and significant technological upgrades will allow scientists to share even more impressive images as well as movies of black holes in the near future.

Feryal Özel, professor of astronomy and physics at UArizona's Steward Observatory, has been a member of the EHT Science Council since its inception and has led the modeling and analysis group.

"We've gotten into everything from very basic theoretical analytic models, all the way to extremely complex, large computational efforts," she said. "To do this kind of work, you need new hardware, new types of algorithms and new types of models."

EHT is a very organic collaboration, according to Özel, with partners bringing their own expertise, resources and telescopes in the face of limited funding. UArizona has led many of these efforts, she added.

As early as the late 1990s, Özel and Psaltis –  concurrently with another team that included Fulvio Melia, a professor in the Department of Physics – undertook the first studies exploring the feasibility of taking a picture of Sgr A*. In November 2012, Psaltis, Marrone and Özel hosted the inaugural meeting of the Event Horizon Telescope in Tucson, which established the worldwide collaboration.

"Many of the early ideas came out of here, the computational tools and infrastructure for the simulation library came out of here, the proof of principle for testing Einstein’s theory came out of here," Psaltis said. "Everything, from running the telescopes to analyzing the data, is a collective effort. Each one of us has their hands in basically everything, and we made it work."

UArizona innovation generated $1.6B in economic output over 5 years A new report indicates that startups and business generated through Tech Launch Arizona at the University of Arizona supported over 2,500 jobs and $561 million in labor income between fiscal years 2017 and 2021. Paul Tumarkin May 18, 2022 Tech Launch Arizona Business and Law Science and Technology College of Optical Sciences Community Engagement Determination Research, Innovation & Impact Tech Launch Arizona

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A new report indicates that startups and business generated through Tech Launch Arizona at the University of Arizona supported over 2,500 jobs and $561 million in labor income between fiscal years 2017 and 2021.

Tech Launch Arizona, the university office that commercializes inventions stemming from UArizona research and innovation, has produced over $1.6 billion in economic activity since 2016, according to the report, released Wednesday.

The report, produced by Rounds Consulting Group and titled "The Economic Impacts of Tech Launch Arizona," outlines the economic impacts generated by TLA for the five-year period from fiscal year 2017 through fiscal year 2021. It also projects impact for the next 10 fiscal years, from fiscal year 2022 through fiscal year 2031.

The top findings of the report indicate that between July 1, 2016, and June 30, 2021, TLA activities generated:

• $1.61 billion in economic output
• $561 million in labor income
• $59 million in tax revenues

The report also indicates that TLA and its associated business activities supported an estimated 2,600 jobs as of fiscal year 2021. Over the most recent five-year period, TLA created 800 new jobs.

The report projects that from fiscal year 2022 through fiscal year 2031, TLA activities will create an additional 1,000 jobs, bringing the total to 3,500 jobs, and generate:

• $4.7 billion in economic output
• $1.6 billion in labor income
• $172 million in tax revenues

"The impact of TLA on the local economy has grown and is a significant contributor to the region’s economic well-being. Our review indicates that this growth will continue throughout the remainder of this decade and beyond," Jim Rounds, co-author of the report, said.

"With their leadership, the Tech Launch Arizona team has grown its impact each and every year. They've engaged more faculty, staff and students as entrepreneurial inventors than ever before in the history of the University of Arizona, and have worked to patent thousands of inventions on behalf of the university," University of Arizona President Robert C. Robbins said in a video message about TLA's impact. "They've worked diligently to license them to companies that can take them forward."

UArizona Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation Elizabeth "Betsy" Cantwell said the university's commitment to innovation and growth in commercialization and impact will continue.

"The innovation ecosystem at the University of Arizona is a robust and integral part of our mission to enrich life for all, allowing us to translate cutting-edge research into market-ready solutions," Cantwell said. "By fostering an entrepreneurial spirit across the university, advancing the creation of startup companies, and licensing University of Arizona inventions to existing companies that can take them forward, we're able to meaningfully benefit people across Arizona and around the world."

The impact calculations stem from the cumulative results of three categories of activity. The first category is the activity generated by startup companies the university has launched to commercialize inventions developed by UArizona faculty, researchers and staff. By the university's definition, a startup is a company founded to commercialize a technology invented by UArizona employees – such as faculty, staff, or graduate students – that has licensed the intellectual property for the invention from the university to take it forward into the marketplace. In the last 10 years, TLA has launched over 125 startups; 83% are still in business and over 80% are operating in Arizona. These startups create new jobs, generate tax income and enrich the community in myriad ways.

The second category represents the impact generated by the more than 450 licenses through which UArizona inventions are being brought to the marketplace by previously existing companies. One example is a trifocal lens developed in the James C. Wyant College of Optical Sciences that the university licensed to health care company Alcon.

The third category of impact activity stems from the daily work of Tech Launch Arizona staff and operations of the office.

"This news is a fantastic way to kickoff our 10th anniversary celebration, where we're reflecting on what TLA has accomplished since it was founded in late 2012," said TLA Assistant Vice President Doug Hockstad. "Add to that the projection over the next decade, and it's both humbling and energizing to see the impact we foresee going forward."

Want to see a moon rock? There's one in downtown Tucson A lunar rock, collected during the 1971 Apollo 15 mission, is on loan until mid-August to the UArizona Alfie Norville Gem & Mineral Museum. Having the rock, museum staff say, provides visitors with a unique opportunity to see an "unadulterated" moon rock – the largest one NASA loans out to museums. Kyle Mittan May 25, 2022 University Communications Science and Technology Alfie Norville Gem & Mineral Museum Research, Innovation & Impact

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It took six days in space – and more than 18 hours of exploration on the moon's surface – for NASA astronauts David Scott and James Irwin to collect the 170 pounds of lunar rocks they brought back to Earth as part of NASA's Apollo 15 mission in 1971.

Anyone in the Tucson area this summer is probably no more than a half-hour car ride from a quarter-pound chunk of that haul.

A moon rock is on display through mid-August at the University of Arizona Alfie Norville Gem & Mineral Museum, thanks to a six-month loan from NASA. It arrived at the museum in early February, as the museum geared up for a grand opening in its new space at the Pima County Historic Courthouse during the annual Tucson Gem, Mineral & Fossil Showcase.

Weighing 4 ounces and measuring about 3 inches long, the rock is the largest sample that NASA loans to museums from its collection at Johnson Space Center in Houston, said Elizabeth Gass, exhibit specialist at the Alfie Norville Gem & Mineral Museum.

The rock can be found in the museum's Mineral Evolution Gallery, the first gallery that guests enter as they leave the lobby.

"It's a privilege to have this rock here," Gass said. "Not every museum qualifies to have one because of the strict security protocols needed to keep the rock safe."

Mark Kelly, a U.S. senator from Arizona and retired astronaut, was instrumental in helping the museum get the rock, Gass said. During a visit to the museum before its grand opening, Kelly noticed the museum did not have a moon rock and mentioned it to museum staff.

Later, before the museum had even filed an application for a moon rock loan, a NASA official called to ask whether the museum was interested.

Kelly, apparently, had reached out to his colleagues at NASA and "had made a good enough case that they called us," Gass said with a chuckle. He also helped expedite the application process, she added.

NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy, during a visit to the UArizona campus earlier this month, expressed gratitude to Kelly for his help in getting the rock to the museum.

"I think NASA can afford to give away a slice of that rock. Because we're going back to get more," Melroy said, referring to the upcoming Artemis missions, which aim to land the first woman and first person of color on the moon.

Apollo 15 was the first of NASA's Apollo "J" missions, which provided astronauts more time to explore the lunar surface than previous Apollo trips. Scott, the mission's commander, and Irwin, the pilot of the lunar module, made the trip to the moon's surface; Alfred Worden, the mission's third astronaut, piloted the command module and remained inside the module as it orbited the moon.

The lunar module touched down in the plains near Hadley Rille, a valley on the moon. The area looks like the foothills at the base of many mountain ranges on Earth, Gass said.

Scott and Irwin spent roughly three days exploring the area. The mission marked the first time humans drove a car on the moon, with the pair logging 17.5 miles in the rover.

The rock that now sits in the museum was collected at Station 8, a site roughly 410 feet from where the lunar module landed. Station 8 is also where the astronauts set up the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package, or ALSEP, which NASA used until 1977 to collect data on the lunar surface.

The rock is a piece of mare basalt, a volcanic mineral found on the flat lowlands of the moon, said Gass, who is also a geologist. Those lowlands, she added, can be seen in images of the moon taken from Earth; they appear as darker, shaded areas, contrasted against the brighter areas, which are mountains. According to NASA, lunar basalts can be as old as 3.3 billion years – older than 98% of minerals found on Earth.

The rock is at least the second moon stone that can be found in Tucson. The Pima Air & Space Museum also has a rock, on permanent loan from NASA, on display.

The Alfie Norville Gem & Mineral Museum stands out from other mineralogy museums as a destination to see both gems and minerals; minerals are inorganic solids that occur naturally in Earth's crust, while gems are minerals that have been combined with something else for aesthetics.

Although the moon rock is grounded in scientific discovery, there's plenty to admire about it for those who just want to look at something pretty, Gass said.

"Seeing an unaltered, unadulterated moon rock is really special," Gass said.

The Alfie Norville Gem & Mineral Museum is located at the Pima County Historic Courthouse, 115 N. Church Ave. The museum is open Wednesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., with the last tickets sold at 3. More information is available on the museum website.