College of Science Impact Report 2025

COLLEGE OF SCIENCE I M P A C T 2025 R E P O R T

THE JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the largest, most powerful telescope ever launched into space. It follows in the footsteps of the Hubble Space Telescope as the next great space science observatory, designed to answer outstanding questions about the Universe and to make breakthrough discoveries in all fields of astronomy. The University of Arizona College of Science is a leader in the JWST mission, with two groundbreaking instruments developed by our faculty. Regents Professor Dr. Marcia Rieke spearheaded the Near Infrared Camera, while Regents Professor Dr. George Rieke leads the science team for the Mid-Infrared Instrument. University of Arizona astronomers have been awarded 13% of the JWST's total observing time, the largest allocation of any institution worldwide, solidifying its critical role in the mission's success. These efforts helped capture the globally recognized photo of the distant universe on the front cover of this magazine.

TABLE OF CONTENTS 1 | Welcome Message from Dean Carmala Garzione 2 | College of Science Overview 4 | College of Science Lecture Series 6 | Tech Launch Arizona Partnership 7 | Research Facts, Figures & Expenditures 8 | College of Science Research Articles 36 | Experience Science in Southern Arizona 38 | Alumni, Homecoming & Galileo Circle

MESSAGE FROM THE DEAN Dear Friends and Colleagues, We are publishing this inaugural impact report to highlight and celebrate the collective achievements of the College of Science and to strengthen our connection with you—our valued community of supporters and partners.

In this impact report, we provide some insight into the marvels of scientific exploration and discovery in the college, as well as stories about the people behind this work. Be sure to check out the many ways that we share our work through community engagement in our numerous outreach venues, science lecture series, and by taking our efforts out into the community to engage students, teachers, and the public.

Reflecting on the past year, I feel profound pride and gratitude for the efforts and successes of the people, departments, and programs in the College of Science. With our broad strengths in Mind, Brain, and Behavioral Sciences; Life and Molecular Sciences; Mathematics and Computational Sciences; Earth Sciences; and Physics and Space Sciences, our

training of students and our research are improving people’s lives and transforming our understanding of the universe around us. We are not only pushing the boundaries of what we know, but creating innovations that support our economy, cure diseases, and improve our daily lives.

Scientific discovery and innovation make the world a better place to live. Whether you are a student, staff member, faculty member, alumnus, community supporter, or colleague, we welcome you to join us in our journey of exploration and discovery. We appreciate your enthusiasm and support of the work that we do to train and inspire young scientists, to improve the lives of people and the health of our planet, to understand our place in the universe, and to share our work with the public.

Sincerely,

Carmala Garzione

Dean | College of Science Professor of Geosciences University of Arizona College of Science | Annual Report 2025

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COLLEGE OF SCIENCE WHO WE ARE

MAJORS OFFERED Applied Physics Artificial Intelligence Astronomy Biochemistry Bioinformatics Biology Chemistry Computer Science Data Science Ecology & Evolutionary Biology Geosciences

AT A GLANCE

Geosciences & Society Hydrology & Atmospheric Sciences Mathematics Molecular & Cellular Biology Neuroscience Neuroscience & Cognitive Science Physics Planetary Geosciences Psychological Sciences Psychology Speech, Language & Hearing Sciences

22

14

UNDERGRADUATE DEGREE PROGRAMS

DEPARTMENTS TOP

20

PUBLIC RESEARCH UNIVERSITIES BY NSF

FLINN SCHOLARS

34

GRADUATE DEGREE PROGRAMS

The Flinn Scholars Program recognizes 20 of the highest achieving high school seniors in the state of Arizona.

During the 2024 academic year, the College of Science welcomed five of the 11 University of Arizona scholars into our programs.

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9,219

1,776

STUDENTS

C L AS S O F 2 02 4 DE G R E E S AWARD E D 6%

8,354 UNDERGRADS

7%

Undergrad 87%

865 GRADS

PhD

160 Masters | 705 PhD

TOP AWARDED MAJORS

PSYCHOLOGY

COMPUTER SCIENCE

NEUROSCIENCE AND COGNITIVE SCIENCE

BIOCHEMISTRY

STUDENT DEMOGRAPHICS 60% Female 4%

10% 42% 34%

BIOLOGY

HISPANIC SERVING INSTITUTE

40% Male White

10%

Masters

Under represented minority International Asian

Welcome! ¡Bienvenidos!

The University of Arizona is the first four-year public university in the state of Arizona to be federally recognized as a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI). As a research intensive land-grant HSI, the University of Arizona is committed to responsively meeting the educational needs of our vibrant and increasingly diverse communities of Arizona.

Other

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Explore the 20th annual College of Science Lecture Series and discover the power of communication with animals, languages, technology, and the cosmos.

Watch the 2025 Lecture Series and past series on YouTube.

Emily Bray and Evan MacLean

Ellen Riloff

Genesis Arizmendi

Daniel Apai and Chris Impey

Sit, Stay, Speak: Unleashing the Science of Dog-Human Communication Two Languages, One Mind: What Science Reveals About Bilingual Communication

Following Your Heart: Recognizing Emotions in Human-Computer Communication Cosmic Conversations: Communicating with the Unknown

science.arizona.edu/lecture-series 4

University of Arizona College of Science | Annual Report 2025

“

The College of Science Lecture Series is a great way to bring together a large and really diverse audience to share in some of the university’s current, cutting-edge research in a way that makes it accessible and understandable to the public,” said Carmala Garzione, Dean of the College of Science. “Science helps us solve fundamental problems and pursue really interesting opportunities, and our goal is to convey how science enables us to get closer to understanding. The discussions will also hopefully help people understand how science works as we progress or move forward through a problem.

”

CONNECTING THE TUCSON COMMUNITY WITH CUTTING-EDGE SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH University of Arizona College of Science | Annual Report 2025

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I N

P A R T N E R S H I P

COLLEGE OF SCIENCE & TECH LAUNCH ARIZONA The University of Arizona is a place of learning, invention and discovery. Tech Launch Arizona’s mission is to collaborate with creators and the local community to help bring those discoveries to the world through commercial pathways. Their primary focus is ensuring that innovations originating with U of A faculty, researchers, staff and students find meaningful applications that benefit the public.

COLLEGE OF SCIENCE TOTALS:

779

Total disclosures

81

179

Total U.S. patents issued

Total non-exclusive licenses

29

117

Total licenses

(exclusives and options)

Total startups *since FY13

COLLEGE OF SCIENCE FACULTY INNOVATION AMBASSADOR

“

DR. JEFF PYUN, CHEMISTRY & BIOCHEMISTRY synthetic polymer chemistry and development of advanced polymeric materials and nanocomposites.

His research group is known internationally for its innovative work in organic/inorganic hybrid polymers and materials for a wide range of applications in photonics, energy, sustainability, and defense.

In total, Pyun has been issued 76 disclosures, 24 patents (16 in the U.S., 8 foreign), and launched three startups: Innovative Energetics LLC, Norcon Technologies Holding, Inc., and Rivixl LLC. Pyun is a Senior Member of the National Academy of Inventors and was named Arizona Academic Innovator of the Year Award by the Arizona Governor’s Office in 2017. Tech Launch Arizona honored him as Inventor of the Year in 2016 for his innovation and impact in the field of chemistry.

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“

Dr. Jeff Pyun’s research is focused on the new

“Tech Launch Arizona and the U of A have provided tremendous support to our research program and our efforts to commercialize new technologies. It is imperative that more U of A faculty – particularly, creative junior faculty – capitalize on these resources to develop and commercialize new IP here at the U of A.” — Dr. Jeff Pyun

RESEARCH TO IMPROVE THE WORLD Research in the College of Science is on the cutting edge of transformative discovery and provides millions of dollars of economic impact to the southern Arizona community and beyond. Our faculty and researchers are dedicated to advancing knowledge and addressing complex challenges through innovative studies and collaborations while teaching and helping develop the next generation of scientists.

TOTAL RESEARCH FUNDING:

$153,546,965 FY24

KEY FUNDING AGENCIES NASA National Science Foundation National Institutes of Health U.S. Department of Energy U.S. Army Contracting Command

The University of Arizona is No. 1 in astronomy and astrophysics research expenditures and ranks in the top 4% of all U.S. Universities in research and development expenditures.

“At the University of Arizona, science research is not just about expanding knowledge—it's about transforming that knowledge into solutions that address the most pressing challenges of our time,” said Dr. Daniel Apai, Assoc. Dean of Research in the College of Science.

“Our students and scholars at The University of Arizona pursue both exciting cuttingedge fundamental and applied research: By attacking grand challenges by building ambitious, interdisciplinary collaborations, through high-impact discoveries, by deepening our understanding of the world around us – and within us – we push the boundaries of human knowledge.

— Dr. Daniel Apai, Assoc. Dean of Research, College of Science

Our highly successful technology transfer and commercialization brings discoveries and methods – ranging from more efficient diagnosis and treatment of cancer through smart water management to advanced space technology – to the hands and into the homes of people in Arizona and beyond. Through our fast-paced, inspiring, and ambitious teaching and research enterprise, we empower our students, faculty, and community to share the future science and society.”

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AST RON OM Y & ST E WA R D O BS E RVATO RY

The GUSTO balloon being transported and lifted by a truck at the launch site in Antarctica.

STEWARD OBSERVATORY BALLOON MISSION BREAKS NASA RECORD 22 MILES ABOVE ANTARCTICA

By Hannah Hindley

Fifty-six days ago, on a nearly windless morning on the Ross Ice Shelf, a stadium-size balloon took flight above Antarctica, carrying with it far infrared technology from the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory in search of clues about the stellar life cycle in our galaxy and beyond.

In search of drier conditions, “we are driven to go to more and more remote places,” said Steward Observatory astronomy professor Chris Walker, principal investigator for the GUSTO mission, who has worked on telescope projects in Antarctica since 1994. Balloon science opens new possibilities for the rapidly evolving field of terahertz spectroscopy, allowing observers to collect far infrared signals before they are lost in the lower layers of the atmosphere, at a fraction of the cost of a fully space-based telescope.

GUSTO – short for the Galactic / Extragalactic ULDB Spectroscopic Terahertz Observatory – has now broken the record as NASA’s longest-flying heavy-lift balloon mission, which previously stood at 55 days, 1 hour and 34 minutes. Currently, the enormous zero-pressure balloon is riding stratospheric air currents 120,000 feet above the Antarctic continent, collecting far infrared radio emissions from the matter between stars. GUSTO surpassed the previous record at 10:22 a.m. Saturday Tucson time.

Balloon telescopes such as GUSTO marry the strength of space observation with the proximity of Earth-based operations, and they come with unique challenges.

A successful launch requires a perfect weather window, with low wind speeds both on the ground and in the stratosphere.

The faint terahertz signals that GUSTO seeks – with frequencies up to a million times higher than the waves emitted by an FM radio – are easily absorbed by water vapor in the Earth’s atmosphere before they can reach ground-based telescopes. Only very dry or highelevation places are well-suited for observatories that catch some of those elusive photons, such as the high Atacama Desert and the South Pole.

When conditions allow, the launch itself is a high-drama spectacle. Support trucks driven out onto the ice shelf pipe helium into the balloon, which luffs and flaps “like a sail” as it fills, Walker said. “You begin to hear the rush of the helium as the balloon inflates, and when they let it go, it rumbles as it unfurls.” This is a tenuous time – if there’s an imperfection or a wind shear, the balloon can shred. Of the record-breaking project, Walker said

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“ballooning is the hardest thing I’ve done professionally, but it’s also the most rewarding.”

If all goes well – as it did for GUSTO – the balloon lifts the telescope inside its specialized gondola and carries it 22 miles above the Earth to the remote seam between the stratosphere and space. From here, astronomers rely on the circular currents of wind above the Antarctic continent during the Southern Hemisphere summer to carry the balloon in broad loops, collecting the light signatures of cosmic chemicals.

Aboard GUSTO, emission line detectors collect molecular information about the interstellar medium – the cosmic gas and dust between stars that gives birth to new stars and galaxies.

“We were all part of the interstellar medium – every atom and molecule in your body was at some point gas and dust flowing between the stars,” Walker said. To complicate matters, the chemistry of the universe is different today than it was after the big bang. To understand the story of star formation in the universe – and by extension, the story of our own origins – astronomers are interested in comparing the composition of the interstellar medium in galaxies of different ages.

GUSTO aims to map out distribution of carbon, oxygen and nitrogen in the young Milky Way and in the neighboring Large Magellanic Cloud, which has characteristics comparable to much older galaxies. A comparison of the two galaxies will help the GUSTO team provide the first complete spectroscopic study of all phases of the stellar life cycle, from the development of interstellar gas clouds, to the formation of stellar nurseries, to the birth and evolution of stars.

The GUSTO mission has traveled a long path to reach the stratosphere. Walker’s team submitted a NASA Explorer Program proposal in 2014, and the project was selected by NASA in 2017. The gondola for the mission was built by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory; Walker’s team from Steward Observatory at U of A provided the telescope and instrumentation – called the “payload” – working alongside various partners including NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

In August 2023, the GUSTO team performed a hang test at the NASA Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Palestine, Texas. From there, the fully integrated gondola

and payload, weighing roughly as much as an SUV, traveled to Antarctica aboard a NASA C-130H cargo aircraft – the first time a balloon mission had shipped fully assembled by air. In Antarctica, the GUSTO team spent the fall and winter months taking daily 12-kilometer trips from McMurdo Station to the hangar to prepare the telescope for launch, traveling aboard Antarctic vans with colossal low-pressure tires across the frozen terrain.

On Dec. 31, a decade after the GUSTO team had submitted its research proposal, the mission launched amid low winds and clear skies, the white balloon billowing up against the backdrop of icy Mount Erebus.

To continue reading, scan the QR code.

Image credit to Tom Williams, CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

Dr. Jane Rigby, who received her PhD in Astronomy from the University of Arizona in 2006, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Joe Biden in 2024.

This is the highest civilian award of the United States, and it honors Rigby’s role in the success of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) mission and her longtime support of diversity and inclusion in science.

Rigby and her team at Goddard Space Flight Center played a major role in the smooth transfer of JWST from commissioning to routine science. Rigby worked on the development of JWST for many years and subsequently led the characterization of JWST's science performance — which now is exceeding expectations and continues to provide pioneering discoveries about the structure and evolution of the cosmos.

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CHE M I ST RY & B I O C HE M I ST RY

REMEDIATING HEAVY METALS

By Dr. Thomas Tomasiak

Heavy metal runoff from industrial processes and mining have a long history of devastating the environment. They cause major problems to health and can persist in water and soil for decades with no good biological processes to decompose them and difficulties in removing them at scale.

Living biological systems offer the ability to overcome challenges with insoluble pollutants.

The Tomasiak laboratory works on one such system, the yeast cadmium factor 1 or ycf1 from simple baker’s yeast. Ycf1 acts like a do-it-all pump that can transport every major heavy metal toxin including arsenic, mercury, lead, and cadmium.

Using the powerful imaging method of cryoelectron microscopy (cryo-EM), along with experiments in cells and purified proteins, they have uncovered a two-step activation mechanism for this pump that explains how yeast cells activate it.

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Tomasiak Lab (L to R): Rodolpho Souza Amado de Carvhalo, Shamiul Rasel, Farhana Jahan Suchana, Annika Schulz, Thomas Tomasiak, Eveyln Cheng, Darpan Rhagav, Binay Maharjan, and Sahan Senanayaka

By capturing a flexible domain called the R-domain in different positions of the transporter, they show how a regulatory signal called phosphorylation removes it from the central cavity where metals bind. These fleeting interactions are difficult to model, so the Tomasiak lab resorted to machine learning methods to boost their weak signal.

Their work, published in Nature Communications, uncovers these critical interactions that are thought could “supercharge” the transporter. Their next steps are to create and test these activated elements in yeast, as well as to introduce ycf1 into plants, to make organisms more tolerant to polluted environments that could be used to safely sequester metals for bioremediation.

CONNECTING WITH THE COMMUNITY THROUGH SCIENCE

By Paul Lee

It has been 15 years since the Chemistry and Biochemistry Department hosted the first “Chemistry Can be Fun: A Program for Adolescents with ASD (autism spectrum disorders) and Asperger Syndrome.”

Event coordinator Jennifer Casteix teared up as she addressed the audience of participants and parents and reminisced about the program’s first year in 2009.

The three-hour camp introduces young people on the Autism Spectrum to a fun program of hands-on science activities while simultaneously providing parents with information about available state, county, and community resources and career possibilities for the participants.

This year’s camp was titled, “STEAM Camp: Exploring Chemistry for 10 to 14-year-olds with ASD.” The handson activities allowed the participants to don lab coats,

PROMOTING WOMEN IN SCIENCE

By Lindsey Holmen

The Program to Advance Women Scientists (PAWS) at the University of Arizona is a graduate student-led organization that promotes gender equity in STEM fields.

PAWS provides members opportunities to connect, grow, and thrive through senior member mentorship, professional development workshops, outreach activities, and networking events.

Student Aidan Prahl and camp participants

gloves, and goggles to experience fun with the sciences for a few hours. The program included lab activities exploring reactions, polymers, fruit batteries and even extracting DNA from strawberries with oneon-one mentoring. After the activities, camp attendees were treated to a Chemistry Magic Show by students in the Chemistry Club and Student Members of the American Chemical Society (SMACS).

members, as well. The club welcomes all members and aims to support women at all stages of their scientific careers by providing access to resources, role models, and a supportive community.

Additionally, PAWS engages in outreach to inspire young children to pursue STEM careers, conducting interactive chemistry demos at schools and local events in the Tucson community. By building a strong network of women scientists, PAWS is committed to empowering women and advancing gender equality in academia and beyond.

The PAWS executive board plays a crucial role in organizing these initiatives, with leadership positions held by graduate students actively involved in STEM research and advocacy. The current board includes Lindsey Holmen as president, Tapasyatanu Dash as vice president, Sydney Cordova as secretary, Lily North and Colin Dral as treasurers, Jenna Courey as outreach chair, Kate Gold as professional development chair, and Annika Silverberg as social chair.

PAWS currently has 66 active members, composed mostly of graduate students with some undergraduate

PAWS members Kate Gold, Sydney Cordova, Jenna Courey, Annika Silverberg, Colin Dral, Lily North, Lindsey Holmen, and Tapasyatanu Dash.

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COM P UT E R SCI E N C E

COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT RECEIVES NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION AWARD TO ADVANCE DECISION-MAKING ALGORITHMS

By Scott Coleman

The Department of Computer Science at the University of Arizona received a prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) award for groundbreaking research aimed at bridging the gap between theory and practice in Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), a powerful methodology used for planning or search tasks. Led by assistant professor Dr. Kwang-Sung Jun, the project promises to improve MCTS algorithms, which have already shown success in applications like reinforcement learning, games, chemical synthesis, materials discovery, and drug development.

Despite its promise, the current state-of-the-art MCTS methods have significant limitations. The most commonly used MCTS algorithm, known as Upper Confidence Bound for Trees (UCT), is known to be provably suboptimal, and existing theories primarily offer asymptotic or worst-case analyses, which often do not capture their actual performance in practice.

This implies that there is a huge potential in improving the nearly 20-year-old UCT algorithm. The goal of Jun's project is to address these issues by developing novel MCTS algorithms with strong mathematical guarantees, improving their practical performance,

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and applying them to real-world problems in material science and large language models (LLMs).

“MCTS has become more important than ever with its use in test-time scale for large language models,” Jun said. “Improvements in MCTS may bring in a significant boost in reasoning capabilities of the LLMs.” The project is built around three main research directions: foundations of MCTS, large-scale MCTS, and experimental design for MCTS. The first objective is to enhance the core algorithms of MCTS, particularly focusing on improving value estimators computed for each node and extending algorithms from the so-called pure exploration problem, which is aligned much better with the objective of MCTS compared to UCT. By developing algorithms with strong performance guarantees, the team aims to establish the optimal performance rates of MCTS and explore its information-theoretic limits.

In the second direction, the research will focus on addressing the challenges posed by largescale problems. Heuristics such as progressive widening, incremental depth expansion, and function

In addition to theoretical and algorithmic advancements, the Computer Science research team will develop all algorithms as open-source software.

This will enable other researchers and practitioners to adopt, test, and improve upon these novel methods.

The algorithms will be evaluated using benchmark datasets and applied to material science tasks, reinforcing the real-world applicability of the work.

Dr. Kwang-Sung Jun

approximations will be analyzed and optimized to ensure MCTS can scale effectively for complex decision-making tasks.

The third key direction of the research involves the design of experiments for MCTS. This aspect will explore methods to train function approximations for MCTS efficiently using fewer data samples, a critical challenge when applying the algorithm to real-world problems. This is aligned to how people use MCTS in train time for LLMs – gathering informative data for developing an accurate process reward model that can be useful in test time.

"Dr. Kwang-Sung Jun's groundbreaking research exemplifies the Department of Computer Science's commitment to advancing both theoretical foundations and practical applications in artificial intelligence," said Dr. Ellen Riloff, professor and head of Computer Science at the University of Arizona. "Dr. Jun and his graduate students are conducting important and exciting research in the area of interactive machine learning (IML), which has the potential to substantially improve the capabilities of large-scale AI systems. This NSF award highlights the Computer Science department's role at the cutting edge of machine learning research that will drive forward the next generation of more powerful and valuable AI technologies."

SUPPORTING THE NEXT GENERATION OF COMPUTER SCIENTISTS A significant portion of the project also aims to integrate education into the research. Undergraduate students will work closely with material scientists in interdisciplinary teams to evaluate the developed algorithms, specifically applying them to tasks related to material discovery. By fostering collaboration between fields, Jun's project provides students with valuable hands-on experience in both computer science and material science.

“The undergraduates will work in between the domain application (material sciences) and the methodology aspect (computer science), which requires effectively communicating with material scientists and computer scientists,” Jun said. “This is an exciting interdisciplinary research experience that will benefit their career.”

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ECOLOGY & E VO LU T I O N A RY BI O LO GY

EARLY TRAUMA CUTS LIFE SHORT FOR RED SQUIRRELS. CLIMATE CHANGE COULD MAKE MATTERS WORSE

By Mikayla Mace Kelley

Life in the Yukon can be tough for young red squirrels.

The project has tracked and studied thousands of wild North American red squirrels in the southwestern part of Canada’s Yukon territory for over 30 years.

Frigid winters, food scarcity, intense competition for territories and the threat of becoming prey to large predators like the Canada lynx are just some of the trials they face.

A new study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences – which Petrullo led with David Delaney, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Colorado Boulder – finds that the more challenges young squirrels face in the year they are born, the shorter their adult lifespan.

Early-life struggles and trauma can literally get under their skin, affecting long-term survival, said Lauren Petrullo, a University of Arizona assistant professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

Scientists want to know what factors, if any, can buffer young squirrels against these threats.

Petrullo is part of the Kluane Red Squirrel Project, a multi-university long-term field project involving the University of Alberta, University of Michigan, University of Colorado Boulder and University of Saskatchewan.

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Red squirrels who make it past their first year of life live about 3 1/2 years, on average, but early life adversity can cut life expectancy by at least 14%.

But there’s a big caveat.

“The ecosystem red squirrels inhabit in this region is unique,” Petrullo said. “Every three to seven years, their favorite food – seed from cones of white spruce trees – is produced in superabundance during what we call a

vary widely in how vulnerable or resilient they are to challenges faced during early development. Our study demonstrates that future environmental quality might be an important factor that can explain why some individuals appear to be more, or less, susceptible to the consequences of early-life adversity.”

While it might be surprising that scientists can glean insights about human resilience from wild red squirrels, Petrullo pointed out that squirrels are rodents, and rodents are commonly used as models for humans in laboratory settings.

“Many lab experiments have limited relevance for broader dynamics between ecology and evolution, because it can be hard to really replicate the ecological challenges that animals have evolved to cope with in a lab setting,” she said.

Dr. Lauren Petrullo

food boom. We found that these booms, even though rare, can interrupt the biological embedding of early-life adversity. If a squirrel had a harsh first year of life, if they were lucky enough to experience a food boom in their second year of life, they lived just as long – if not longer – in spite of early-life adversity.”

The team replicated a food boom by offering wild squirrels in the Yukon peanut butter as a supplemental food source. The peanut butter didn’t have the same effect as the naturally occurring food boom did.

“This suggests that the buffering effect we see is not really just about an increase in available calories,” Petrullo said. “It’s probably about shifts in larger population-level dynamics, like competition.”

WHAT SQUIRRELS CAN TEACH US ABOUT HUMANS

Wild red squirrels, on the other hand, allow for such investigations and are an especially useful study group for questions regarding the early-life environment, Petrullo said. Although growing up as a young squirrel in the Yukon can be difficult, with lots of things making early development challenging, there are also things that can go right.

“Some red squirrels have the luck of being born into gentler early environments, akin to being born with a silver spoon,” Petrullo said. “Because of this, we’ve got this really nice individual variation in early-life environmental quality across a natural ecological environment.”

This environment, however, is expected to experience a great deal of change as global temperatures continue to rise.

“As food boom patterns begin to change,” Petrullo said, “the pathways that connect early-life experiences and lifespan may change as well, potentially offering important insight into how animals may adapt to increasingly challenging environments.”

Petrullo and her colleagues are eager to tease out the mechanisms that link squirrels’ early developmental conditions with later-life survival. What they learn could inform scientific understanding of human resilience, too.

“Our findings in red squirrels echo what we know about how early-life adversity can shorten adult lifespan in humans and other primates,” Petrullo said. “Humans

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G EOSC I E N CE S

FUTURE INCREASE IN EXTREME EL NIÑO SUPPORTED BY PAST GLACIAL CHANGES

By Scott Coleman

As the world continues to warm due to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, scientists have long speculated about the future behavior of El Niño events, the periodic climatic phenomenon that dramatically impacts global weather patterns. Now, new findings from climate simulations supported by measurements of glacial microfossils led by Dr. Kaustubh Thirumalai in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Arizona offer fresh insights into how the occurrence and intensity of extreme El Niño events might change in response to future climate warming. These simulations explain patterns of past climate data and provide a clearer picture of how these events behaved in the distant past, when global temperatures were significantly different.

El Niño events, part of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), are characterized by the warming of ocean waters in the central and eastern Pacific, disrupting weather patterns worldwide. Extreme El Niño events, such as those in 1982, 1997, and 2015, can lead to severe weather consequences, including coral bleaching, forest fires, heat waves, and instability in ice sheets. While these events are not uncommon, their extreme intensity has been known to cause widespread environmental damage.

However, understanding how these extreme events might evolve under future climate conditions is challenging. Climate models predict increasing variability in sea surface temperatures (SST) and rainfall, suggesting a potential rise in the frequency and intensity of extreme El Niño events under higher greenhouse gas concentrations. But due to uncertainties in climate model predictions and the relatively short period of observational data, validating these models with historical records has proven difficult.

In an effort to bridge this gap, researchers have turned to palaeoclimate records, which offer a glimpse into how the ENSO phenomenon behaved during different climatic periods, such as the Last Glacial Maximum 16

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(LGM) roughly 21,000 years ago. The problem, however, lies in interpreting these records and linking past changes to future predictions. Past studies have suggested a highly variable ENSO during the Holocene period, with some records from the glacial period indicating significant changes in ENSO variability.

However, a consistent mechanism connecting past and future ENSO behavior has remained elusive.

To model the behavior of the ENSO system over the past 21,000 years, a period marked by significant climatic shifts, the researchers used the Community Earth System Model (CESM1.2). This model was forced under variety of past and future climate scenarios, including glacial and interglacial periods, as well as future warming scenarios with higher CO2 concentrations.

The findings were striking. The simulations showed a clear relationship between the intensity of ENSO variability and extreme El Niño events across different climatic states. Under future greenhouse warming, ENSO variability significantly increased, while during glacial conditions, ENSO variability was notably reduced.

The key driver of these changes was found to be the state of the tropical Pacific ocean-atmosphere system, Dr. Thirumalai with a seawater sample filled with planktic foraminifera in the subtropical Atlantic Ocean.

Dr. Thirumalai and Dr. Julie Richey of the USGS investigating microscopic plankton aboard the R/V Pelican.

particularly the depth of the ocean’s mixed layer and the strength of the Walker circulation—a major atmospheric circulation pattern in the tropics.

Extreme El Niño events were more frequent in periods of higher ENSO variability, such as during future warming scenarios, where nearly half of the events reached extreme magnitudes (defined as SST anomalies exceeding 2°C). In contrast, under glacial conditions, extreme events were rare. This finding supports the hypothesis that a shallower mixed layer and weaker Walker circulation under warming conditions could lead to more frequent and intense extreme El Niño events in the future.

The simulation results were validated against newly generated palaeoclimate data at the Department of Geosciences Paleo² Lab that Thirumalai oversees.

These data comprise stable oxygen isotopic measurements of planktic foraminiferal shells—marine organisms that float in the upper ocean and build microscopic calcium carbonate shells—which record temperature changes. Thirumalai and the team compiled ocean temperature reconstructions from across the tropical Pacific, which help capture a spatial

signal of past ENSO variability. These reconstructions, all based on individual foraminiferal analyses—a highresolution technique to reconstruct short-term ocean temperature fluctuations—offer critical insights into how ENSO behavior was reduced during the glacial period.

The match between simulated and reconstructed ENSO variability under both glacial and modern conditions provides compelling evidence that the mechanisms driving ENSO events are consistent across different climatic states.

Whereas future warming is expected to increase the frequency of extreme El Niño events, the precise impacts will depend on the magnitude of future greenhouse gas emissions. The potential for more frequent and intense extreme El Niño events highlights the urgent need for continued research and global efforts to mitigate greenhouse emissions. As the world’s weather patterns continue to shift, anticipating and managing the impacts of anthropogenic global warming will be crucial for both environmental protection and societal adaptation.

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HYDROLOGY & AT M O S PHE R I C S C I E N C E S

PEEKING INTO THE INVISIBLE WORLD OF THE ATMOSPHERE

By Mikayla Mace Kelley

Earth’s atmosphere might be out of sight, out of mind, but it is actually a dynamic place with layers of distinct characteristics that are constantly vying for real estate in the sky. And while the atmosphere’s layers can’t be seen with the naked eye, scientists have the incentive to determine where they lie.

For example, knowing the height of what’s called the planetary boundary layer – the layer of the atmosphere that interacts directly with the planet’s surface – compared to the mixing layer, which contains thoroughly mixed air that steadily cools with increased elevation, can help meteorologists predict air quality.

The planetary boundary layer and mixed layer usually have nearly the same height. When they do, lidar laser technology can be used to effectively detect their height.

Lidar uses pulsed lasers to measure light scattering and absorption by aerosol particles in the atmosphere.

But sometimes, atmospheric conditions arise in which the mixed layer is significantly lower than the planetary boundary layer, a phenomenon called decoupling. Lidar has not been used to retrieve the height of both layers under these conditions. This is something scientists would like to be able to do because, for example, the more shallow the mixing layer is, the more concentrated pollution will be over a region.

A team of University of Arizona-led researchers published a technique in the Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres that combines new scientific insights with the revision of an existing computer algorithm to better detect different layers of the atmosphere using lidar, enabling scientists to explore the still mostly uncharted atmospheric world and enhancing the value of lidar measurements. Yike Xu is the paper’s first author and a graduate student in the U of A Department of Hydrology and Atmospheric Sciences.

The results were made possible by a $30 million NASA award to a U of A-led project in 2018. The project team – led by Armin Sorooshian, a professor in the Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering

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– collected data on aerosols, clouds and meteorology and synthesized their interactions over the northwestern Atlantic Ocean using lidar and other instruments flown on airplanes. The funding comes from NASA’s Earth Venture Class program, which funds projects investigating important, but not-well-understood aspects of Earth system processes.

A view of the clouds from the aircraft called the Falcon that carried the lidar instruments.

PARSING OUT THE BOUNDARIES While there’s a wide range in the height of the planetary boundary layer, it averages just over 3,000 feet globally.

During hot desert summers, it can swell to over 13,000 feet as the sun beats down on the desert floor, heating and puffing up the air above. In contrast, at the frigid poles, the planetary boundary layer shrinks to less than 500 feet, said study co-author Xubin Zeng, professor in the Department of Hydrology and Atmospheric Sciences and the Agnese Nelms Haury Endowed Chair in Environment.

Sometimes, an inversion layer develops above the mixing layer, which traps the mixing layer well beneath the planetary boundary layer. While this decoupling isn’t obvious to the naked eye, there are some hints.

“On a clear day in the wintertime in Tucson, if you drive into the city from the suburbs, you can see a brownish fog,” Zeng said. “That air is trapped near the surface by warm air above. That’s an inversion.”

Lidar from aircraft or satellite can measure atmospheric inversion height under clear-sky conditions or cloud tops at the top of the planetary boundary layer, but that’s where lidar capabilities have ended, until now.

The revised algorithm and new insights applied to lidar data uses holes in the clouds or clear areas between

The Falcon aircraft flying above the clouds. It carried the lidar instrument onboard, which used pulsed laser to measure light scattering and absorption by aerosol particles in the atmosphere.

clouds reveal both the lower inversion layer height (indicated by cloud bottoms) and the higher inversion layer height (indicated by cloud tops). Importantly, the lower inversion layer also demarcates the upper limit of the mixing layer.

The University of Arizona and the Department of Hydrology & Atmospheric Sciences has been recognized for having one of the world’s top academic research program in water resources. The U of A ranks No. 1 in the U.S. and No. 4 in the world in water resources, according to ShanghaiRanking’s 2024 Global Ranking of Academic Subjects.

#1

in the U.S.

The team assessed the accuracy of its work against data collected by a weather balloon dropped from an aircraft.

As the balloon fell, it captured information on temperature, humidity and winds.

“From this comparison, we verified that our new techniques are a reliable way of determining the height of the planetary boundary layer and mixing layer,” Xu said.

Although the study was conducted over the Atlantic Ocean, Zeng said that the method can be applied globally.

There are also implications for climate change mitigation.

Some researchers have turned to the controversial practice of pumping aerosols into the air off the coast of California in order to make low-level clouds brighter to reflect more solar radiation and help cool the warming world. But ejecting aerosols upward isn’t always effective at brightening the clouds.

#4

in the world

“If they release aerosols when the planetary boundary layer and mixing layer are decoupled, the aerosols can’t overcome the boundary between the two to reach the clouds,” Xu said. “This significantly reduces the effect the aerosols can have on cloud-whitening solar radiation management.”

Zeng and his team hope that their results will contribute to the development and launch of a new satellite mission focusing on the planetary boundary layer in the next decade.

The U of A has ranked in the top 10 globally since ShanghaiRanking started ranking water resources programs in 2017.

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LAB ORATORY OF T R E E - R I N G R E S E A R C H

GROWTH RINGS IN FISH GIVE CLUES ABOUT FLUCTUATIONS IN CLIMATE OVER DECADES

By Niranjana Rajalakshmi

A giant tree in your backyard can reveal stories about Earth’s past climate. The concentric rings in the trunk, besides indicating the age of the tree, also shed light on the corresponding weather conditions during each year of the tree’s life.

But growth rings are not exclusive to trees. Similar rings found in the tiny ear bones of fish provide clues about the effects of climate change on both land and sea.

Cross-sectional view of a splitnose rockfish (Sebastes diploproa) otolith collected off the coast of California.

Hatfield Marine Science Center, looking for someone to do growth increment analysis in fish. I had no idea that fish lived a long time and formed rings. But I was intrigued by this idea. As a tree-ring scientist, I thought I could incorporate the techniques I’d used to analyze growth increments in trees to address problems in the marine systems, analogous to issues that we address in terrestrial systems.

Q: How do growth rings in trees compare to growth rings in fish when it comes to understanding climate change?

Dr. Bryan Black

Bryan Black, an associate professor of dendrochronology at the University of Arizona Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, has been applying the tree-ring dating techniques to so-called “fish rings” to understand how environmental variability is affecting fish growth and productivity over decades.

In this Q&A, Black discusses the techniques he uses to study growth increments in the ear bones, or otoliths, of fish; the correlation between otoliths and climate change; and how the fish-ring dating technique is comparable to tree-ring dating.

Q: How did you develop an interest for studying fish growth rings?

A: It was by chance that I came to know this area of research exists. After finishing my Ph.D. with a specialization in Appalachian Forest ecology, I came across an advertisement from Oregon State University’s

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A: I could step back to the founding of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research. A.E. Douglass, the lab’s founder, invented the technique of “crossdating.” As climate varies from year to year, it induces synchronous growth patterns among all the trees of a given species and location.

For example, in the Southwest, where rainfall strongly affects growth, trees form a wide ring during wet years and a narrow ring in dry years. As climate varies from year to year, it leads to the formation of a time-specific synchronous barcode of growth among trees.

Crossdating is the process of matching those growth barcodes. It ensures that the calendar year of every ring is correctly identified, as sometimes trees don’t form a ring the whole way around their circumference. If you sample the tree at a place where it didn’t form a ring, you wouldn’t know if you just did simple ring counts. But by sampling a whole bunch of trees and comparing the growth patterns, you’d immediately know if the ring was missed.

The foundational idea behind bringing tree-ring techniques to the marine system is understanding if we can crossdate these fish to build chronologies going back multiple decades; integrate chronologies across

different fish species; and compare chronologies with environmental data like ocean temperature and salinity to tell us how fish respond to climate variability in the world’s oceans.

With these fish otoliths, we have a shortcut to develop exactly dated, well-replicated histories of fish growth in marine systems and study how it relates to variability in climate. It can also help disentangle the effects of humans on marine systems.

Q: Is there a species of fish you prefer to study, and how do you go about collecting samples?

A: One of the main things to prove the concept was to choose a fish species that doesn’t have a big range and does not migrate. It also needed to be a species where the growth increments are annual. Just like trees, you want fish living in an environment where there’s some seasonal variability, like a cold and a warm season, which will induce differences in the otoliths’ growth that would show up as an annual banding pattern. We did have several candidates and selected a species of rockfish from the North Pacific that tends to have a compact home area. This species of rockfish, the splitnose rockfish, is also known to live a long time and form increments that are annual and clearly visible.

Many species of rockfish, all of which are from a diverse genus of fish named Sebastes, are economically important and support valuable fisheries. So, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is charged with management of rockfish species, which are periodically surveyed for their biological parameters. The pea-sized otoliths floating in the fish’s head are collected, and the age of each fish is estimated.

We have collections of rockfish otoliths along the western U.S. coast that go back to the 1970s and had been used for simple ring counts to estimate age of these fish. I could use those otoliths to extract the next level of information in the increment widths for crossdating and developing growth chronologies. In fact, there are millions of these archived otoliths from a wide range of species around the country that are ready for this purpose.

Q: What else do you hope to learn about the otoliths in the future?

A: I’ve been working with fish chronologies for 20 years now. There is a network of fish chronologies across Europe, Australia, the U.S. and Canada, by which we

can study what the chronologies have in common, what they tell us about broad-scale climate drivers. We can even compare fish chronologies from the ocean to tree-ring chronologies on land to show how broad-scale atmospheric patterns simultaneously affect marine and terrestrial environments.

Right now, we are also working with collaborators in Australia on trans-Pacific comparisons of chronologies to learn how climate, especially marine heatwaves, affects growth of fish, and to compare responses of fish populations that are heavily exploited by fisheries against those that have not been heavily exploited. We hope to learn more about how fish populations are responding to extreme climate events and histories of heavy fishing.

Students from Hendricks Elementary visited the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research in October.

Dendrochronology and the next generation of scientists Over three days in October, 75 sixth graders from Hendricks Elementary in Tucson, AZ, visited the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research (LTRR) and took a deep dive into the world of dendrochronology, building on their classroom learning about tree rings, climate, and water use.

Before coming to the Lab, the students learned how tree rings reveal past climate conditions like temperature and rainfall in different biomes and about how they reflect the impacts of extreme events like fire and drought. At the LTRR, students experienced dendrochronology firsthand. They engaged with real tree core samples, and learned how scientists study these rings to uncover environmental history.

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LUN AR & P L AN E TA RY L A BO R ATO RY

STUDYING ARCTIC GLACIERS WITH AIRBORNE RADAR: U OF A PROJECT ATTRACTS $30M FROM NASA

By Daniel Stolte

A University of Arizona-led project that uses advanced airborne radar mounted to lowflying aircraft to study arctic glaciers is one of six new missions that have received funding by NASA. Dubbed Snow4Flow, the mission is led by Jack Holt, a professor in the U of A Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and the Department of Geosciences. It is one of only two missions, selected from 42 proposals, to be funded at $30 million. Four other projects will each receive $15 million.

The funding, announced April 19, comes from NASA’s Earth Venture program, which focuses on missions that use instruments mounted on aircraft to make measurements that cannot be made from space.

Snow4Flow’s goal is to get a better handle on the snowfall feeding into glaciers and how fast those glaciers move. In combination with climate models, this will allow researchers to make more accurate predictions about how glaciers shrink and grow, and how much they contribute to sea level change, Holt said.

“Those glaciers are retreating fast, and they’re making a large contribution to sea level rise, but we don’t know exactly how much and how that’s going to change in the future,” he said. “Right now, we can’t accurately measure how much snow feeds into the glacier systems, and without knowing their ice thickness, you don’t know the volume of ice flowing out from the glacier. Those are things that you can’t measure with satellites from space.”

Snow4Flow is designed to address a critical need of climate scientists in their efforts to develop accurate projections of sea level rise from the melting of land glaciers. Across four major study regions representing many hundreds of glaciers in the Northern Hemisphere – Alaska/Yukon, southeastern Greenland, the Canadian Arctic Archipelago and Svalbard archipelago in Norway – the Snow4Flow team will use microwave and longwavelength radar sounders mounted to low-flying aircraft to measure snow accumulation and glacial ice thickness.

The resulting data will inform models of glacier dynamics and their contributions to sea level rise.

One of Alaska's most iconic glaciers, the Malaspina Glacier spills out from the St. Elias Mountains onto the coastal plain as a "pancake of ice".

Around the world, glaciers are threatened by a warming climate, and scientists need as much data as possible to refine climate prediction models. This photo was taken during a previous NASA-funded mission tasked with measuring annual changes in the thickness of glaciers, sea ice and ice sheets.

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While Holt’s team will focus on studying glaciers in the Northern Hemisphere, the group expects the data collected over the course of the five-year project will be applicable to glaciers in other parts of the world. The measurements can be used to calibrate observations from different satellite missions, allowing scientists to monitor glaciers from space and improve models that predict how glaciers across the globe will behave and respond to climate change.

snowfall in high-latitude, high-altitude regions and Harig studies ice mass loss using gravity measurements from space satellites.

The university’s Earth Dynamics Observatory, or EDO, combines U of A strengths in space exploration, instrumentation and Earth sciences to learn more about our planet. Collecting information about Earth from space provides new information about how Earth systems work, how they are changing and how humans might anticipate and respond to changes.

Ski-equipped deHavilland Otter aircraft on Bagley Icefield, Alaska, during NASA’s Operation IceBridge, a previous airborne program. Snow4Flow will use similar aircraft instrumented with multiple radars and a scanning laser altimeter to map snow depth and ice thickness over many glaciers and ice fields including this one, which is the largest ice mass outside of Antarctica and Greenland.

Snow4Flow centers around two instruments: one with low-frequency radar that generates the very long wavelengths needed to penetrate thick ice sheets, and another that operates at shorter wavelengths and is optimized to probe blankets of snow.

“We will mount them to small aircraft – fixed-wing, helicopters or both – which will fly low over glaciers that pass through mountain valleys,” Holt said. “During those flights, we will collect data that essentially produce cross sections of the snow and glacier ice thickness.”

Behrangi, a professor of hydrology and atmospheric sciences, said the observatory played a crucial role in the success of the Snow4Flow proposal “by encouraging innovative thinking, allowing the team to break free from conventional ideas and envision a broader, more impactful mission instead of settling for smaller, less ambitious proposals.”

“These large federal programs are increasingly interdisciplinary, where they need teams assembled from many disciplines to come together and answer the big science questions of the day,” said Harig, an assistant professor of geophysics. “Jack (Holt) was able to use our expertise within EDO to refine the project idea over the last few years and be very well positioned when the solicitation finally came out.”

“At the same time, these missions improve our ability to use satellites by calibrating algorithms that attempt to use spaceborne data for such purposes,” he said.

Rather than having science and instrument teams defined at the time of the proposal, the projects selected for the NASA funding will be open to other scientists who are interested in applying to join the effort. Holt expects to have a final team assembled by fall 2025 and to begin flight operations in spring 2026. The mission will take place over three years, capturing winter snowfall before snowmelt begins in the summer months.

Holt attributes Snow4Flow’s success in attracting federal funding to a strategic cluster hire at the university that included Ali Behrangi in the Department of Hydrology and Atmospheric Sciences and Chris Harig in the Department of Geosciences, through the university’s Earth Dynamics Observatory. In cluster hires, multiple scholars are recruited into one or more departments based on shared research interests. Behrangi studies

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MAT H E M AT I C S

EXPLORING HORSE BIOMECHANICS: A HANDS-ON RESEARCH EXPERIENCE FOR UNDERGRADUATES

By Dr. Laura Miller

Over time, these models could help improve equine rehabilitation, injury prevention, and training techniques.

Unlike traditional undergraduate research, which is often limited to a select few, this course allows more students to engage in real-world, data-driven research from the start of their college careers. It is open to students in mathematics, engineering, veterinary science, and biology, creating an entry point for those interested in mathematics and data science. It also aims to recruit more underrepresented students in STEM, particularly by leveraging the strong participation of women in equestrian sports.

Student volunteer Ashlynne Parriott with horse Jackson.

At the University of Arizona Al Marah Equine Center, students in a new Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE) will use data-driven methods to study horse movement, biomechanics, and physiology. They will collect high-speed video and inertial sensor data and apply mathematical modeling to analyze gait asymmetries, respiration, and heart rate. The goal is to understand how training and interventions— such as chiropractic work, retraining, and hoof trimming— affect performance and soundness.

This CURE is part of a larger effort to integrate mathematics, engineering, and equine science as the project is a collaboration between the Department of Mathematics, Biomedical Engineering (BME), and the School of Animal and Comparative Biomedical Sciences (ACBS). Students will develop quantitative models to describe gait mechanics and asymmetries and use signal processing and statistical tools to examine the relationship between stride, heart rate, and respiration.

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Sharyl Cates (L), licensed Clinical Social Worker, and Nancy Skocy (R), licensed counselor, with horses.

The horse biomechanics research project extends beyond this course. Ongoing work includes developing predictive models for rider-horse interactions, training effects, and injury risk, as well as exploring computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models of equine circulation. With support from the Provost Investment Fund (PIF), future plans include expanding REU opportunities and upgrading the indoor arena with high-speed video systems to enhance motion analysis. By combining math, technology, and hands-on research, this program advances STEM education, equine science, and applied mathematical modeling. Students will gain experience in quantitative analysis and physiological modeling while working on real problems in horse movement and welfare.

SOLVING FOR SUCCESS: CRR’S FORMULA FOR MATHEMATICS EDUCATION EXCELLENCE

By Melissa Hosten and Wiam Dahbi

For the past 24 years, the Center for Recruitment and Retention of Mathematics Teachers (CRR) at the University of Arizona’s Department of Mathematics has been a leader in innovative mentoring and fostering teacher leadership. Established in 2001 to address the shortage of qualified mathematics educators, the CRR has grown into a vital resource, providing professional development, mentorship, and support to teachers and students across Arizona. CRR programs are offered at no cost to all teachers and schools in the state (public, private, and charter), with most services provided hybrid with both in-person and online participants.

Through impactful programming such as the Mathematics Educator Appreciation Day Conference (the state’s largest K-16 mathematics conference), teacher workshops, and mentoring initiatives, the CRR empowers educators to enhance mathematics instruction and inspire student success. Programs like the New Teacher Induction and IMPACTS workshops offer year-round professional learning, while AmeriCorps STEMM tutoring connects university and high school students with K-12 learners, strengthening mathematics understanding statewide. With a mission to develop and retain high-quality mathematics teachers, the CRR directly impacts thousands of students each year by improving teacher effectiveness and fostering a love of mathematics.

In recent years, the CRR has prioritized efforts in pandemic recovery, working to rebuild student confidence in mathematics and strengthen their mathematical identity. By focusing on programs that address disrupted learning, reduce math anxiety, and support both students and teachers in adapting to new instructional approaches, the CRR has played a crucial role in helping students re-engage with mathematics and develop a positive disposition toward the subject.

Mathematics educators collaborating at a recent CRR event.

through the Presidential Awards for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring (PAESMEM) and the Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching (PAEMST), respectively. These prestigious awards celebrate individuals and organizations that have significantly contributed to STEM education and mentorship, reinforcing the University of Arizona’s role as a leader in academic excellence.

As we look ahead, the CRR remains committed to its vision: ensuring that every child has access to an excellent mathematics teacher. By fostering a strong professional community and championing innovation in mathematics education, the CRR continues to shape the future of mathematics learning in Arizona and beyond.

This dedication to education and leadership is reflected in the national recognition received by University of Arizona faculty and staff. President Joe Biden honored outstanding educators across the nation, including those from the university, Dr. Rodrigo Gutiérrez (Director of the CRR) and Ariel Beggs (Program Coordinator), University of Arizona College of Science | Annual Report 2025

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MOL E CUL AR & CE L LU L A R BI O LO GY

MICROBIAL PIONEERS: FROM VOLCANIC LANDSCAPES TO AQUATIC ECOSYSTEMS

By Dr. Ingmar Riedel-Kruse

Microorganisms are Earth’s silent engineers, shaping ecosystems in ways we are only beginning to understand.

Two recent studies from the Duhamel Lab (Molecular & Cellular Biology Department) highlight the remarkable adaptability of microbes—from the aftermath of volcanic eruptions to the depths of aquatic ecosystems— revealing critical insights into life’s resilience and environmental change.

extreme heat, ultraviolet radiation, and scarce nutrients, microbes adapt in astonishing ways, expanding our understanding of life’s potential beyond our planet.

THE HIDDEN INFLUENCE OF MICROBES ON THE PHOSPHORUS CYCLE While microbes shape new land, they also play a crucial role in sustaining life within aquatic ecosystems. In a recent Nature Reviews Microbiology paper, Duhamel explores how microorganisms drive the phosphorus cycle, a fundamental process for planetary habitability.

This research uncovers new microbial pathways that transform phosphorus compounds in unexpected ways, influencing everything from local water quality to global biogeochemical cycles.

With human activities increasingly impacting aquatic environments, understanding how microbes regulate phosphorus at a cellular level could provide solutions for environmental challenges. By integrating molecular biology with large-scale environmental modeling, this research bridges the microscopic and global, offering critical insights for the future of our planet.

Dr. Solange Duhamel

COLONIZING NEW WORLDS: MICROBES IN VOLCANIC TERRAINS When volcanic eruptions create barren landscapes, life’s first settlers are often microscopic. Graduate student Nathan Hadland, in collaboration with Dr. Solange Duhamel and Dr. Christopher W. Hamilton, published a comprehensive review in Nature Communications Earth & Environment examining how microbes establish themselves in young volcanic terrains. From hot springs and lava tubes to the deep-sea floor, these extreme environments offer a unique glimpse into the earliest stages of ecosystem development.

Understanding microbial colonization in these systems is crucial not only for ecology but also for astrobiology— shedding light on how life may have emerged on Earth and potentially on Mars, which was volcanically active in its past. Despite harsh conditions such as

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DECODING CELL COMMUNICATION: FROM FUNDAMENTAL RESEARCH TO REAL-WORLD IMPACT

By Dr. Ingmar Riedel-Kruse

How do cells sense their surroundings and navigate through complex environments? Researchers in the Molecular & Cellular Biology and Chemistry & Biochemistry Departments at the University of Arizona are unlocking new insights into these fundamental biological processes—advancing our understanding of cell movement, disease, and even immune response.

RAS AND MTORC2: THE MOLECULAR SWITCHES THAT GUIDE CELLS In a study published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, Dr. Pascale Dr. Pascale G. Charest Charest and her team, including Stephen F. Smith, A.F.M. Tariqul Islam, Shoxruxxon Alimukhamedov, and Ethan T. Weiss, uncovered new details about how cells communicate and move. Their research focused on RasC, a protein that acts as a molecular switch to activate mTORC2, a key protein complex involved in cell signaling.

Using the single-celled model organism Dictyostelium, they identified specific regions of RasC that control its interaction with mTORC2, deepening our understanding of how cells migrate.

This research is more than a molecular discovery—it has implications for diseases where cell signaling goes awry, such as cancer. By pinpointing critical mechanisms in cell movement, these findings could help pave the way for targeted therapies that regulate cellular migration.

In addition to these discoveries, Dr. Pascale Charest and Dr. Wouter-Jan Rappel (UC San Diego) were awarded a $1.6 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to investigate how cells sense and respond to chemical gradients, a process known as chemotaxis.

Chemotaxis is essential for many biological functions, from guiding immune cells to infection sites to helping microorganisms locate food. Despite its importance, the mechanisms behind how cells detect subtle chemical differences remain poorly understood.

Using Dictyostelium as a model system, their research aims to uncover the role of G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs)—proteins that play a central role in sensing the environment. Understanding this process could provide crucial insights into immune system function and chronic inflammatory diseases.

Beyond the lab, this grant is also dedicated to mentoring the next generation of scientists. Dr. Charest and Dr. Rappel are actively engaging high school and undergraduate students, particularly from underrepresented backgrounds, through hands-on research experiences. Programs such as KEYS at the University of Arizona and partnerships with local schools aim to introduce young students to careers in science, fostering curiosity and inclusion in STEM fields.

By combining cutting-edge research with education and outreach, these projects are not only advancing biomedical science but also shaping the future of scientific discovery.

$1.6M NSF GRANT TO EXPLORE CELL MIGRATION AND INSPIRE FUTURE SCIENTISTS Fig.2: By pinpointing the exact parts of RasC that interact with mTORC2, the researchers have deepened our understanding of how cells communicate and move.

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NEU ROSC I E N CE

525-MILLION-YEAR-OLD FOSSIL DEFIES TEXTBOOK EXPLANATIONFOR BRAIN EVOLUTION

By Daniel Stolte

Fossils of a tiny sea creature that died more than half a billion years ago may compel a science textbook rewrite of how brains evolved.

group in the animal kingdom. Arthropods include insects, crustaceans, spiders and other arachnids, plus some other lineages such as millipedes and centipedes.

A study published in Science – led by Nicholas Strausfeld, a Regents Professor in the University of Arizona Department of Neuroscience, and Frank Hirth, a reader of evolutionary neuroscience at King’s College London – provides the first detailed description of Cardiodictyon catenulum, a wormlike animal preserved in rocks in China’s southern Yunnan province. Measuring barely half an inch (less than 1.5 centimeters) long and initially discovered in 1984, the fossil had hidden a crucial secret until now: a delicately preserved nervous system, including a brain.

“From the 1880s, biologists noted the clearly segmented appearance of the trunk typical for arthropods, and basically extrapolated that to the head,” Hirth said. “That is how the field arrived at supposing the head is an anterior extension of a segmented trunk.”

“To our knowledge, this is the oldest fossilized brain we know of, so far,” Strausfeld said.

Cardiodictyon belonged to an extinct group of animals known as armored lobopodians, which were abundant early in a period known as the Cambrian, when virtually all major animal lineages appeared over an extremely short time between 540 million and 500 million years ago. Lobopodians likely moved about the sea floor using multiple pairs of soft, stubby legs that lacked the joints of their descendants, the euarthropods – Greek for “real jointed foot.” Today’s closest living relatives of lobopodians are velvet worms that live mainly in Australia, New Zealand and South America.

A DEBATE GOING BACK TO THE 1800S Fossils of Cardiodictyon reveal an animal with a segmented trunk in which there are repeating arrangements of neural structures known as ganglia.

This contrasts starkly with its head and brain, both of which lack any evidence of segmentation.

“This anatomy was completely unexpected because the heads and brains of modern arthropods, and some of their fossilized ancestors, have for over a hundred years been considered as segmented,” Strausfeld said.

According to the authors, the finding resolves a long and heated debate about the origin and composition of the head in arthropods, the world’s most species-rich

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“But Cardiodictyon shows that the early head wasn’t segmented, nor was its brain, which suggests the brain and the trunk nervous system likely evolved separately,” Strausfeld said.

BRAINS DO FOSSILIZE Cardiodictyon was part of the Chengjiang fauna, a famous deposit of fossils in the Yunnan Province discovered by paleontologist Xianguang Hou. The soft, delicate bodies of lobopodians have preserved well in the fossil record, but other than Cardiodictyon, none have been scrutinized for their head and brain, possibly because lobopodians are generally small. The most prominent parts of Cardiodictyon were a series of triangular, saddleshaped structures that defined each segment and served as attachment points for pairs of legs. Those had been found in even older rocks dating back to the start of the Cambrian.

“That tells us that armored lobopodians might have been the earliest arthropods,” Strausfeld said, predating even trilobites, an iconic and diverse group of marine arthropods that went extinct around 250 million years ago.”

“Until very recently, the common understanding was ‘brains don’t fossilize,’” Hirth said. “So you would not expect to find a fossil with a preserved brain in the first place. And, second, this animal is so small you would not even dare to look at it in hopes of finding a brain.”

However, work over the last 10 years, much of it done by Strausfeld, has identified several cases of preserved brains in a variety of fossilized arthropods.

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ARIZONA SCIENTISTS PINPOINT ANOREXIA’S NEUROLOGIC ORIGINS

By Mikayla Mace Kelley On the left is the central amygdala and on the right is the oval region of the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis. PKC-delta neurons glow green in this image. When the research team turned off those neurons in both regions, mice recovered from anorexia. Scientists sought out anorexia’s origins in the amygdala, the brains emotion center, because the disorder is often associated with anxiety and depression.

Anorexia nervosa, a mental health disorder in which people dangerously restrict their eating or purge their stomachs soon after a meal, is one of the deadliest psychological diseases.

Yet, what exactly happens biologically in the anorexic brain has remained unclear, and therapies are limited.

Scientists have been tailing a lead for years, though.

They’ve known that the disorder is often associated with anxiety and depression, hinting that the biological basis for anorexia could be regulated by neurons somewhere in the brain region that controls emotion, called the amygdala.

That’s exactly where Haijiang Cai, a University of Arizona associate professor in the Department of Neuroscience and BIO5 Institute member, and his team found it: Anorexia is caused by a combination of two subregions in the amygdala, according to new research published in Cell Reports.

One knot of neurons in the central nucleus of the amygdala pumps the brakes on your appetite when you get full, feel nauseous or taste something bitter. The other is in the oval region of the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, which also halts eating due to inflammation and sickness.

They also found that PKC-delta neurons become more active in response to eating during the anorexia development. What’s more, when they artificially activated these neurons, they caused a suppression in eating habits and increased exercise.

“This study suggests two important insights to treat anorexia,” Cai said. “One is that we need to target multiple brain regions to develop therapies. We also need to treat multiple conditions. For example, maybe one drug will target nausea and another drug target will target inflammation, and you have to combine them, like a cocktail therapy, to have better therapeutic effects.”

The team relied on mice models for their research.

“There’s no animal model that can mimic human disease completely, but this is as close as we can get,” Cai said. “For example, there are multiple common features, including a warped body image, a very low body weight, limited food intake and excessive exercise. We can’t know if an animal has a warped body image, but we can measure the other three features.”

One future step – since researchers cannot destroy neurons for human treatment – is to develop a method to silence the neurons temporarily, using drugs or some other method to test if that can prevent anorexia development or speed up recovery for people who have already developed the disorder.

Cai and his research team found that when they destroyed a certain type of brain cell, called PKC-delta neurons, in both of these regions, they could prevent anorexia development.

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PHYSI CS

Dr. Mohammed Hassan, associate professor of physics and optical sciences, let a group of researchers in developing the first transmission electron microscope powerful enough to capture images of electrons in motion.

FREEZE-FRAME: U OF A RESEARCHERS DEVELOP MICROSCOPE THAT CAN SEE ELECTRONS IN MOTION

By Logan Burtch-Buus

Imagine owning a camera so powerful it can take freezeframe photographs of a moving electron – an object traveling so fast it could circle the Earth many times in a second.

Researchers at the University of Arizona have developed the world’s fastest electron microscope that can do just that.

They believe their work will lead to groundbreaking advancements in physics, chemistry, bioengineering, materials sciences and more.

“When you get the latest version of a smartphone, it comes with a better camera,” said Mohammed Hassan, associate professor of physics and optical sciences.

“This transmission electron microscope is like a very powerful camera in the latest version of smartphones;

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it allows us to take pictures of things we were not able to see before – like electrons. With this microscope, we hope the scientific community can understand the quantum physics behind how an electron behaves and how an electron moves.”

Hassan led a team of U of A researchers in physics and optical sciences that published the research article “Attosecond electron microscopy and diffraction” in the journal Science Advances. Hassan worked alongside Nikolay Golubev, assistant professor of physics; Dandan Hui, co-lead author and former research associate in optics and physics who now works at the Xi’an Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences; Husain Alqattan, colead author, U of A alumnus and assistant professor of physics at Kuwait University; and Mohamed Sennary, a graduate student studying optics and physics.

A transmission electron microscope is a tool used by scientists and researchers to magnify objects up to millions of times their actual size in order to see details too small for a traditional light microscope to detect.

that take place in between those frames. In order to see an electron frozen in place, U of A researchers, for the first time, generated a single attosecond electron pulse, which is as fast as electrons move, thereby enhancing the microscope’s temporal resolution, like a high-speed camera capturing movements that would otherwise be invisible.

Hassan and his colleagues based their work on the Nobel Prize-winning accomplishments of Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huilliere, who won the Novel Prize in Physics in 2023 after generating the first extreme ultraviolet radiation pulse so short it could be measured in attoseconds.

The ‘attomicroscope’ consists of two sections. The top converts is an ultraviolet pulse that release ultra fast electrons inside the microscope, while the bottom section uses another two lasers to gate, initiate and precisely control electron movement in the sample being studied.

Instead of using visible light, a transmission electron microscope directs beams of electrons through whatever sample is being studied. The interaction between the electrons and the sample is captured by lenses and detected by a camera sensor in order to generate detailed images of the sample.

Ultrafast electron microscopes using these principles were first developed in the 2000s and use a laser to generate pulsed beams of electrons. This technique greatly increases a microscope’s temporal resolution – its ability to measure and observe changes in a sample over time. In these ultrafast microscopes, instead of relying on the speed of a camera’s shutter to dictate image quality, the resolution of a transmission electron microscope is determined by the duration of electron pulses.

The faster the pulse, the better the image.

Ultrafast electron microscopes previously operated by emitting a train of electron pulses at speeds of a few attoseconds. An attosecond is one quintillionth of a second. Pulses at these speeds create a series of images – like frames in a movie – but scientists were still missing the reactions and changes in an electron

Using that work as a steppingstone, U of A researchers developed a microscope in which a powerful laser is split and converted into two parts – a very fast electron pulse and two ultrashort light pulses. The first light pulse, known as the pump pulse, feeds energy into a sample and causes electrons to move or undergo other rapid changes. The second light pulse, also called the optical gating pulse, acts like a gate by creating a brief window of time in which the gated, single attosecond electron pulse is generated.

The speed of the gating pulse therefore dictates the resolution of the image. By carefully synchronizing the two pulses, researchers control when the electron pulses probe the sample to observe ultrafast processes at the atomic level.

“The improvement of the temporal resolution inside of electron microscopes has been long anticipated and the focus of many research groups, because we all want to see the electron motion,” Hassan said. “These movements happen in attoseconds. But now, for the first time, we are able to attain attosecond temporal resolution with our electron transmission microscope – and we coined it ‘attomicroscopy.’ For the first time, we can see pieces of the electron in motion.”

Hassan and his colleagues were recognized by Guinness World Records for developing the world’s fastest electron microscope.

University of Arizona College of Science | Annual Report 2025

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PSYCH OLOGY

BRAIN STUDY CHALLENGES LONG-HELD VIEWS ABOUT PARKINSON’S MOVEMENT DISORDERS

By Niranjana Rajalakshmi

University of Arizona researchers have revealed new insights into one of the most common complications faced

by Parkinson’s disease patients: uncontrollable movements that develop after years of treatment.

Parkinson’s disease – a neurological disorder of the brain that affects a person’s movement – develops when the level of dopamine, a chemical in the brain that’s responsible for bodily movements, begins to dwindle. To counter the loss of dopamine, a drug called levodopa is administered and later gets converted into dopamine in the brain. However, long-term treatment with levodopa induces involuntary and uncontrollable movements known as levodopa-induced dyskinesia.

A study published in the journal Brain has uncovered new findings about the nature of levodopa-induced dyskinesia and how ketamine, an anesthetic, can help address the challenging condition.

Over the years, the brain of a Parkinson’s patient adapts to the levodopa treatment, which is why levodopa causes dyskinesia in the long term, said Dr. Abhilasha Vishwanath, the study’s lead author and a postdoctoral research associate in the U of A Department of Psychology.

In the new study, the research team found that the motor cortex – the brain region responsible for controlling movement – becomes essentially “disconnected” during dyskinetic episodes. This finding challenges the prevailing view that the motor cortex actively generates these uncontrollable movements.

Because of the disconnect between motor cortical activity and these uncontrollable movements, there’s probably not a direct link, but rather an indirect way in which these movements are being generated, Vishwanath said.

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Dr. Abhilasha Vishwanath

The researchers recorded activity from thousands of neurons in the motor cortex.

“There are about 80 billion neurons in the brain, and they hardly shut up at any point. So, there are a lot of interactions between these cells that are ongoing all the time,” Vishwanath said.

The research group found that these neurons’ firing patterns showed little correlation with the dyskinetic movements, suggesting a fundamental disconnection rather than direct causation.

“It’s like an orchestra where the conductor goes on vacation,” said Dr. Stephen Cowen, senior author of the study and an associate professor in the Department of Psychology. “Without the motor cortex properly coordinating movement, downstream neural circuits are left to spontaneously generate these problematic movements on their own.”

This new understanding of dyskinesia’s underlying mechanism is complemented by the team’s findings regarding the therapeutic potential of ketamine, a common anesthetic. The research demonstrated that ketamine could help disrupt abnormal repetitive electrical patterns in the brain that occur during dyskinesia. This could potentially help the motor cortex to regain some control over movement.

Dr. Vishwanath at the Neural Systems and Behavior Program in Woods Hole, MA, testing electrophysiology equipment for measuring neural activity.

With one dose of ketamine, beneficial effects can be seen even after a few months, Vishwanath said.

These findings gain additional significance in light of a planned Phase 2 clinical trial at the U of A, where a group of researchers from the Department of Neurology are testing low doses of ketamine infusions as a treatment for dyskinesia in Parkinson’s patients. Early results from this trial appear promising, Vishwanath said, with some patients experiencing benefits that last for weeks after a single course of treatment.

Dr. Stephen Cowen

Ketamine works like a one-two punch, Cowen said.

It initially disrupts these abnormal electrical patterns occurring during dyskinesia. Then, hours or days later, ketamine triggers much slower processes that allow for changes in the connectivity and activity of brain cells over time, known as neuroplasticity, that last much longer than ketamine’s immediate effects.

Neuroplasticity is what that enables neurons to form new connections and strengthen existing ones.

Ketamine doses could be tweaked in a way such that the therapeutic benefits are maintained with minimized side effects, Cowen said. Entirely new therapeutic approaches may also be developed based on the study’s findings about motor cortex involvement in dyskinesia.

“By understanding the basic neurobiology underlying how ketamine helps these dyskinetic individuals, we might be able to better treat levodopa-induced dyskinesia in the future,” Cowen said.

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SPEE CH , L AN GUAG E & HE A R I N G S C I E N C E S

EXPLORING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE VESTIBULAR SYSTEM, COGNITIVE IMPAIRMENTS AND SENSORIMOTOR BEHAVIORS

By Analeise Mayor

Each year, 25–50% of older adults experience a fall — a statistic well known to vestibular researchers.

Dr. Megan Kobel, an assistant professor in the Department of Speech, Language & Hearing Sciences, and the director of the NIH-funded Vestibular Research Lab, has dedicated her career to treating vestibular disorders, and uncovering the relationship between the vestibular system, cognitive impairments, and sensorimotor behaviors.

The goal of the research, Kobel said, is to better understand the fundamental mechanisms underlying fall risk, and to help determine why patients with Alzheimer’s disease and other cognitive impairments are more likely to lose their balance and fall down than cognitively healthy adults. Kobel’s research also seeks to examine why patients with vestibular dysfunction exhibit subsequent changes in cognition.

“The factors contributing to fall risk are not completely understood,” Kobel explained. “The vestibular system, part of the inner ear, is a known contributor to fall risk, and recent evidence suggests that cognition may interact with vestibular function to influence falls.”

Because the vestibular system is responsible for sensing motion, patients with vestibular disease often experience balance problems, dizziness, vertigo, along with many other symptoms, which lead to increased likelihood of falls.

To Kobel, one of the most pressing concerns in vestibular research is how to improve diagnosis for patients with vestibular symptoms.

“Over a third of patients who we see in clinic have test results come back normal, but we know that there's an abnormality there,” she said. “We are fundamentally missing something in a lot of patients.”

According to Kobel, it was this disparity that initially motivated her to pursue a PhD. Since then, her work has been focused on advancing vestibular diagnostic

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University of Arizona College of Science | Annual Report 2025

The “six degree of freedom motion hexapod” will allow Dr. Kobel and other vestibular researchers to better understand abnormalities in patients with known or suspected vestibular disorders.

techniques and assessing vestibular perception- orhow we sense and feel motion.

“Traditionally, when we do vestibular testing, we measure a bunch of reflexes, and then we try to figure out what's going on,” Kobel said.

But thanks to grant funding from the National Institutes of Health, Kobel is bringing new, state of the art diagnostic equipment to the University of Arizona.

The “six degree of freedom motion hexapod,” which Kobel said is expected to be fully operational in the next few weeks, will help Kobel, and other vestibular

researchers to better understand abnormalities in patients with known or suspected vestibular disorders.

When using the hexapod, patients are placed on a platform which can be maneuvered in six different directions- up and down, back and forward, and side to side- giving the machine its name.

In the future, Kobel said the hexapod could provide those answers, and even open up valuable new avenues of research. Currently, Kobel said she is working to develop methods to measure and improve balance performance in vestibular patients, which will utilize the hexapod as a new form of treatment.

“It can go in any direction you want or any combination of directions you want,” Kobel said. “We use it to figure out the smallest motion that people can correctly identify. In patients with dizziness that tends to better correspond to their symptoms, and then in older adults we’re able to detect abnormalities that better correspond to their balance and walking problems.”

“Long term, we might be able to develop treatments that lead to better balance performance,” she said. “We could design it to use virtual reality and motion paired together, or we could introduce some conflicts and see how people handle the motion processing. Over time, with a lot of practice, we might be able to improve their motion perception.”

By collecting data on healthy adults, adults with vestibular disorders, and adults with cognitive impairment, Kobel said her research will further explore the extent to which the inner ear, balance, and cognition are interrelated.

“We know that in adults or even children with inner ear disorders, we can see changes in cognition. On the standard cognitive tests, and on tests of spatial cognition, they tend to do worse than healthy adults with healthy inner ears.”

Similarly, Kobel said that adults with mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease, have about two to three times the incidence of vestibular disorders in comparison to cognitively healthy adults.

She believes that understanding these correlations, can lead to better treatments, and better outcomes for patients living with vestibular disorders or cognitive impairment.

“We know, in older adults with cognitive impairment, a fall is the number one predictor of loss of independence,” Kobel said. “So being able to figure out which adults are at high risk of falling means that we could potentially intervene sooner.”

The hope, she said, is that researchers would be able to use the hexapod to potentially track a patient's motion perception changes, and monitor their progress over time.

“Right now, we only track patient recovery through their symptom reports,” Kobel said. “It’s based on how they think they're doing, but we have nothing to back that up.

We have no test to confirm they’re doing better.”

The blue envelope holds important information for drivers to hand to the officer.

New blue envelope program created at University of Arizona helps support autistic drivers Dr. Nell Maltman, Assistant Professor, and Jennifer Casteix, Clinical Professor, from Speech, Language & Hearing Sciences collaborated with law enforcement to introduce the Blue Envelope Program in the state of Arizona.

The Blue Envelope gives autistic drivers a single location to hold vehicle registration and insurance that will be needed if they are involved in a traffic stop by law enforcement. The envelope provides instructions for both the driver and officer to help guide effective communication, reduce the stress of the encounter, and ensure safety of all parties.

University of Arizona College of Science | Annual Report 2025

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EXPERIENCE SCIENCE

FLANDRAU SCIENCE CENTER & PLANETARIUM DISCOVER THE WONDERS OF SCIENCE

Flandrau Science Center & Planetarium is your destination for adventures in science! From the depths of the oceans in the Undersea Discovery exhibit to the farthest reaches of space in the magnificent new Universe of Science exhibit, Flandrau’s exhibits and planetarium shows reveal the marvels of Earth and the wonders of the universe for visitors of all ages.

Explore the science center’s interactive, hands-on exhibits exploring marine science, insects, astronomy and more. Learn about the University of Arizona’s role in important scientific discoveries of the past and the future and hear directly from the researchers at the forefront of these efforts. Broaden your horizons in the Eos Planetarium Theater and blast off to explore planets, stars, galaxies and beyond with a guided tour of the nighttime sky.

Visit: flandrau.org 36

University of Arizona College of Science | Annual Report 2025

IN SOUTHERN ARIZONA

LABORATORY OF TREE-RING RESEARCH DOCENT-LED TOURS

Step into the captivating world of dendrochronology at the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research—an experience that will ignite curiosity in visitors of all ages! Discover the secrets hidden in tree rings, which not only reveal the stories of ancient cultures but also provide vital clues to tackle modern challenges like climate change. Marvel at the oldest trees on Earth in the Exhibit Hall and witness firsthand how their growth patterns tell tales spanning thousands of years.

Take your exploration further with self-guided or behind-the-scenes tours led by passionate docents. Dive deep into the science and artistry behind tree-ring studies and uncover how this interdisciplinary field shapes our understanding of history, ecology, and the future. Whether you're a nature enthusiast, a history buff, or a science lover, this unique experience promises to leave you inspired. Tours are open now—don’t miss your chance to connect with the fascinating legacy etched into Earth's oldest living witnesses!

Visit: ltrr.arizona.edu University of Arizona College of Science | Annual Report 2025

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EOS F O U N DAT I O N :

BRIGHTENING LIVES IN ARIZONA In Greek mythology, Eos is the goddess of the dawn, thought to bring in the light and cast out darkness.

A 2024 gift to the College of Science from University of Arizona alumna Gwendolyn “Gwen” Weiner and the EOS Foundation will be used to brighten the lives of individuals affected by conditions that impact psychological health.

Gwen established the EOS Foundation Endowed Chair in Health Psychology in the College of Science and also funded a much-need renovation of the Department of Psychology’s Behavioral Health Clinic.

This gift stems from Gwen's nearly two-decade connection with Professor of Psychology Dr. David Sbarra, who was named the inaugural chair holder effective July 1, 2024. Dr. Sbarra’s research centers on how people recover from social separation and cope with loss. He is internationally-recognized for his significant scholarly, clinical, graduate teaching and mentorship contributions in the area of health psychology.

Gwen first met Dr. Sbarra in 2007, and over the years, she witnessed his commitment to serving patients and students, and it resonated with her lifelong interest in supporting mental health services. When Gwen learned that as part of the University’s Fuel Wonder Campaign, gifts to establish new endowed chairs could be

“Being appointed as the EOS Foundation Endowed Chair in Health Psychology is a tremendous honor.

The Endowed Chair position provides important new resources that are helping grow my research – Dr. David Sbarra laboratory by supporting plans to hire a new data scientist with the payout from the endowment. This kind of support will be a game changer in terms of our work, and I am thrilled to serve as the inaugural holder of this chair position.”

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University of Arizona College of Science | Annual Report 2025

Gwendolyn "Gwen" Weiner '64 and Dr. David Sbarra.

enhanced through the Eminent Scholar Program which provides a 1:1 match for the endowment’s payout for five years and an additional one-time award to support graduate students working with the chair holder, she was excited to learn more.

Also, she came to understand that the Department of Psychology’s Behavioral Health Clinic needed to be updated and expanded to better respond to growing community needs. The clinic serves as a training facility for advanced Clinical Psychology doctoral students and provides assessment and therapy services to individuals in southern Arizona. Funding for the clinic will support increased supervisor time, provide student support for training, make critical infrastructure improvements, and

pay for software and telehealth technology costs. Gwen quickly decided to fund the endowed chair and the upgrades to the Behavioral Health Clinic.

Yet this was only the latest of Gwen’s gifts to the College of Science. Over the years, she has supported and brought her design expertise to the complete renovation of Flandrau Science Center and Planetarium’s main theater, now named the EOS Foundation Theater, and contributed to the Marine Discovery and Universe of Science exhibits. Through her generous support of the University of Arizona, she is bringing light to the lives of adults and children in southern Arizona.

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HOMECOMING Every fall, the College of Science welcomes home hundreds of alumni at Homecoming. Science alumni and their family and friends spend enjoy a special tailgate outside of Flandrau Science Center & Planetarium socializing and reminiscing with former classmates about their days at the University of Arizona. With thousands of College of Science alumni around the globe, Homecoming weekend represents an opportunity to come together and share the brilliant work and impact our alumni are making everywhere. Join us for Homecoming on November 8, 2025!

n Col lege of Scie

c e Al u m ni

Homecoming 20 24

ALUMNI OF THE YEAR

The 2024 College of Science Alumni of the Year awardee was Dr. Duncan Buell, class of 1971. Among his many notable accomplishments, Dr. Buell’s research has been used in applications of computing: number theory, cryptography, information retrieval, digital humanities and election data analysis.

A GLOBAL COMMUNITY 48,664 ALUMNI The College of Science has alumni around the globe spanning 6 continents and 93 countries.

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University of Arizona College of Science | Annual Report 2025

GALILEO CIRCLE

The Galileo Circle is a community of engaged individuals whose support is vital to the continued excellence of the University of Arizona’s College of Science.

Members support student scientists as well as groundbreaking research by distinguished faculty.

The Galileo Circle awards scholarships to outstanding undergraduate and graduate students who demonstrate exceptional potential in the physical, mathematical, environmental, cognitive, and life sciences. Every gift supports College of Science students and their pursuits of cutting-edge research discovery and educational excellence.

“Since 2012, my late husband and I have been proud Galileo Circle Patrons. I am always pleased to celebrate the excellence and contributions to science of the incredible scholars I have been paired with over the years. I also enjoy participating in outside activities with the students, whenever possible! These moments allow us to learn from one another and share interests beyond just science. I have kept in touch with many of the students after they have graduate from the University of Arizona and love hearing about their continued success.”

– Doris Coris Over the last 18 years, 2,082 students have been recognized with more than $2.1 million in Galileo Circle scholarship funds. In the 2024-2025 academic year, the Galileo Circle supported 148 outstanding College of Science students with over $200,000 in funds.

Additionally, through the generosity of Galileo Circle members, the College of Science annually recognizes 5-7 distinguished faculty and staff who have made exceptional contributions to teaching, research, mentoring, outreach, and overall excellence. These awards are one of the highest individual honors the college can bestow.

Since 2004, Galileo Circle members have supported 100+ College of Science faculty/staff with over $512,000 in funding.

University of Arizona College of Science | Annual Report 2025

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EXPERIENCE SCIENCE

MT. LEMMON SKYCENTER

SKYNIGHTS STARGAZING PROGRAM

See the stars like never before! View the wonders of the cosmos from the top of Mt. Lemmon in Tucson using the largest public viewing telescopes in Arizona and explore the universe.

This is a rare opportunity to explore the planets and stars in a way that many will never get to experience.

ASTRONOMER NIGHTS

Guests are treated as professional astronomers overnight, choosing their own observing or imaging targets in this customized astronomical experience. Depending on the season, you may witness planets, star clusters, distant galaxies, nebulae, and other celestial phenomena such as comets or a supernova.

Visit: skycenter.arizona.edu 42

University of Arizona College of Science | Annual Report 2025

IN SOUTHERN ARIZONA

RICHARD F. CARIS MIRROR LAB

THE WORLD’S MOST POWERFUL TELESCOPES START WITH OUR MIRRORS

At the University of Arizona, we build the world’s largest telescope mirrors. Explore the lab where it happens, learn how we invented the process, and discover how Steward Observatory pushes the boundaries of our search for knowledge. These mirrors represent a radical departure from the conventional solid-glass mirrors used in the past, producing a new generation of telescopes now exploring the universe in optical and infrared light.

GUIDED TOURS

Experience an up-close look at the massive telescope mirrors on a guided tour at this one-of-akind facility. Marvel at the ingenious engineering and optical innovations that enable us to build the world’s largest, most advanced telescope mirrors. Tours are open now!

Visit: mirrorlab.arizona.edu University of Arizona College of Science | Annual Report 2025

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SCIENCE.ARIZONA.EDU

DISCOVERY THAT TRANSFORMS