Dr. Gary Wilson

As must be painfully obvious, we’ve been out of circulation for the past couple of weeks.  Afterglow of the Research Festival, taking care of end-of-semester details like finals and grades and commencement and meetings and banquets and….  We stepped back to catch our collective breaths, and now we’ll do a little catch-up on what’s been going on…

  • Research Festival Results.  The Research Festival was a huge success with 16 oral and poster presentations representing research from around 25 McMurry and Cisco STEM students.  Our winners were:
    • Oral Presentation:  Krystal Goedde, who worked with Team Brant Scouts doing population surveys of small mammals at Camp Bowie in Brown County TX.  Krystal exemplifies the intent of the T5 grant, having begun her college career in STEM at Cisco and continuing it at McMurry.
    • Poster Presentation:  Daniel Munoz, who is ALSO a Cisco product continuing his career at McMurry.  Daniel’s poster provided and overview of his project for Team O’Connell’s Oncogeniuses which he will dive into in the coming year.
    • The quality of the poster entries was exceptional, with every poster being ranked in the top 4 by at least one of the judges.
  • T5 Grant Logo.  We are getting very close to finalizing the imagery that will be used to denote the Partnering for STEM Success grant.  The plan is for an image to represent the grant as a whole, and then to enable each Research Team to customize an aspect of the logo to reflect their focus.  Expect to see the artwork make its way onto shirts and lab coats and hats and stationery very soon.
  • Construction.  We inch closer to the start of the Biochem/Molecular Biology research and teaching lab renovation projects.  We expect it to be a busy and noisy summer as they complete asbestos abatement and demolition, and then complete the infrastructure and install the facilities and equipment needed to support thriving teaching and research spaces.
  • Digital Cadavers.  About this time next year we will be eagerly anticipating the purchase and installation of digital cadaver tables – 4K displays that provide 3-D MRI/CT images of cadavers for the study of human anatomy and physiology.  The company we are working with also has digital scans of non-human organisms, providing us with a wealth of materials and opportunity to bring this technology into other courses.  We have five faculty who will be learning the software this summer and working to make educational products from the scans for our courses.  At this point, we are securing the software and training to make this work possible.
  • Workshops.  We have been planning two workshops for faculty development with respect to skills and techniques faculty might use to enhance their research and courses.  One workshop is focused on field biology – population sampling and analysis.  The other is focused on GIS and its versatility for use in a variety of projects.  Cisco and McMurry faculty have signed up and are eager to jump in during the middle of June.

So, though things are slowing down for most on campus, our work continues to keep us busy.