MSGC News & Events

NASA Celebrates its 50th Anniversary at the 2008 Folklife Festival

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 09:11:00

This summer (June 25-29 and July 2-6) NASA is honored to be one of three featured programs in the 42nd Annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the National Mall in Washington DC. "NASA: Fifty Years and Beyond" will showcase the role that the men and women of NASA have played in broadening the horizons of American science and culture, as well as the role that they will continue to play in helping to shape the future. The festival will also highlight the Himalayan nation of Bhutan and the music, food and wine of Texas.

Visit www.nasa.gov/50th/Folklife/index.html for updates to the festival

Scholarship Helps Community College Students Seeking USM Degree

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 12:31:00

May 12, 2008

Beginning in the fall of 2008, income from a $1 million scholarship fund will be dedicated to helping Maine Community College System students continue their educations at the University of Southern Maine.

Leon and Lisa Gorman of Yarmouth established the $1 million USM scholarship fund to help Maine citizens earn undergraduate and graduate degrees.

The Gorman Scholars Fund will provide $2,500 scholarships to five, full-time USM undergraduate students who transfer from any institution within the Maine Community College System. The scholarships are renewable for up to three years. Current plans call for up to 14 scholarships for Community College transfers to be made available as the fund increases in value.

The Gorman Scholars Fund also will award scholarships to students enrolled in a USM graduate program, including one awarded to a student enrolled in USM’s Extended Teacher Education Program.

All undergraduate Gorman Scholars must be Maine residents who have completed 24 credit hours at a Maine Community College, and who intend to enroll as full-time USM students. Preference will be given to those students who have earned a minimum transfer grade point average of 3.0.

Students who are interested in one of the undergraduate transfer scholarships should contact Toni Passerman in USM’s Office of Transfer Affairs at 780-5691. Students who are interested in a graduate scholarship should contact Janet Casey in USM’s Office of Graduate Studies at 780-4877.

“Access to high-quality education is critically important to our state in terms of advancing economic development, and to individual citizens in terms of providing a more fulfilling life,” said the Gormans in a prepared statement. “USM is uniquely positioned to give people of all ages and backgrounds access to that high-quality education.”

Leon Gorman, who was a student in the evening program at USM in the 60’s, also added that he hopes the Gorman Scholars Fund will help Maine citizens “benefit from the type of educational opportunities that I enjoyed.”

“This is a wonderful gift,” said USM Interim President Joseph Wood, “in that it does so much to support the transformative, personal growth and academic success of our students. The success of our students, in turn, is linked directly to the success of our state.”

Leon Gorman, L.L. Bean’s chairman of the board, has been active in and honored by many organizations, including The Nature Conservancy, Appalachian Mountain Club, Natural Resources Council of Maine, Boy Scouts of America, and United Way, and is the recipient of the Presidential Award from the Portland Chapter of the NAACP for guardianship of civil rights in Maine. He is a former trustee of Bowdoin College (his alma mater), Maine Audubon, Hurricane Island Outward Bound School, the Maine chapter of The Nature Conservancy, and the Natural Resources Council of Maine.

Lisa Gorman is founder of the Cancer Community Center and has taken lead roles in fund-raising on behalf of the Casco Bay Regional YMCA, Preble Street Resource Center, The Nature Conservancy, the Appalachian Mountain Club, and CasinosNO!. A past president of the Jewish Federation of Southern Maine, she has been honored with the Hannah G. Solomon Award from the Southern Maine Section of the National Council of Jewish Women and the Deborah Morton Award from the University of New England.

Information can be found at www.usm.maine.edu

Bowdoin College student, Keith Matera works on Numerical Relativity Project

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 08:37:00

Keith Matera, a senior at Bowdoin College worked under Dr. Thomas Baumgarte on a project in numerical relativity, which aims at solving the equations of Einstein's general relativity on the computer to construct models of astrophysical objects with very strong gravitational fields, including black holes and neutron stars. In solving these equations one encounters some conceptional issues. When modeling black holes, for example, so-called boundary conditions appear on the surface of the black hole (the "event horizon") that, from a mathematical point of view, can be chosen arbitrarily. From a physical point of view, however, we would like to know how different possible choices for these boundary conditions affect the resulting solution. In his project, Keith studied a simple example problem - of certain particles in orbit about a black hole - to analyze the effect of these choices. He found that they do not have any effect on the physical properties of the solution, which is re-assuring. More broadly, his results help us understand and calibrate numerical models of more interesting objects, including binary black holes.

This work resulted in a publication in the Physical Review, of which Keith was a co-author.

Keith has accepted a position to teach high school physics next year at the Canterbury School in New Milford, CT.