| Alumni Community Update |
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Visit the Briggs Online Alumni Community to see this month's features:
There are over 260 new alumni registered on the Briggs Alumni Online Community!
Register today and see what your fellow Briggsies are doing.
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Greetings!
We are already at the middle of Fall semester. Briggs students can be seen frantically scanning their class notes in the hallways; the trees on campus are beginning to show their autumn colors. Briggsies will remember this as one of the most beautiful times to be on campus.
Homecoming was a success as we greeted alumni at the Briggs homecoming tent, watched the MSU Spartans beat the Iowa Hawkeyes, and marveled at the cool LBC float. We were also proud to have 2 LBC students on this year's Homecoming Court, Jessica Odgen and Stephanie Dawes. Stephanie, a current Bailey Scholar, is also one of MSU's nominees for both Rhodes and Marshall Scholarships!
BriggsWear Store Featured Product
The holiday season is just around the corner. Shop the BriggsWear store for items like this attractive ornament. All proceeds support the Student Advisory Committee and other student events.
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| Harry? Harry Potter? Renaissance Science, Magic, and Medicine |
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 Professor Mark Waddell has been assisting the National Library of Medicine (NLM) as they have used themes from the "Harry Potter" phenomenon to introduce audiences to important ideas in the development of modern science and medicine. Last year Professor Waddell taught a Briggs course called "How Magic Became Science." He was able to use themes from that course as well as his own research to assist the NLM in putting together an exhibit that's historically accurate as well as interesting and engaging. The exhibition discusses everything from the natural history of unicorns and basilisks to past ideas about scientific responsibility and respect for the natural world. Professor Waddell is currently trying to arrange to have the exhibition visit the MSU Library in the Spring.
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| Americans are (Political) Party Animals |
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Briggs Professor Aaron McCright and sociologist Riley E. Dunlap of Oklahoma State University have teamed up to present polling data that support the theory that Republicans and Democrats are increasingly "more ideologically polarized" when it comes to the issue of global warming. Their study points out the correlation between party affiliation and views on the climate. They observe that over the last ten years, "Republicans and Democrats who believe they understand global warming reasonably well [have been holding] more divergent views compared with their presumably less-informed counterparts." In an article in the magazine Environment, A Widening Gap: Republican and Democratic Views on Climate Change, Dunlap and McCright conclude that Democrats mostly rely on the scientific assessments on climate change, while Republicans do not.
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| Evolution of the Galaxies - Grant Received |
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Briggs Professor Brian O'Shea has received a grant from the DOE & NSF supercomputing time (6.2 million CPU hours) to support his research in computational astrophysics. Dr. O'Shea is making models of the Milky Way (home, sweet home) to understand how the populations of stars got to be where they are. Using "galactic archaeology," the research looks at the properties of very old stars in the outskirts of our own galaxy and compares their properties to those of previously studied stars. This project is complementary to observations done by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, in which MSU is a major partner.
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| Campaign to Bring the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams to MSU |
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 MSU, home of the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL), is one of two prime contenders expected to apply for the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB), a half-billion dollar federal science project for important nuclear science research.
As described on the NSCL website, the unique thing about MSU as a site for FRIB is that it would keep education as a key component of this kind of research. MSU already has one of the top nuclear physics graduate programs in the nation, ranked No. 2 after MIT. Establishing this new rare isotope beam facility at a university will engage graduate and undergraduate students in research and provide middle and high school students a first-hand view of cutting-edge science that is critical for the nation's future competitiveness.
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