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Space Weatherman
Gifts to endowment support for faculty attract, recruit, and retain teachers who are out of this world.
Endowing professorships is one way that PC attracts, recruits, and retains professors who are out of this world. Physics professor Dr. James Wanliss has received considerable acclaim in his career for his space weather research. Since he’s been at PC, he has received two prestigious National Science Foundation awards: the Collaborations in Mathematical Geosciences (CMG) award and the CAREER Award, the NSF’s highest honor.
His research covers topics like “Timing of Substorm-related Auroral Oscillations” and “Intermittency of Storms and Substorms,” regularly appearing in peer-reviewed science journals such as Earth Planets Space, Journal of Geophysical Research and Annales Geophysicae.
The devout researcher places a high priority on teaching as well. In addition to teaching physics, Wanliss founded and directs the Space Weather Undergraduate Research Laboratory at PC, where students learn about space weather from one of the world’s experts.
Already, students have attended and presented at national conferences on space weather research. In fact, James Johnson and Michael Watke were the only undergraduates to present at the 2009 Space Weather Week Conference at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Colorado this past spring.
“If a student ends up going into research and is able to publish papers, that tells me he or she has learned to think,” Wanliss said. “If a student goes into industry and is successful, can communicate, and can be one of the top people, I’m happy. I’ve done my job.”
Dr. James Wanliss represents the talented PC faculty members who teach our students every day. Six PC professors have been named SC professors of the year in recent years, more than any other college or university in the state. Raise the torch for PC teachers by endowing a professorship or other fund for their use today.