UNT Insider: President's newsletter

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The UNT Welcome Center opened this month at the corner of Maple and Highland streets, offering guests, prospective students and their families an easily accessible location to begin campus tours.

Straight from Smatresk

Dear Alum,

UNT Welcome Center exterior This month we celebrated the opening of the UNT Welcome Center, our new "front door" to greet prospective students, families and guests when they visit our caring and creative campus. With thousands of visitors annually touring UNT, the Welcome Center's centralized location at the corner of Maple and Highland streets and across from the Highland Street Garage will be easily accessible for all.

We designed this building to improve the prospective student tour experience and seamlessly connect them with the information needed to make college enrollment decisions. We also moved the Dining Services and Housing and Residence Life offices to the Welcome Center's second floor so that questions can easily be answered before or after a campus tour.

If you know of students in the midst of their college search, tell them about your experience at UNT and encourage them to take a tour. Our Eagle Ambassadors do an excellent job showcasing life at UNT by highlighting our buildings, sharing facts and discussing our campus' unique culture and spirit.

Our Denton campus is constantly growing and evolving with our student body, and I hope you will consider taking a tour the next time you come home for a visit. We offer tours for all — including prospective freshmen, transfer and graduate students — and they can be booked at tours.unt.edu.

UNT Proud,
Neal Smatresk
President
@UNTPrez

The Inside Scoop

MBA students win $20,000

Charles Laws ('18) and Michelle Schodowski ('18) recently won $20,000 to support their startup, Radda, by taking first place in the Ed Tech Ascend pitch competition, which was a partnership between UNT and Edmodo during the US-China Smart Education Conference. Michelle and Charles are M.B.A. students in the Ryan College of Business who developed an online service that enables musicians to seek and give advice on their compositions. Radda creates an environment for constructive criticism from other musicians and is something I look forward to watching grow and develop. Congratulations to Michelle and Charles!

Read more Radda's
winning pitch »

Most cited professors

Richard Dixon, Vladimir Shulaev and Idean Salehyan

Three of our faculty recently were recognized as being among the most cited academics in the world. Knowing the UNT faculty as I do, this comes as no surprise but it certainly validates our status as a Tier One research university. Richard Dixon (pictured left) and Vladimir Shulaev (pictured center) both work in the Department of Biological Sciences and are in the top one percent of researchers in their field to be cited, according to Clarivate Analytics. In fact, Dr. Dixon has been cited in other researchers' work more than 70,000 times. And Idean Salehyan (pictured right) was recognized by the American Political Science Association as the third most-cited researcher in his graduation cohort. He focuses on international and civil conflict and has himself published numerous articles in top journals.

Learn more about UNT's
research enterprise »

National Geographic features UNT faculty

Morgan Freeman, Pankaj Jain and Geoffrey Wawro

UNT professors Pankaj Jain and Geoffrey Wawro will share their expertise in religion and history for upcoming shows on the National Geographic channel. Dr. Jain, an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion, traveled to Nepal last fall where he joined Academy Award-winning actor Morgan Freeman to participate in rituals at a Jain temple in Kathmandu. Dr. Jain will appear in "The Story of God with Morgan Freeman" at 8 p.m. April 9. The documentary series, now in its third season, explores how religions around the world have shaped society. The last two seasons are available on Netflix. Dr. Wawro, Department of History professor and director of the Military History Center at UNT, is featured in multiple episodes of "Nazi Megastructures: America's War," which takes a look at groundbreaking weapon technology developed during World War II.

Discover more about these UNT
faculty on television »

Grad programs ranked by U.S. News & World Report

Our academic programs are some of the best in the country and U.S. News & World Report recently ranked six of our graduate academic programs in the nation's top 50. The Master of Public Administration program received several top rankings – the program's specialties in homeland security and emergency management (fifth in the nation) and local government management (fifth in the nation) both ranked first in Texas, while its specialization in public finance and budgeting (27th in the nation) ranked second in Texas. Other rankings include our rehabilitation counseling graduate program (12th in the nation), student counseling and personnel services graduate program (14th in the nation), materials science and engineering graduate program (70th in the nation) and business administration graduate program (99th in the nation). Both our College of Engineering and College of Education also were ranked 93rd in the nation by U.S. News & World Report.

Explore UNT's
academic rankings »

Spotlight on Excellence

UNT student wins IBM competition and masters the mainframe – again!

Information technology and decision sciences senior Anna McKee, the first woman to win IBM's Master the Mainframe collegiate coding contest, bested her score from 2018 and once again won the competition's North American region. Anna's 2019 performance ranked her among the top three competitors globally and marked the third consecutive year that a G. Brint Ryan College of Business student won the contest. Anna was recently featured by NBC DFW and discussed her love for coding and technology, and how this competition made her realize she can prompt change in the way mainframe computing is used by global businesses.

Athletics-filled day scheduled
for April 6

Bring the family to campus April 6 for a full day of excitement with Mean Green Athletics for football's spring game, the North Texas Track and Field Classic and a softball double-header. The Mean Green opened spring football practice March 19 and will have an intrasquad scrimmage, known as the Spring Game, at noon. A ribbon-cutting for the North Texas Soccer and Track Complex will be held at 2:15 p.m., prior to the meet's running events. And softball will play against St. Mary's at 1 and 3 p.m. at Lovelace Stadium. Parking and event admission are free for this fan appreciation day, so bring the family out for a fun afternoon.

Building a Better World: Clebrating Women in STEM symposium at the University of North Texas

Innovating change through research

Mathematics professor Xuexia Wang (pictured at center) and 16-year-old Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science student Julia Christina Ayalde Camacho (pictured at right) are working together to fight cancer with mathematics.
Eduardo Blanco, assistant professor of computer science and engineering, received $500,000 from the National Science Foundation to teach computers negation. This project could help smart devices and intelligent systems create more natural conversations with humans and provide better language translation.
College of Engineering professors Song Fu and Qing Yang are developing a system by which multiple autonomous vehicles communicate with one another. They also have received a $360,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to host camps on vehicular edge computing and security during the next three summers.
UNT astronomers restored, updated and installed a half-meter Corrected Dall-Kirkhand telescope to be used for student photometric and astrometric research.
For their original research projects that tackled diabetes, cybersecurity, multiple sclerosis and brain injuries, TAMS seniors Mira Patel, Ritik Patnaik and Rishi Shridharan were named three of the top 300 scholars in the United States in the Regeneron Science Talent Search.

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Office of the President

University of North Texas
Hurley Administration Building, Room 201
Mailing Address:
1155 Union Circle #311425
Denton, Texas 76203-5017
940-565-2108

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