University of Arizona in the News

The University of Arizona and larger Tucson community are mourning the loss of hydrology and atmospheric sciences department head and professor Thomas Meixner, who worked to educate the next generation of water researchers and make our world's most precious resource safer for all.

A news conference Thursday gave the media a first look at the painting "Woman-Ochre" by Willem de Kooning, which returned home to the University of Arizona Museum of Art last month after being stolen in 1985. This week the painting will be hung in the UAMA main gallery, where it will go on display to the public Oct. 8 through May 20, when it will return to its second floor exhibition space and be kept under a case.

A news conference Thursday gave the media a first look at the painting "Woman-Ochre" by Willem de Kooning, which returned home to the University of Arizona Museum of Art last month after being stolen in 1985. This week the painting will be hung in the UAMA main gallery, where it will go on display to the public Oct. 8 through May 20, when it will return to its second floor exhibition space and be kept under a case.

"Ricochet: An American Trauma" is a PBS NewsHour documentary that explores the often unseen impacts of gun violence. It delves into the trauma from mass shootings, community violence and firearm suicides. Jennifer Carlson, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Arizona, is interviewed. "At some point in our lives, almost every single American is going to know someone who has been impacted by gun violence," Carlson said.

When Marcia Rieke, a Regents Professor of Astronomy at the University of Arizona, saw images from the James Webb Space Telescope, she thought what a lot of us were thinking: Holy cow! Rieke is the lead scientists for Webb's Near-Infrared Camera, which captured this picture of the Cartwheel Galaxy 500 million light-years away. "It just looks so cool and different than what we thought it might," Rieke said.

The University of Arizona is one of nine schools receiving recertification of a Seal of Excelencia, from Excelencia in Education, an organization focused on Latino college completion. The group included the university among its inaugural cohort of seal recipients in 2019, as recognition for offering programs, policies, leadership and institutional culture for supporting Latino student success.

In a complex web of interdependent organisms, microbes – a broad term encompassing mostly single-cell, bacteria-like life forms – perform the chemical processes that form the foundations of life. University of Arizona assistant professor of environmental microbiology Paul Carini hopes a better understanding of microbes will yield insights that can be applied to help humanity weather the worst effects of climate change. "Water distribution patterns are shifting all over Earth.

School psychologists from the University of Arizona are helping teachers get their students readjusted to learning after the pandemic. The Arizona Department of Education awarded a $2.3 million grant to the school psychology graduate program at the University of Arizona. The funding will enable the university to deliver its expertise to school districts in Tempe, Florence and Mesa. Professor Marsha Spencer explains some students are still finding their way back to the classroom environment after months of remote learning.

Organic molecules which give many plants their distinctive smells, like pine, also help create water droplets which together ultimately form clouds. Now, University of Arizona researchers, led by assistant professor of natural resources and the environment Laura Meredith, report warmer daytime temperatures over rainforests tend to increase the chances those particles will become cloud nuclei. The results come from experiments conducted at an enclosed artificial tropical rainforest within the Biosphere 2 complex.

Many experts say lawns are problematic in the increasingly hot and dry southwestern U.S., which is in the grip of its worst megadrought in 1,200 years. But new research indicates ripping out lawns could actually create a little bit more heat. "That's one of the tricky things about studying heat," said University of Arizona assistant professor of planning and sustainable built environments Ladd Keith, who wasn't involved in the research.