College of Arts, Sciences and Education

Dear friends and alumni,

Welcome to the spring semester! I hope everyone enjoyed a pleasant and rejuvenating break.

Last year, we began a new tradition of highlighting one of our academic departments in each monthly college newsletter. We are pleased to begin this year by showcasing the psychological science department.

Since its founding in 1983, the psychological science department has exemplified a commitment to academic rigor, student success and meaningful community engagement. The department’s research profile continues to rise, driven in large part by the contributions of an outstanding group of early- and mid-career faculty. Among them are:

Dr. Amy Belfi, an expert in cognition and neuroscience, Fellow of the American Psychological Association, and recipient of Missouri S&T’s Kummer Impact Professorship.

Dr. Daniel Shank, a widely published scholar in human–computer interaction, who is ranked among the top 2% of most-cited scientists in his field.

Equally important is the department’s exceptional dedication to teaching and mentorship. Faculty members consistently guide students in original research, clinical training, and professional development, advancing not only the field of psychology but also Missouri S&T’s mission of inquiry, inclusion, and societal impact. Notable recognitions include Dr. Merilee Krueger, Curators’ Teaching Professor, and Dr. Matthew Ng, recipient of the Class of ’42 Teaching Award. In addition, Dr. Jessica Cundiff and Dr. Amber Henslee have been honored as Missouri S&T Women of the Year.

The achievements of psychology students are equally impressive. Undergraduate and graduate students have published peer-reviewed journal articles, earned prestigious fellowships, presented research at regional and national conferences, and secured competitive placements in graduate programs, internships and professional positions. For example, Julien Hanson, an undergraduate student, published as a first author—along with several other Missouri S&T student researchers—in the journal Memory & Cognition. Aiden Pickett, an undergraduate dual major in psychology and computer science, currently serves as student body president while conducting research in multiple psychology laboratories and helping to relaunch the Psychology Club.

Finally, the department launched its new applied psychology Ph.D. program last year, making it the first social science doctoral degree offered at Missouri S&T. This innovative program is well positioned to prepare students to address emerging challenges in mental health, cognitive science, organizational psychology and other applied domains.

Sincerely,

Mehrzad Boroujerdi, Ph.D.
Vice Provost and Dean

Patrica-Ivy Agorsor, a Ph.D. student in chemistry in Dr. Michael Eze's research group, presented a poster at the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC) North America 46th Annual Meeting, held in Portland, Oregon, Nov. 16–20, 2025. Her poster was titled “Identification of Volatile Organic Compound Biomarkers of PFAS Exposure.”

Adrian Batista-Planas, Ph.D. candidate in chemistry, successfully defended his dissertation on Jan. 6, 2026. His dissertation advisor was Dr. Richard Dawes.

Tinley Beecham, an undergraduate psychological science major, completed her fall 2025 internship with Katie Curtis, Counselor at Mark Twain Elementary School. As part of her required internship project, she partnered with the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee to host a food drive during men’s and women’s basketball games, benefiting Hope Alliance’s Friday Food Backpack program in Rolla. In addition, she raised $450 through social media to purchase food items for donation.

Kyle Foster, Pablo Jara, and Rashad Bakhshizada are the recipients of the 32nd Schearer Prize for Graduate Research in Physics, awarded in honor of Laird D. Schearer, the department’s first Curators’ Distinguished Professor of Physics. First prizes were awarded to Kyle Foster for “Time-Resolved 3D Momentum Spectroscopy in Continuous Wave Atomic Photoionization Experiments” and to Pablo Jara for “Harnessing Coherent-Wave Control for Sensing Applications.” Rashad Bakhshizada received second prize for “Fractional Brownian Motion with Mean-Density Interaction: A Myopic Self-Avoiding Fractional Stochastic Process.”

Jacob Hauck, a Ph.D. student in computational and applied mathematics, has been named a recipient of the 2025 U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) Award. The first Missouri S&T mathematics and statistics graduate student to receive this honor, Hauck will continue his doctoral research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where he currently interns in the Data Analysis and Machine Learning Group. A Kummer Innovation and Entrepreneurship Doctoral Fellow, his research focuses on surrogate modeling for nonlocal mechanics and scientific machine learning. His advisor is Dr. Yanzhi Zhang, Gary Havener Endowed Professor of mathematics and statistics.

Pablo Jara, a graduate student in physics, is lead author of a new paper published in Physical Review Applied, a journal of the American Physical Society. The work, “Harnessing coherent-wave control for sensing applications,” was supervised by Prof. Alexey Yamilov. The research introduces a new way to understand how light travels through opaque materials like biological tissue and how carefully shaping the incoming light can improve sensing and imaging. Results show that using specially designed light patterns can boost signal strength and make it easier to detect tiny changes inside the material, which could help advance biomedical imaging technologies such as diffuse optical tomography.

Logan Sowadski is the first author of the paper "Quantum Critical Behavior of Diluted Quasi-One-Dimensional Ising Chains" which has been published in the journal Annalen der Physik. Logan graduated this summer with his master’s degree in physics; the paper is based on Logan's thesis. His advisor was Dr. Thomas Vojta.

Jason Summers and Cole Rischbieter are the winners of this year's physics department Outreach Award. They were honored for their outstanding contributions to outreach activities that promote physics to children, college students, and the general public.

Brittany Rohrer has joined the CASE office as executive assistant. She brings extensive administrative experience from her career in the federal government, where she served in a variety of support roles. While she is new to higher education, Rohrer most recently worked as a Procurement Officer for the National Energy Technology Laboratory and as the MOSIS/Core Data Manager for the St. James R-I School District. She is enthusiastic about contributing her strong administrative background to the CASE office and looks forward to applying her skills in a new professional setting. Outside of the office, Rohrer is an avid thrifter who enjoys fabric arts and country living. She resides on several acres between Rolla and Salem, where weekends often involve chasing dogs, herding poultry, and enjoying life outdoors. She can be reached at brrgxb@mst.edu.

The biological sciences department has a new Future Students webpage.

S&T's mathematics and statistics department reminds students about the Fast Track program. Fast Track is S&T's summer math program that gives you an opportunity to earn credit by exam for algebra and trigonometry. By successfully completing the online Fast Track program and exams this summer, you can be more prepared and move ahead in your math.

Dr. Xiaojie Wang joined Missouri S&T in 2025 as a tenure-track assistant professor of physics. She earned her PhD. at the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP), Chinese Academy of Sciences, and then moved to Michigan Technological University, where she completed postdoctoral training and later served as a research assistant professor. Her work is grounded in large international scientific collaborations and combines discovery-driven research with hands-on technical development.

Wang’s research focuses on very-high-energy and ultra-high-energy gamma-ray astronomy: using the most energetic light in the universe to study how our Milky Way accelerates particles to extreme energies. She plays a leading role in the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Gamma-ray Observatory as coordinator of its Galactic Working Group and greatly contributes to the development of the Southern Wide-field Gamma-ray Observatory (SWGO). A recent highlight of her work, published in Nature, reported a large bubble of ultra-high-energy gamma rays surrounding the microquasar V4641 Sagittarii, showing that a stellar-mass black hole system in our own galaxy can drive particle acceleration on surprisingly large scales.

At Missouri S&T, Wang is building a Gamma-Ray & Multi-Messenger Astrophysics research group and welcomes both undergraduate and graduate students. She is especially interested in projects that connect core physics concepts to real observatory data, combining rigorous analysis with modern computational tools. She looks forward to mentoring students through research pathways that lead to early, tangible outcomes: conference presentations, collaboration contributions, and publications, while preparing them for success in either academia or industry, aligned with their individual interests.

Dr. Mehrzad Boroujerdi, Dean of CASE, published the essay “On Exile” in The Montrel Review. He was also quoted by BBC, DIE ZEI, Financial Times, Adnkronos News Agency, Iran International, The Times (of London) and Türkiye Today on protests in Iran.

Dr. Michael Bruening, professor of history and political science, published an article in "The Conversation," titled, "Why one 16th-century theologian’s advice for a bitterly divided nation holds true today." It was republished by the Religious News Service, and NewsBreak, among other news outlets.

Dr. Gerald Cohen, professor of German, has published “Reflections on Linear B (Part 13): Sign 21 May Derive from the Ancient Egyptian Wedjat Eye (Eye of Horus),” Comments on Etymology 55.4 (January 2026). The article continues Cohen’s investigation into the origins of the unusual signs of Linear B, the earliest form of Greek writing (ca. 1400–1200 B.C.), which originated in Crete and is unrelated to the Greek alphabet. He argues that some Linear B signs reflect Egyptian influence, particularly from Egyptian mythology.

Shenandoah magazine (William & Mary University) interviewed Professor Mathew Goldberg, associate teaching professor of English and technical communication, about his book Night Watch, a short story collection exploring the violence of ordinary life.

Dr. Yue-Wern Huang, professor of biological science and associate dean for research and external relations, received a $6,351 grant from Stoecker & Associates Technologies for a project titled “An evaluation of diethyl azelate (DEA) to treat recluse spider bites.”

Dr. Clair Kueny, chair and associate professor of psychological science, received $45,138 in funding from the Phelps County Opioid Settlement Funds Committee to support research related to recovery friendly workplaces in rural communities. Her work will focus on establishing recovery friendly workplaces and establishing evaluation metrics to determine their individual and community impacts.

Dr. Shelley Minteer, director of the Kummer Institute Center for Resource Sustainability and Dr. Ken Robertson Memorial Professor of chemistry, and Matteo Grattieri (University of Bari) co-edited Bioelectrocatalysis: From Electron Transfer Processes to Emerging Technological Applications, published by Wiley in January 2026.

Dr. Simeon Mistakidis, assistant professor of physics, published “Multicomponent One-Dimensional Quantum Droplets across the Mean-Field Stability Regime” in SciPost Physics with collaborators from the University of Hamburg, introducing a theoretical framework that elucidates the role of quantum fluctuations in self-bound many-body states. He also coauthored “Rogue Waves in Extended Gross–Pitaevskii Models with a Lee–Huang–Yang Correction,” published in Physical Review A with Dr. Garyfallia Katsimiga and collaborators from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Northumbria University, revealing the emergence of extreme rogue-wave phenomena in ultracold quantum media.

Dr. Vahe Permzadian, assistant professor of psychological science, published an article titled “Examining the effect of newcomers’ adaptability on proximal and distal outcomes of organizational socialization” in Acta Psychologica.

Dr. Michael Peterson, assistant professor of philosophy, presented his paper "The Radioactive Transmission of Responsibility" at the Middle Eastern Technical University's 5th Annual Applied Ethics Conference in Ankara, Turkey, Nov. 19-21, 2025. This conference aimed at promoting innovation in applied ethics education and praxis. Peterson's paper addresses the need for greater applied ethics engagement in policy design in order to better resolve demands for inter- and intra-generational equity and justice. He also published an essay entitled "Electricity" in the Pittsburgh Review of Books. The essay explores the social conditions of the experience of tapping into the electrical grid.

Dr. Ross Channing Reed, lecturer of philosophy, published Precarity, Trauma, Addiction, and Love in Philosophical Counseling with Bloomsbury Publishing. He also authored the article “Technofeudalism and the Psychological Foreclosure of the Future” in The Philosophical Salon.

How do robot designers anthropomorphize their own creations? Psychology and technical communication professors Drs. Daniel Shank, David Wright, Merilee Krueger, and Carleigh Davis and a team of student researchers studied S&T’s Combat Robotics team to answer this question in their just published paper “Warrior Bot, Relational Bot, Blameworthy Bot: How a Student Design Team Anthropomorphize Their Combat Robot Creations.”

Dr. Kathleen Sheppard, professor of history and political science, delivered two conference papers: “Egypt as a Health Resort: Tuberculosis, Lung Trippers, and Antiquities” at the History of Science Society annual meeting in New Orleans (November), and “Encountering Saqqara: Victorian Visitors to an Ancient Necropolis” at the Cross-Cultural Interaction in Egypt Through the Ages conference in Cairo, organized by ARCE and CAORC (December). In November, she also presented a Sunday Storytellers event at the Fountain on Delmar for her 2024 book, Women in the Valley of the Kings. She was elected to a three-year term as the first American Trustee of the Egypt Exploration Society, the UK’s leading charity and international research institute dedicated to Egyptian cultural heritage since 1882.

Dr. Pablo Sobrado, Richard Vitek/FCR Endowed Chair of Biochemistry, delivered an invited talk titled “Hydroxylation of Amine by Flavin-Dependent Monooxygenases” at the 29th Enzyme Mechanisms Conference held in Carlsbad, CA, Jan. 4–8,. His presentation focused on the mechanistic basis of flavin-dependent monooxygenases and their role in amine hydroxylation, offering insights into the biosynthesis of natural products with anticancer and antibacterial properties. The ECM conference is recognized as the leading meeting in the field of enzyme and chemical biology research.

Dr. Dave Westenberg, (pictured above, center) Curator’s Distinguished Teaching Professor of biological sciences, presented posters on teaching about overlooked scientists in the microbial sciences, highlighting Fannie Angelina Hess, who introduced agar-agar into microbiology. The posters were presented at the National Association of Biology Teachers meeting and the American Society for Microbiology Conference for Undergraduate Educators as part of a collaborative project with Dr. Corrado Nai (Indonesia). In addition, Westenberg presented on developing learning objectives aligned with the new ASM Curriculum Guidelines. He also visited National Chung Hsing University, Chung Shan Medical University, and Mingdao High School, where he met with faculty and students and delivered presentations on undergraduate and graduate programs at Missouri S&T, synthetic biology and the Missouri S&T iGEM team and research conducted in his laboratory.

A paper by Dr. Gina L. C. Yosten, Kummer Endowed Chair and professor of biological sciences, and her colleagues has been selected for APSelect, the American Physiological Society’s monthly collection of outstanding research articles. The study, “Gpr160 Deletion Alters Food Intake and Meal Patterning in Mice,” was published in the American Journal of Physiology—Endocrinology and Metabolism.

Brandt and Elizabeth Bohlmann and Robert and Sharon Bohlmann have made gifts totaling $12,500 to the Deans Fund in the College of Arts, Sciences, and Education in memory of their father Raymond Bohlmann, ME’61. Raymond asked his sons to support the university in appreciation for the education he received – an education he credits as foundational to his decades of success at McDonnell Douglas, now Boeing. In addition, through Brandt’s employment with Boeing, a matching gift of $6,250 is expected.

Dr. Robert Montgomery and Dr. Frances “Dee” Haemmerlie Montgomery contributed $10,000 to the psychological science department.

To support CASE, contact the Senior Development Officer, Michelle Shults, at shultsm@mst.edu; telephone 573-341-4380.

Disclaimer: CASE does not endorse the arguments presented in any of the essays listed in this section of the newsletter. We share them solely as "food for thought" and encourage our enlightened audience to form their own opinions on the subjects discussed.

College of Arts, Sciences and Education

Missouri University of Science and Technology

118 Fulton Hall

301 W. 14th St., Rolla, MO 65409

573-341-4687

case@mst.edu