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Suson Receives Olan Kruse Science Faculty Award at Texas A&M University-Kingsville for Second Time

Dan Suson

KINGSVILLE (September 10, 2003) --- Dr. Daniel Suson, professor and chair of the physics/geosciences department at Texas A&M University-Kingsville, has received the Olan Kruse Science Faculty Award given through the College of Arts and Sciences. This is the second time he has received the honor; he first was recognized in 1996.

Suson came to the university in 1991 and has served as a department chair since 1998. During his tenure as chair, he created a Science Computing Center with an $80,000 grant from the Office of Naval Research. He also established a physics library for students and faculty. He has many presentations and publications to his credit and also has been successful in obtaining external research funding.

Suson has traveled to Washington D. C. each summer since 1995 to do his part to further space missions and research as a co-investigator with the Silicon GLAST team at the Naval Research Laboratory. Suson is involved with NASA's Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope Project (GLAST LAT) and Texas A&M-Kingsville is participating as a member institution.

He has received numerous grants to support his work, which has grown from the general instrumentation area to the simulation area. He is working on data acquisition and is looking for ways to refine software programs for use in this project.

Suson said Texas A&M-Kingsville is the only minority institution working on this project, which stems from a collaboration between Stanford University and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), the Goddard Space Flight Center, the Naval Research Laboratories and other institutions in Japan, France, Italy and Germany.

Scheduled to launch in 2006, GLAST will continue the exploration of the gamma ray sky. It is scheduled to be a five-year mission. It replaces the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, whose 10-year mission ended in 2000.

He is the principal investigator of an initiative called the Texas Electronic Coalition for Physics (TECP). The TECP is funded by the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) in the U. S. Department of Education and is aimed at providing quality and variety in physics instruction at institutions with small physics departments through the creation of distributed (or electronic) program. The $210,000 award from FIPSE is split between all the institutions in the coalition, which include A&M-Kingsville, A&M-Corpus Christi, West Texas A&M, Tarleton and Texas A&M International. The coalition is creating an electronic department that spans the five campuses and covers the state of Texas to offer students a wide variety of physics courses through all means possible, including classroom instruction where possible, but also relying on televised or Internet courses when necessary.

Suson also received external funding to participate in a partnership program funded by the U. S. Department of Energy that will help students obtain advanced degrees in physics. Suson said the partnership aims to create a pipeline between the undergraduate physics program and the graduate degree program in the nuclear engineering and health physics department at Texas A&M University. The program targets students at Texas A&M-Kingsville and Prairie View A&M. Suson said the Kingsville campus is focusing on the health physics area while Prairie View A&M is concentrating on the nuclear engineering area.

In 2000, he received the Distinguished Research Award from the Javelina Alumni Association. He delivered the annual Faculty Lecture in 1997. His topic was “The Science in Science Fiction.”

Suson received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Colorado and his master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Texas at Dallas. He completed post-doctoral research in Tokyo at Waseda University in 1989.

The Olan Kruse Science Faculty Award was established in 1991 by Dr. Olan Kruse, physics professor emeritus, to reward excellence in teaching and/or research in biology, chemistry, geosciences or physics. The award carries a stipend of $1,200.

-TAMUK-