Heiman steps down as Kinsey director
Compiled by Jon Blau
Search is on for a new Kinsey director
Julia Heiman is stepping down as director of IU’s Kinsey Institute and a committee has been formed to find her replacement.
Heiman has headed the internationally recognized institute since 2004, but she will return to her faculty position in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. The 10-member search committee will be chaired by Brad Wheeler, vice president for information technology and a professor of information systems at IU’s Kelley School of Business.
The Kinsey Institute was established in 1947 by the late Alfred C. Kinsey, a professor of zoology at IU. The institute studies sex, gender and reproduction, which includes components of psychology, neuroscience, biology, gender studies, public health, sociology, behavioral sciences and other fields.
Grant funds study of subatomic particles
IU physicists will receive more than $5.4 million over three years from the National Science Foundation to study subatomic particles.
Department of physics members Will Jacobs, Lisa Kaufman, Chen-Yu Liu, Josh Long, Hans-Otto Meyer, Hermann Nann, William Snow, Ed Stephenson, Rex Tayloe, Anselm Vossen and Scott Wissink, along with several post-doctoral and graduate students and undergrads, will make up the team that will try to analyze how the angular momentum of protons -- the subatomic particles in the nucleus of atoms -- is distributed among a proton’s internal quarks and gluons.
IU physicists have already contributed to the STAR Detector -- the Solenoidal Tracker at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider -- at Brookhaven National Laboratory, designing and constructing its Endcap Electromagnetic Calorimeter, the device created to see how gluons, the particles that bind quarks within protons, contribute toward angular momentum, according to a news release.
CO2 monitoring recognized
Indiana University’s MMSF Flux Tower in the Morgan-Monroe State Forest, the second-longest-running carbon dioxide flux monitoring site in the world, has been identified as one of 11 core data-gathering sites in the AmeriFlux network.
The designation ensures funding for the tower through September 2015 and likely into the future, according to a news release. As part of the AmeriFlux Management Project, the tower is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, and has been collecting data to help scientists monitor carbon dioxide exchange between the atmosphere and forest ecosystems.
Among its findings, the tower has recorded warmer temperatures between 2000and 2012, which have led to longer growing seasons. From 2000 to 2008, longer growing seasons meant increased carbon uptake. But as the forest has gotten drier, there have been declines in carbon uptake, the news release said.
Editor's note: This story from The Bloomington Herald-Times is being published here as a courtesy for readers of IU in the News.