OXFORD, Miss. – The University of Mississippi Center for Population Studies has developed an extensive reference guide to poverty, hunger and chronic health problems in the state, the Mississippi Health and Hunger Atlas.

Modeled after the Missouri Hunger Atlas, the resource is the first iteration of its kind in Mississippi and in the South. This atlas addresses high rates of food insecurity and poor health outcomes, two important issues in the state.

“Alarmingly, while national food insecurity trends are declining, Mississippi’s rates are rising,” said Anne Cafer, assistant professor of sociology and anthropology and co-coordinator of the atlas project.

“For the last 15 years, Mississippi has consistently ranked among the top two states with the highest food insecurity rate. Mississippi also consistently ranks poorly for a number of demographic, economic and health statistics when compared to national thresholds.”

This project is also headed by John Green, professor of sociology and anthropology and director of the Center for Population Studies, and Rachel Haggard, an Ole Miss graduate student from San Diego.

Cafer worked on the Missouri Hunger Atlas, which has proven useful to an array of community organizers and legislators. Wanting to bring the concept to Mississippi, she quickly found support from community and university stakeholders.

With the help of Green and Haggard, the Mississippi Health and Hunger Atlas was initiated and completed in less than four months.

“The atlas seeks to shed light on county-level variations for a variety of these demographic, health and hunger indicators,” Green said. “Examining these indicators at a county level, patterns, normally overshadowed by standard macro, national, level analysis begin to emerge.

“This atlas is intended to offer a tool for improving assessment of need and performance to promote improved practices and decision-making related to hunger and health in Mississippi.”

The developers have five goals for the atlas:

– Raise awareness regarding the extent and depth of food insecurity and health disparities and needs in Mississippi

– Spread knowledge of what public and private programs are doing to reach vulnerable populations

– Reveal geographic patterns in the state

– Provide need and performance measures that can be updated on a regular basis

– Aid public and private stakeholders to assess their performance and provide a means for improving better resource delivery to the Mississippians they serve

“In this atlas, health and hunger indicators are mapped and used to assess need – such as food security rates, obesity rate, etc. – and performance – including SNAP enrollment and primary care physicians per 100,000 people,” Cafer said. “The economic and demographic data are also mapped to provide additional information on county level context surrounding health and hunger.”

“This visual, spatial analysis helps community stakeholders, policymakers, researchers and other practitioners target their efforts and resources to places most in need,” Green said. “Additionally, each county has a separate page, which provides their exact rates and rankings for each of the variables.”

Efforts to produce the atlas were supported by public agencies such as the Mississippi Department of Human Services and the members of the UM Department of Pharmacy Administration.

“It is through partnerships and collaboration that efforts to reduce hunger and health disparities in Mississippi are possible,” Haggard said. “The atlas is a compilation of hard work from these partners and faculty and students as well as the resources provided by the Center for Population Studies at the University of Mississippi.”

The Mississippi Health and Hunger Atlas is available at http://socanth.olemiss.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/154/2017/05/Hunger-Atlas-2017.pdf.

OXFORD, Miss. – Seven University of Mississippi freshmen have been inducted into the Alpha Phi chapter of Omicron Delta Kappa, a prestigious national leadership honor society.

The annual ODK Freshman Leadership Awards, which identify outstanding freshman leaders and community servants, were presented at the organization’s annual induction ceremony. Previous recipients have gone on to serve in roles such as Associated Student Body president and to be inducted into the university’s student Hall of Fame.

This year’s recipients of the ODK Freshman Leader Awards are Leah Davis of Tupelo, Savannah Day of Fayetteville, Arkansas, Caroline Glaze of Hattiesburg, Brock Huerkamp of Arkadelphia, Arkansas, Summer Jefferson of Cumming, Georgia, Olivia Lanum of Brandon and James “JC” Pride of Jackson.

“Each year, the selection process becomes more difficult as the university attracts outstanding students from all over the country,” said Ryan Upshaw, ODK adviser and assistant dean for student services in the School of Engineering.

“Our society is excited to be able to recognize their outstanding contributions during their first year on campus. We also look forward to their potential membership in our society later in their college career.”

A psychology major, Davis expressed gratitude at the recognition.

“Receiving the ODK Freshman Leader of the Year Award was a very humbling experience for me,” she said. “I was honored to know that the work and service I have done for my beloved university was recognized.

“I am excited for the opportunities that this recognition will bring, and cannot wait to continue to serve my campus!”

Davis is a member of the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College and is a LuckyDay Scholar. She has participated in the ASB Freshman Council and Black Student Union and is a member of the UM Gospel Choir and Concert Singers. She has volunteered with Green Grove, “Groovin’ at Move-In” and the Oxford Film Festival.

Day is double majoring in public policy leadership and broadcast journalism as a member of both the Honors College and the Lott Leadership Institute. The recipient of a scholarship from the Lott Institute, she served as a legislative aide for the ASB Senate and was a member of the inaugural ASB Freshman Forum program and Lambda Sigma. She also is a news reporter for NewsWatch Ole Miss and has volunteered with RebelTHON and Big Event.

Glaze is an Ole Miss Women’s Council Scholar studying public policy leadership and secondary math education. She is a member of the Honors College, Lott Leadership Institute and the Mississippi Excellence in Teaching Program. She serves as vice president of Pittman Hall Community Council and is a member of ASB Freshman Council and Lambda Sigma. Glaze has volunteered with the Marks Tutoring Project and the Ole Miss Food Bank.

A member of the Honors College and the Lott Leadership Institute, Huerkamp is studying public policy leadership. He has volunteered with RebelTHON and the Big Event and has been a member of the ASB Freshman Council and Lambda Sigma. He will serve on the executive board of RebelTHON 2018.

Jefferson is a biology major as a member of the Honors College. She is the recipient of the Stamps Scholarship, the highest campus scholarship, and is a member of the Chancellor’s Leadership Class. Jefferson is a team leader and accounting chair for Coaches Against Cancer and has begun undergraduate research in the Department of Biology. This summer, she will intern with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A member of the Haley Barbour Center for Manufacturing Excellence and the Honors College, Lanum is studying mechanical engineering with an emphasis in manufacturing. She is president of the Stewart Hall Community Council and a member of the Engineering Student Body Leadership Council, Society of Women Engineers, Lambda Sigma and the NASA Student Launch Initiative Outreach and Structures Team. She has volunteered with the FIRST Robotics Tournament and will travel to South Carolina next fall to work as a co-op student with International Paper Co.

Pride is studying mechanical engineering with an emphasis in manufacturing as part of the CME and the Honors College. He has volunteered with the Big Event, RebelTHON and Coaching for Literacy. Pride is the recipient of the W.R. Newman scholarship and is a member of the Chancellor’s Leadership Class, ASB Freshman Council and Lambda Sigma.

Omicron Delta Kappa is a 103-year-old leadership honor society that has initiated more than 300,000 members at since its founding. The society has more than 285 active chapters at colleges and universities across the United States.

OXFORD, Miss. – When scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory fired a beam of tiny particles called muons into a giant electromagnet late last week, it signaled the start of a three-year effort that could yield another landmark discovery in particle physics.

It’s a project with some strong Mississippi ties: Physicists from the University of Mississippi have played key roles in the hardware development and data analysis for the collaborative experiment, and the project’s central component traveled through northeast Mississippi on a monthlong journey from New York to the Chicago suburbs.

The Muon g-2 experiment at Fermilab could rewrite scientists’ picture of the universe and how it works. On May 31, the 50-foot-wide superconducting electromagnet at the center of the experiment saw its first beam of muon particles from Fermilab’s accelerators, the first step in an effort to measure just what happens to those particles when placed in a stunningly precise magnetic field.

“The Muon g-2 experiment’s first beam truly signals the start of an important new research program at Fermilab, one that uses muon particles to look for rare and fascinating anomalies in nature,” said Nigel Lockyer, Fermilab director. “After years of preparation, I’m excited to see this experiment begin its search in earnest.”

Another person excited to see the project begin is Breese Quinn, an associate professor of physics at UM and a collaborator in the Muon g-2 project. Quinn has been involved in the project for four years, and his team – including postdoctoral research associate Jenny Holzbauer and graduate student Wanwei Wu – are at Fermilab to help set up the experiment.

The Ole Miss team is responsible for putting together the storage beam chamber for the muon beam and the equipment to steer it.

“They’ve done fantastic work on that,” said Quinn, who will travel to Fermilab this week to spend much of June working on the project. “Those systems are operating beautifully, and they’re currently being tuned up.”

Quinn and his group also are working on studies to help understand the dynamics of the muon beam.

“These studies are really key to this experiment being able to reach the degree of precision needed to provide conclusive evidence of what we’re looking for,” he said.

The goal of the experiment is to precisely measure how much muons wobble on their axis as they spin in a magnetic field. The Standard Model, a landmark, 40-year-old theory that describes three of the four fundamental forces in the universe, predicts how much muons should wobble, but an earlier experiment suggested the wobble may be greater than predicted.

That would mean that previously undetected particles are present, influencing the motion of the muons, Quinn said.

“If new particles exist outside the Standard Model, it would establish that there are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy,” he said. “It would be proof of new building blocks of matter, and that’s exciting.”

Getting to this point was a long road for Muon g-2, both figuratively and literally. The first generation of this experiment took place at the DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

The results there indicated that the muons wobbled more than predicted, but the experiment could not measure the movement with enough precision to be conclusive. So scientists began planning a new experiment, using the capabilities of Fermilab to boost the experiment’s precision by a factor of four.

Since it would have cost 10 times more to build a completely new machine at Brookhaven rather than move the magnet to Fermilab, the Muon g-2 team transported the fragile, 50-foot-wide superconducting magnet in one piece from Long Island to the suburbs of Chicago in the summer of 2013.

The magnet took a barge south around Florida, up the Tennessee-Tombigbee waterway and the Illinois River, and then was driven on a specially designed 18-axle truck over three nights to Fermilab. The journey covered 3,200 miles.

As the magnet made its way up the Tenn-Tom, Quinn and his family watched it go through the G.V. “Sonny” Montgomery Lock in Itawamba County. But getting the magnet to the Chicago suburbs was only half the battle.

“Since it arrived, the team here at Fermilab has been working around the clock installing detectors, building a control room and, for the past year, adjusting the uniformity of the magnetic field, which must be precisely known to an unprecedented level to obtain any new physics,” said Chris Polly, project manager of the Muon g-2 experiment. “It’s been a lot of work, but we’re ready now to really get started.”

Over the next few weeks the Muon g-2 team will test the equipment installed around the magnet, which will be storing and measuring muons for the first time in 16 years. Later this year, they will start taking science-quality data, and if their results confirm the anomaly first seen at Brookhaven, it will mean that the elegant picture of the universe that scientists have been working on for decades is incomplete, and that new particles or forces may be out there, waiting to be discovered.

The first results should be available in about a year, Quinn said. The full run is scheduled to take three years to get full sensitivity and precision from the equipment, though.

“It’s an exciting time for the whole team, and for physics,” said David Hertzog of the University of Washington, co-spokesperson of the Muon g-2 collaboration. “The magnet has been working, and working fantastically well. It won’t be long until we have our first results, and a better view through the window that the Brookhaven experiment opened for us.”

The Muon g-2 collaboration includes more than 150 scientists and engineers from more than 30 institutions in nine countries. The experiment is supported by DOE’s Office of Science and the National Science Foundation.

Learn more about the Muon g-2 experiment at http://muon-g-2.fnal.gov. Take a 360-degree tour of the Muon g-2 experiment hall at http://muon-g-2.fnal.gov/virtual-tour.html.

For more about physics research at the University of Mississippi, go to http://physics.olemiss.edu/.

OXFORD, Miss. – Four University of Mississippi faculty members have been honored as inaugural recipients of a New Scholar Award in the university’s College of Liberal Arts.

The first recipients are Matthew R. Wilson, assistant professor of theatre arts, Derrick A. Harriell, assistant professor of English and African American studies, Jared Delcamp, assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry, and Joshua Hendrickson, assistant professor of economics. Each honoree received a $1,000 cash prize and medal, presented during the College of Liberal Arts graduation ceremony.

“The College of Liberal Arts continues to recruit some of the very best young faculty in the nation,” said Charles L. Hussey, associate dean for research and graduate education and professor of chemistry. “These faculty members represent the ‘best of the best’ in the college and will no doubt prove to be academic leaders in their discipline.”

The New Scholar Award will be presented annually to untenured, tenure-track faculty members in the College of Liberal Arts who are within six years of their initial tenure-track academic appointment and who have demonstrated exemplary performance in research, scholarship and/or creative achievement. Depending on the quality of the pool of nominees, up to four awards will be available, with one each chosen from the areas of natural sciences and mathematics, social sciences, humanities, and fine and performing arts.

Individuals may receive the award only once, but recipients will retain their eligibility for the College of Liberal Arts Award for Research, Scholarship and Creative Achievement, which is normally awarded to post-tenure, senior faculty.

“New scholars must be nominated by the department chair and/or tenured professorial rank colleagues in cooperation with the chair,” Hussey said. “Nominations will remain active for two years. A faculty committee chosen by the dean of the College of Liberal Arts or his designee will select the award recipients.”

Wilson said that for the college to acknowledge his work as an actor, director and choreographer makes him feel at home and proves that the administration is committed to a forward-thinking mission that addresses the plurality of the modern university and the needs of the modern world.

“My only concern in accepting this position was whether I would be able to stay connected to the world of theater practice and keep my professional career viable while based in Oxford,” he said. “My first two years here have worked out better than I had even hoped, and this award is a recognition of what I have been able to accomplish through the support of the university.”

One of Wilson’s specialties focuses on Italian Renaissance masked comedy called “commedia dell’arte.” This was the style of the Ole Miss Theatre production of “The Tooth-Puller” and is the subject of his scholarly book chapters and published plays.

“Each year, I travel to conferences and other universities to perform my ‘The Great One-Man Commedia Epic’ and to lecture on the history and theory of commedia dell’arte,” he said.

“Currently, I am in northern Italy, teaching commedia at a workshop in Siena, which includes several of our theatre arts majors, and traveling to historic theaters and museums for further research. My stipend is proving useful and well-timed in helping to subsidize this research trip.”

Hendrickson said he was surprised and humbled by the award.

“Maintaining an active and growing research agenda requires a lot of time and effort,” he said. “To be recognized as a recipient of this award when I know that there are countless others on the faculty working hard toward similar goals is an honor.”

Hendrickson’s research is predominantly focused on monetary theory, history and policy. He studies the effects of monetary policy on the economy, both in the present and during important historical events.

“My most recent work, for example, shows that the inflation that the British experienced during the Napoleonic Wars was due, in part, to the monetization of government debt by the Bank of England,” he said. “Other recent work examines how inflation affects the production decisions of firms and whether low interest rates can potentially cause boom-bust cycles in investment.”

To be recognized by the university is very rewarding, Harriell said.

“I believe in this university, the English department and our M.F.A. program,” he said. “Additionally, I work hard to sustain the level of excellence that has been set. For the university to acknowledge this means that my carrying of the torch is not being overlooked.”

Harriell’s second collection of poems is a historical collection highlighting the lives of celebrated heavyweight African-American pugilists Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, Joe Frazier and Mike Tyson.

“My third collection is a collection that investigates my own past, as well as my adjustment to Mississippi and the South,” Harriell said.

Delcamp said he was so focused on his field’s research that he really hadn’t considered anyone outside of it taking notice of progress being made.

“To be acknowledged by people outside my own small research world was very fulfilling,” he said. “To be given an award like this certainly has instilled a sense of pride in the work my group has done. It was great to see people outside my field taking note of how hard we have been working.”

Delcamp’s research focuses on dye-sensitized solar cells. These solar cell materials are made from very robust, cost-effective, nonhazardous materials and can be mass produced at a fraction of the cost of solar cells commonly seen on rooftops.

“My group focuses on one specific component of these solar cells that is known to be the performance-limiting material,” Delcamp said. “We are using synthetic organic chemistry to offer new materials, which can be competitive in terms of performance to traditional solar cells while maintaining the tremendous cost advantage.

“So far, my team owns a number of records in this field, and we look forward to breaking them soon.”

For more information about the College of Liberal Arts, go to http://libarts.olemiss.edu/.