Christopher A. Lewicki’s life revolves around Mars. After graduating from the UA, he started working day and night for two years on the phenomenally successful Mars Rover landings – integrating 46 different motors, overseeing 3 a.m. practice landings and keeping 10,000 wiring connections and miles of cable straight. Now he is NASA’s flight system engineer for the Phoenix Mars Scout Mission, the UA’s largest-ever research endeavor, headed by Peter Smith of the UA Lunar and Planetary Lab. This Mars-obsessed UA aerospace engineering grad is “a force of good on our project,” Smith said.

Insecticides kill pests. Simple, right? Wrong. Even as they kill, insecticides drive evolution, because only toxin-resistant individuals survive and reproduce. This accelerated evolution means that when insecticides are overused they can quickly become useless. Conundrums like this keep Dave Crowder busy. A Ph.D. candidate in the UA's Entomology Program, Crowder uses mathematical models and experiments to study how crop-destroying whitefly populations might dwindle or thrive in various farming scenarios. His research helps determine how best to control these and other pests and is helping to rank UA entomology #2 among all major U.S. research universities in the most recent Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index.

In the midst of ongoing concerns about the quality of teaching in America, a study by the UA College of Education brings great news -- first-year teachers in Arizona are launching their careers well prepared for their formidable task. A research team of Educational Psychology faculty and graduate students observed new teachers in K-12 classrooms over three years, tracking instructional activities, interactions with students and more. Their findings show that new teachers pass muster, delivering quality education as defined by a widely used, long-vetted evaluation standard. Honored for its insights and importance by the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, the study paves the way for still deeper examination of the factors that drive teacher success.

More than 50 years ago, scientists pointed radio telescopes to the sky and found light from objects so distant that they appeared as faint stars, barely detectable. Today we know them as quasars—quasi-stellar-radio-sources—the oldest known galaxies, pulsing with energy from powerful black holes devouring as many as a thousand suns per year. Most are at the fringes of our expanding universe—up to 13 billion light years away—and may hold the key to understanding its earliest eras. Ready to turn that key stands the UA’s Dr. Xiaohui Fan, a global leader in studying these celestial Rosetta stones and the only astronomer to win a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship award.

The largest National Science Foundation grant ever received in Arizona was awarded to the UA – $50 million for a five year project called the iPlant Collaborative. Administered by the BIO5 Institute, it will create a global center and computer infrastructure to unite plant scientists, computer scientists and information scientists from around the world to answer questions of global importance. “This project is collaborative – designed by the scientific community, for the community,” says UA plant sciences professor, BIO5 member and iPlant director Richard Jorgensen, “and will change the way we do science.” All iPlant projects will offer programs for school-aged children, undergraduate and graduate students and interested lay people.