Welcome to the Fresh Tracks Newsletter, highlighting news from the SCI Institute. Since our first newsletter six months ago, SCI Institute faculty, staff, and students have continued to perform exciting research, lead international conferences, perform important professional service, and educate students at the graduate, undergraduate, and even high school levels.

In this issue, we emphasize research on FluoRender, which is an interactive tool for confocal microscopy data visualization. Confocal microscopy is an important imaging technique in biology used to study three-dimensional (3D) structures of biological samples. Together with biologists, Professor Charles Hansen and his graduate student Yong Wan (who successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation in April 2013) designed and developed FluoRender. In addition to being a useful visualization tool for biologists, FluoRender has been used to create stunning images that have garnered awards in international biology image competitions.

I am pleased to draw attention to one of my very successful Ph.D. students and early SCI members, Han-Wei Shen, who is now a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Ohio State University. Han- Wei continues to perform cutting-edge visualization research and educate new visualization researchers. Professor Shen founded and leads the Graphics and Visualization Study (GRAVITY) research group at OSU. Han-Wei is also an amazing educator, having graduated 12 Ph.D. students, which means I have 12 more "academic grandchildren", and several M.S. students. He received the Department’s Outstanding Teaching Award twice.

We hope you will continue to join us for the 2013-14 SCI Institute Distinguished Lecture Series on Fridays at 2:00 p.m. in the Evans Conference Room. If you can’t attend in person, these Distinguished Lectures are available on the SCI TV section of our website. Details of all our upcoming seminars and lectures, along with an archive of previous seminars are available on our events page.

Sincerely,

Chris R. Johnson, Ph.D.
Director,
Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute
Distinguished Professor,
School of Computing
University of Utah

Fresh Tracks September 2013