In the Spotlight: June 2026
Kudos to these faculty, staff and programs.
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- Recent philosophy, politics and law graduate Ethan Ward was awarded a Fulbright to study security and diplomacy at Tel Aviv University. Before graduating this spring, Ward was a peer mentor in the Honors College and an Honors Ambassador. He was the president of Mock Trial club and the founder of the Pickleball Club at NAU. Read more about his time at NAU and his career aspirations on the NAU Foundation website.
- Bridget Smith-Konter, associate professor in the School of Earth and Sustainability, collaborated in the study “Cajon Pass and the Southern San Andreas Fault System: Earthquake Cycle Stress Accumulation and Present-Day Loading,” which suggests the San Andreas fault is currently experiencing its highest levels of accumulated tectonic stress in over 1000 years, based on the paleoseismic earthquake record.
- NAU ranked in the top 3.9% of institutions worldwide by the Center for World University Ranking (CWUR) and was included in their list of the top 2,000 global institutions.
- NAU’s Center for International Education received the prestigious IDEAS microgrant to support the NAU in Malawi faculty-led program. The grant from the U.S. Department of State’s Educational and Cultural Affairs and World Learning supports efforts to expand opportunities for more American students to study abroad and gain skills that are critical to U.S. national security and economic prosperity.
- NAU’s Center for International Education was named 2026 Campus Partner of the Year for Public Health by the Department of Health Sciences for its initiatives, collaborations and commitment to the success of NAU students and the advancement of their shared mission.
- Alumnus George Kusche, who graduated with a master’s in statistics in 2023, won the Comrades Ultramarathon in South Africa (86 km / 53.3 miles uphill this year) on June 14, setting a new record time of 5:15:56 and beating the old record by nearly nine minutes. Kusche was a member of the NAU national championship cross country team in 2022.
- In the latest U.S. News and World Report Best Global Universities rankings, NAU was recognized as a top university for ecology. NAU was ranked 52nd globally and 15th in the United States, highlighting the university’s strength in ecological research.
- NAU’s Ecological Restoration Institute received the Interactive Ingenuity award at the 2026 Esri Federal GIS Conference, a national recognition for TWIG, a wildfire mapping tool developed in partnership with NAU’s sister institutes in Colorado and New Mexico.
- David Trilling, chair of the Department of Astronomy and Planetary Science, co-authored the article “Taxonomic Distribution of the Small Near-Earth Asteroid Population” recently published in The Planetary Science Journal. His other publication, “You Only Stack Once (YOSO): A Motion-Filtered, Deep-Learning Framework for Detecting Faint Moving Sources” was accepted by the Astronomical Society Journal.
- Gerard van Belle, research professor in the Department of Astronomy and Planetary Science, participated in the Flagstaff Leadership Program’s Science Leadership Education Day hosted by USGS, presenting to groups on the business of science for the fourth consecutive year.
- The article “Triaxial shapes and densities of G!kún||’hòmdímà, Haumea, and Varda from stellar occultations” by Will Grundy, research professor in the Department of Astronomy and Planetary Science, was accepted for publication by the Astronomical Society Journal.