Undergraduate Research Mentor of the Year 2009
College of Science

Over the last twenty years, Dr. JR Dennison has mentored more than fifty undergraduate researchers in the Materials Physics Group at USU. In the words of his department head, Jan Sojka, “Professor Dennison has practiced what he teaches about the process of learning, namely that working together leads to greater new knowledge than working on one’s own.” Almost all of these students have written a formal research report, half have co-authored publications, and more than two thirds have made professional presentations at regional, national or international conferences.  Four undergraduate researchers have given contributed presentations at the American Physical Society March Meeting.  Closer to home, students in the group have completed twenty-one USU Student Showcase presentations, thirty-one senior projects and fourteen successful URCO grant proposals through the USU Research Office. Dr. Dennison has also mentored undergraduates from a variety of departments in the Colleges of Science and Engineering as they designed, built and tested a suite of experiments that are now on the International Space Station. Sojka noted that in this project with the USU Get-Away-Special program the students were “mentored from start to finish by Professor Dennison.” In addition to training students in the lab, for twenty years Dennison has spearheaded the organization of USU Physics Day at Lagoon that annually attracts around 7000 middle- and high-school students and their teachers. Students and faculty in the Department work together each year to maximize the physics learning content for these secondary students. Dennison describes his approach to mentoring undergraduate researchers as “not as much a vocation or task for me as it is an avocation and a passion. There is little doubt that the one-on-one mentoring and the enthusiasm and synergy of an active research group are my greatest joys in teaching.”