ROANOKE COLLEGE STUDENT RESEARCH TO BE FEATURED ON CAPITAL HILL

Research conducted by Hanan Dahche ’05 has been accepted for The Council on Undergraduate Research’s Undergraduate Research Posters on the Hill event. Sixty competitively selected undergraduate student research posters will be displayed at the U.S. Capitol on April 19, 2005. Dahche’s research was conducted at NASA in Huntsville, Alabama over the past two years. In the Fall of 2004, Dahche was one of three finalists in the student paper contest at the Annual Southeastern conference of the Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges.

“Hanan had an amazing opportunity to do research at NASA, and now she is sharing the results with the nation,” Dr. John Day, vice president and dean of the college, said. “We’re delighted with her success and proud to be able to offer these kinds of experiences to our students.”

Dahche is an international student from Lebanon. She is a senior biochemistry major with a minor in computer science. She has been on the Dean’s list several times and is a member of Beta Beta Beta Biological society, a national honor society founded in 1922 to recognize outstanding achievement in the biological sciences at the undergraduate level. She is also a member of the Virginia Delta Chapter of the National Honorary Mathematics Society Pi Mu Epsilon, and a member of the National Honorary Society for women in Chemistry Iota Sigma Pi. She was nominated by Roanoke College to the National Dean’s List and the Who’s Who Among Students in American Universities and Colleges. She was selected for both honorary awards knowing that only one half of one percent of the nation’s college students receive the National Dean’s List award. Her biography will be published in the 28th Annual Edition of the National Dean’s List.

Dahche’s research, titled “Design of a Simulator for Ionizing Radiation Detector,” was conducted during her summer 2004 internship as part of a research project to design a software simulator for ionizing radiation detector at NASA-National Space Science and Technology Center (NSSTC) in Huntsville, AL. The project was funded by NASA and was a part of NASA's Deep Space Test Bed for radiation shielding studies. The research was conducted with Dr. John Watts, NASA-NSSTC and Dr. Nasser Barghouty, former associate professor of physics at Roanoke College, to customize simulation codes for detector performance for the high energy cosmic ray group at NSSTC.

Dahche is the second Roanoke College student to be selected for the Posters on the Hill event. Pamela Armata, a 2004 graduate from Richmond, was selected for the same event last year for her research titled "Spatially iterated prisoner's dilemma", done through the college’s Summer Scholars program in 2003.

She was one of six students from Virginia selected to participate in the program. Armata was joined by student researchers from University of Richmond, Washington & Lee University, James Madison University and NASA Langley Research Center.