Thomas Werner, the Florence B. Sherwood Professor of Physical Sciences, was elected chair of the Board of Governors of the National Conference on Undergraduate
Research.
As Chair, Werner – who also was elected to his third three-year term on the 24-member board – will be responsible for heading the board in their planning of next year's
conference, to be held at the University of Texas at Austin.
One issue Werner says he will be addressing as chair is the size of future conferences. This year's NCUR was about 50 percent larger than NCUR 1995 held at Union College.
“We don't want NCUR to get too large … it could lose something,” Werner said.
“We also want to maintain the possibility that schools like Union will be able to
host NCUR in the future.”
This year's NCUR was the tenth annual conference, and returned to the University of
North Carolina at Asheville, which started NCUR and held the first two conferences.
Attending were about 35 Union students and four faculty members including Werner, Walid
Thabet, George Shaw and Margaret Schadler. Schadler gave an invited talk on planning and
implementing college conferences on undergraduate research, such as Union's Steinmetz
Symposium.