Eye on the Y: College of Life Sciences announces new associate deans; BYU engineers engrave the entire Book of Mormon on microchip wafer
Dean Laura Bridgewater announced three new associate dean for the College of Life Sciences. Loreen Allphin of the Department of Plant and Wildlife Sciences, Benjamin Crookston of the Department of Public Health, and Michael Stark of the Department of Cell Biology and Physiology will assume their positions and responsibilities beginning October 1, 2022.
College of Life Sciences announces new associate deans
Dean Laura Bridgewater announced three new associate deans for the College of Life Sciences. Loreen Allphin of the Department of Plant and Wildlife Sciences, Benjamin Crookston of the Department of Public Health, and Michael Stark of the Department of Cell Biology and Physiology will assume their positions and responsibilities beginning Oct. 1.
Doctor Loreen Allphin is a plant conservationist and conservation geneticist. With a Ph.D in Biology with an emphasis in ecology and evolution, Allphin joined the BYU faculty in 1996.
After receiving a Ph.D in public health from University of Utah, Doctor Benjamin Crookston joined the BYU staff in 2011. Doctor Crookston works with research related to maternal and child health, poverty alleviation and women’s empowerment.
As current chair of the Department of Cell Biology and Physiology, Doctor Michael Stark has been teaching at BYU since 2001 and has participated in multiple research projects focused on sensory neuron differentiation.
These three new associate deans will replace Michael Barnes, professor of public health; Rick Jellen, professor of plant and wildlife sciences and Susan Fullmer, professor of nutrition, dietetics and food science.
BYU engineers engrave the entire Book of Mormon on microchip wafer
A group of BYU students from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department etched the entire text of The Book of Mormon onto a tiny microchip wafer.
This 4-inch microchip contains all 291,652 words found within the book. Each of the 1,497,482 characters found on the tiny scripture disc is approximately 25 by 35 micrometers.
“Lots of people can do this and lots of people have done this with the Bible,” faculty mentor and Electrical and Computer Engineering professor Aaron Hawkins said. “But to our knowledge, no one has ever done it for The Book of Mormon. We realized it was up to BYU to put The Book of Mormon into silicon.”
This wafer along with wafers of the New and Old Testaments are on display outside the cleanroom on the fourth floor of the Clyde Building.