Picture a college professor standing at the front of a crowded auditorium and speaking to a group of three hundred students. The speaker, sharp-eyed and astute, has a glass of water and stands tall and mighty behind a podium. He projects a series of sounds toward the dreary-eyed students – a mouthful of verbs, adjectives and nouns, all carrying different meanings. The speaker’s information may be fascinating and well organized, but one MU researcher doesn’t ask why someone is speaking. He’s more interested in studying how the speaker is communicating.

Shubhra Gangopadhyay is the one of the few female faculty at MU’s Center for Micro/Nano Systems and Nanotechnology. She’s also the one in charge of developing the center. In the Electrical and Computer Engineering department, of which Gangopadhyay is the LaPierre Endowed Chair Professor, she is one of three women. “There is a shortage of female scientists and female professors, in general,” Gangopadhyay says. “And in engineering, it is really not good.”

In order to raise awareness of their research, Gompper and his team work closely with a number of agencies, including the Missouri Department of Conservation, the Arkansas Fishing Game Commission, and the U.S. Forest Services.

Without active management and conservation of tigers in the wild, tigers will disappear from the wild in our lifetime. Tigers for Tigers is a student group that raises money to help tigers continue to survive in the wild.

Students work as a non-profit organization to promote the awareness of species extinction, animal ecology, and environmental issues to elementary students.

As a young boy, the idea of using his voice in a performance setting fascinated Radhakrishnan. “I wanted to be in movies, be an actor, director, and all sorts of stuff,” he says. “Coming from a family of doctors, my dad, his dad, and grandparents were all doctors; they wanted me to be in the medical field.” Instead, Radhakrishnan chose a career that fell in between vocal performance and medicine: speech pathology.

When it came time for Gangopadhyay to earn her PhD, she decided she wanted to attend a prestigious school, India Institute of Technology in Kharagpur. “It was a major step for my family to let me go,” she says. Convincing her father was the hard part; he didn’t want his daughter living more than 1,000 kilometers away. But Gangopadhyay was stubborn and told him she wouldn’t accept a “no.” He finally agreed, so long as she agreed to stay with an uncle who lived in Kharagpur.