Left to Right: Thoms, Guleng, Carpintero
Winona State University is currently hosting three visiting professors. Pablo Carpintero is a Fulbright Language Teaching Assistant from Argentina; Amu Guleng is a Research Scholar from Inner Mongolia Agricultural University in China; and Martin Thoms is a Fulbright Scholar from the University of New England in Australia.
Pablo Carpintero is a Fulbright Language Teaching Assistant. This semester he is teaching a Spanish 101 class in the Department of World Languages and Global Studies at Winona State University.
Carpintero grew up in the city of Río Cuarto, in the province of Córdoba, in Argentina. At the age of 18, he enrolled in the English Language Teaching course offered by the National University of Río Cuarto. As a student, he carried out research projects about Strategic Reading in English as a Foreign Language and delivered talks in conferences in Río Cuarto and other major cities in Argentina. In 2011, he started working as a professor in charge of three-year courses addressed to Elementary and Intermediate students of English in the Language Department in the National University of Río Cuarto.
Carpintero will also conduct a weekly Spanish roundtable at 7 p.m. Thursdays in Somsen 320. Spanish Conversation Tables are for students, faculty and staff who would like to practice their Spanish and discuss issues about Argentina and the world in a fun, informal setting.
Amu Guleng is a Research Scholar from Inner Mongolia Agricultural University in China. She came with support from the China Scholarship Council (CSC), an affiliate of the Ministry of Education in China.
Guleng will conduct research in image processing with Professor Mingrui Zhang in the WSU Computer Science department. Together they will extend a curriculum module developed by Zhang under the Real World Engineering Projects program at IEEE, the world’s largest professional association dedicated to advancing technological innovation and excellence for the benefit of humanity.
Guleng has been the chair of Physics and Electrical Engineering Department at Inner Mongolia Agricultural University in China since 2007. Guleng has been teaching General Physics, Optoelectronics, Fibre Optics, Digital Image Processing and Biomathematics at both undergraduate and graduate levels in China. She has been awarded the Chinese National Teaching award and Inner Mongolian Science and Technology prize.
Her research interests include image processing and pattern recognition, particularly, microscopic structure recognition for Mongolian herbs, and the semi-automatic recognition system based on invariant moments. Her research projects are currently supported by the China National Science Foundation and Inner Mongolia National Science Foundation. She has published more than 50 research papers and authored five textbooks in Mongolian and in Chinese.
Martin Thoms of Australia was awarded a 2012 Fulbright Senior Scholarship to undertake collaborative research with the Large River Studies Center at Winona State University and the U.S. Geological Survey in La Crosse.
Through his research scholarship, he and his colleagues will examine the resilience of river ecosystems in relation to climate change. The project will address significant knowledge gaps in relation to the changing structure of floodplain-rivers by reconstructing past and present food webs in aquatic ecosystems of lowland rivers of the Murray Basin and Upper Mississippi River.
Thoms is the Director of the Riverine Landscapes Research Laboratory and Chair of the Geography Department at the University of New England in Australia. He is an internationally recognized scientist in the field of river ecosystems, specializing in the connections between freshwater ecology, hydrology and geomorphology. His competency in this field has been recognized numerous times by Australian and International organizations, winning awards for his innovation in river science from the University of Canberra, the International Association of Hydrological Sciences and the Binghamton Geomorphology Group.
For more information, call Andrea Mikkelsen at 507-457-5024.
