Published: February 21, 2019
New Lecture Series Reconnects Alumni to UT, Current Students
The University of Tampa’s new Spartan Success Alumni Lecture Series aims to bring alumni back to campus to help them reconnect with the University and give students a glimpse of the possibilities of life after UT. The first lecture, scheduled for Tuesday, Feb. 26, features Kira Armacost ’07, senior scientist at Merck & Co. Inc. The event begins at 4 p.m. in the Graduate and Health Studies Building, Room 104, and is free and open to the public.
Armacost’s presentation, titled Bringing Equilibration to an Entropic Environment — Finding a Niche in Computational Chemistry, will highlight the role discovery chemistry modelers have at her company. She will also talk about how she began her journey and some of the opportunities she has been given in her career.
As a senior scientist at Merck in Kenilworth, NJ, Armacost has been a member of the modeling and informatics group for almost three years. She serves as chair of the Early Career Board for the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling, organizer of the Mid-Atlantic Computational Chemistry group and a volunteer in Women in STEM initiatives. She earned a doctorate in theoretical organic chemistry from Auburn University in 2013 and completed postdoctoral research at the University of Michigan from 2013–2016.
The Spartan Success Alumni Lecture Series will continue on Thursday, March 7, with Becky Kagan Schott ’04, an Emmy-award winning underwater photographer and videographer. Schott’s presentation will begin at 4 p.m. in Reeves Theater on the second floor of the Vaughn Center and is free and open to the public.
Schott’s projects have taken her all over the world, from the Arctic to Antarctica and many locations in between. She specializes in bringing back video from challenging aquatic environments from filming in caves and under ice, to inside shipwrecks and around sharks. A five-time Emmy-Award winning underwater cameraman, photographer and technical diving instructor, her work can be seen on major networks, including National Geographic, Discovery Channel and the Travel Channel.
The Spartan Success Alumni Lecture Series is supported through a UT Board of Fellows Grant. For more information, contact Eric Freundt, director of undergraduate research and inquiry, at efreundt@ut.edu or Eric Werner, chair of the Department of Chemistry, Biochemistry and Physics, at ewerner@ut.edu.
