Gary Mitchell

Helping STEM Students Shine

June 26, 2015

University of Portland business professor Gary Mitchell and his wife, Veronica, coached a team of 13 Lake Oswego students who recently became robotics world champions. The students, ranging from grades eight through eleven, won the Control Award (for Robot Intelligence) at the FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) World Championship, held April 22-25, 2015 in St. Louis, Missouri. Team Axis is a self-funded neighborhood robotics team that just finished its second year of FTC competition.

Only 128 of 4,500 teams from around the world qualified for the annual World Championship. The Mitchells started coaching the team last year when they learned their local high school had no space or budget to support a robotics team. Their son, Colin, is a member of the team as well.

In order to make it to the World Championship, the team had to advance through four levels of competition, including the Oregon State Championship and the West Super-Regional Championship (72 teams from 13 western states). The top 2.9% of teams from around the world competed at the World Championship, including teams from the U.S., China, Germany, Mexico, New Zealand, South Korea, Russia, Canada, Australia, Romania, India, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia, and the Netherlands.

According to the Mitchells, the primary mission of Team Axis is to provide STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) opportunities for kids who do not have access to similar programs through their school.

Team Axis has social media pages at twitter.com/teamaxisftc and www.facebook.com/TeamAxis7187. Additional information on the FIRST FTC program can be found at www.usfirst.org/ftc and information about FTC in Oregon can be found at http://www.ortop.org/ftc/.

Business Team Shines

March 4, 2013

A team of students from the University’s operations management program won the APICS (Association for Operations Management) West Coast Case Competition, the largest APICS regional case competition offered this year nationwide, according to Gary Mitchell, business administration. It was the second straight year that a UP team won the competition.

Students on the winning team are Tommy French, Andrew Hadfield, Keith Hummel, Elyse Landreville, and Deven Ropes. The UP team outperformed Portland State, San Diego State, Cal Poly Pomona, Cal State Northridge, and many others. For this competition, the West Coast region included 11 western states, Texas, and Mexico. For more information contact Mitchell at 7280 or mitchelg@up.edu.

Aziz Inan, Shiley School of Engineering, had his brain teaser, “A Number of Reasons to Celebrate Gert Boyle,” published in the Portland Tribune on December 4, 2019.

Barb Braband, Rebecca Gaudino, and Anissa Rogers received a Teaching Poster Award for the presentation of “Innovations in Interdisciplinary Education on Grief: An Interview Project” at the 2019 National Symposium for Academic Palliative Care Education and Research in San Diego, CA, on Oct. 12, 2019. The 2019 National Symposium was sponsored by the Shiley Institute for Palliative Care.

Jane Scott, Clark Library, presented a poster, “Empowering ethical practices: Activities for access services” (with Heidi Senior) at the Access Services Conference, Atlanta, GA, November 2019.

Christina Ivler, Shiley School of Engineering, wrote “Frequency-Response and Frequency-Domain Models” and “Classical Frequency-Domain Design Methods” (with J. David Powell) and “Control System Optimization Methods in the Frequency Domain” in Baillieul J., Samad T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Systems and Control. Springer, London, 2019.

Buck Taylor, chemistry, wrote “Cooperative CO2 Scission by Anomalous Insertion into a Rh–Si Bond” (with Matthew Whited, Daron Janzen, and student coauthors Michael Trenerry, Jia Zhang, Theodore Donnell, Paul Peterson, Vanessa Eng) in Organometallics , November 2019 , 38 , 4420–4432.

Ami Ahern-Rindell, biology, was invited to be a member of a 3-person review panel to participate in onsite campus visits during October 29 – November 1 to review several PUIs (Predominantly Undergraduate Institutions) in Oklahoma who are recipients of an NIH-INBRE Consortium Award. This multi-million dollar grant provides funding for 5 years to improve biomedical research across the state of Oklahoma collaboratively between research intensive universities, PUIs, and Community Colleges.

Lora Looney, international languages and cultures, gave a faculty workshop on “Unpacking the Project First to Identify a Course’s Driving Question(s) Towards Teaching for Understanding” at the 39^thOriginal Lilly Conference on College Teaching at Miami University in Oxford, OH, on November 22.

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