DENTON (UNT), Texas — Dr. Feifei Pan, assistant professor of geography at the University of North Texas, has been selected to receive one of 32 nationally competitive Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Awards from Oak Ridge Associated Universities. Pan was one of four faculty members from Texas colleges and universities selected as winners, who were chosen from 114 applicants. He is the seventh UNT faculty member to win a Powe award since 2005.
The award will support Pan’s research on inversely retrieving the spatial variability of soil particle size distribution from remotely sensed soil moisture. Soil particle size distribution, which classifies soil as clay, silt, sand and rock, is usually determined by time-consuming and labor-intensive soil surveys. Pan developed a method of estimating particle size distribution from observed soil moisture, which he used to determine the soil moisture mean — the average measure of moisture in soil — and variance — the expectation of the average squared deviations from the mean — from soil collected at the Throughfall Displacement Experiment sites in Walker Branch Watershed in eastern Tennessee.
Oak Ridge Associated Universities, or ORAU, is a conortium of 96 major research institutes that advances science and education by providing the universities with partnerships with national laboratories, government agencies and private industry. ORAU manages the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education for the U.S. Department of Energy.
The Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Awards are given to faculty members with research in engineering and applied science, life sciences, mathematics and computer science, physical sciences and policy management and education. The $5,000 awards are intended to enrich the research and professional growth of young faculty members and result in new funding opportunities. Universities of faculty members who receive Powe awards are required to match the awards with additional $5,000 by providing funds for travel, equipment or other assistance for the faculty members' research.
Pan’s research has been published in Journal of the American Water Resources Association, Journal of Geophysical Research — Biogeosciences, Water Resources Research, Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences and Advances in Water Resources, among other professional journals. He has upcoming articles in Journal of Hydrologic Engineering and Journal of Hydrometeorology.
He received his bachelor’s degree in atmospheric science at Nanjing University in China, master’s degree in marine meteorology from the National Research Center of Marine Environmental Forecast in Beijing, master’s degree in geology and geophysics from Yale University and doctoral degree in civil and environmental engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.