Christina Hall successfully defended her thesis proposal entitled “Assessing Air Pollution Using Spanish Moss as a Bioindicator in the Low Country of Savannah River Basin“ on July 14, 2022. She proposed to study the pollutants in Spanish Moss with the Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis. The committee includes Dr. Zaijing Sun (chair), Dr. Steen Madsen, Dr. Carson Riland, and Dr. Alexander Barzilov.

Recently, Dr. Zaijing Sun joined UNLV as an associate professor in the Department of Health Physics and Diagnostic Sciences. He established the group of Heath, Environment, and Radiation Detection (HERD). The HERD group is dedicated to the research in nuclear activation analysis (NAA and PAA), medical isotope production, MC simulation of clinic LINACs, temporal data mining in nuclear decommissioning, and 3-D imaging in diagnostic sciences. 

Before joining UNLV, Dr. Sun was an assistant professor in the Nuclear Engineering Program at South Carolina State University. He had been a postdoc in the Nuclear Engineering Division at the Argonne National laboratory. His research interests include gamma-ray spectroscopy, Monte Carlo simulations, radiation physics, radioanalytical chemistry, temporal data mining (TDM) in nuclear decommissioning, and medical isotope production.