Loury Floyd, associate professor and assistant dean for teacher education, has been elected vice president of the North Carolina Association of Colleges and Teacher Educators. NC-ACTE is the organization that unites teacher educators in public and private colleges and universities, staff and faculty in state created initiatives and consortiums, and the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. Floyd will serve a two-year term.

Samuel A. Moseley, chair of the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, has been reappointed by Gov. Beverly Perdue to a two-year term as a member of the North Carolina Internship Council, effective Aug. 29. The North Carolina Internship Council serves as a selection committee for state agencies that will be allowed to have student interns, and is charged with selecting the interns that serve in that capacity. Moseley has the most seniority of the members serving on the council. He has served on the council since 1995.

Maura Busch Nsonwu, assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Work, was a panelist for “Women, War and Peace,” PBS/UNC-TV’s five-part special on the impact of war on women and vice versa. The discussion was taped Sept. 29 at Guilford College. The special series premiered Oct. 11, and will air Tuesdays at 10 p.m. through Nov. 8.

Nsonwu was recommended to UNC-TV by The Center for New North Carolinians because of her work and research with refugees. She also had organized several community forums around the documentary, “Pray the Devil Back to Hell,” a story about a small band of Liberian women who came together in the midst of a bloody civil war, took on the violent warlords and corrupt Charles Taylor regime, and won a long-awaited peace for their shattered country in 2003.

Hal W. Snarr, associate professor in the Department of Economics and Finance, has published an article in Applied Economics, 45:4, 525-540. Using state-level panel data from 1990 to 2005, Snarr analyzes how state implementation of welfare reform simultaneously affects caseload, employment and out-of-wedlock births, “Was it the economy or reform that precipitated the steep decline in the US welfare caseload?”

In August, Shih-Liang “Sid” Wang, professor of mechanical engineering, presented a three-part lecture series on nuclear energy at ABCO Automation in Brown Summit, N.C. The topics were Nuclear Energy in the United States and around the World in the Aftermath of Japan’s Fukushima Nuclear Incident; Nuclear Energy in China: China’s Nuclear Policy and the Two Dozen Reactors under Construction; and Nuclear Fuel Cycle: Mining, Enrichment, Fuel Fabrication and Waste (Spent Fuels).

In 2007, Wang received an educational grant from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and he has been teaching an elective on nuclear energy for the past four years. ABCO specializes in providing comprehensive industrial services to manufacturers. The company recently received a contract to fabricate a production system that will be installed in China to assemble nuclear fuels.