Bear Briefs

Student-Athletes Shine In Classroom — UM Athletic Director Jim O’Day recently announced that UM’s 289 student-athletes earned a 3.0 grade point average for the 2008 fall semester. Women’s tennis (3.34), women’s track and field (3.27) and volleyball (3.20) highlighted the department’s fall academic success. Grizzly student-athletes posted an average cumulative GPA of 3.05. Montana’s undergraduate student body of 10,538 had an average term GPA of 2.83 and a cumulative GPA of 2.89. Half of the department teams had a fall GPA of at least 3.0, and nine of the 12 teams maintained a cumulative GPA of at least 3.0. UM’s volleyball team has a department-best cumulative GPA of 3.36. Women’s tennis cumulative GPA was 3.33 and women’s track and field was 3.32. The men’s basketball team’s 2.99 grade point average is expected to be among the better averages among Division I schools in the country. The 102 student-athletes on the Montana football team, which had a 16-week game schedule, posted an impressive 2.9 fall semester GPA and a 2.91 cumulative GPA.

Griz Football Players Named To ‘Fabulous Fifty’ — Two UM football players were selected for the 2008 College Sporting News Fabulous Fifty Division I FCS All-American team. Colin Dow, a senior offensive guard from Billings, and Colt Anderson, a senior safety from Butte, received the honors. Junior Marc Mariani, from Havre, was an honorable mention. Anderson, who was selected for the team last year as well, also was considered for Defensive Player of the Year honors. In all, 36 teams and 13 conferences are represented on the team. Richmond landed four players on the squad, James Madison had three, while nine other teams, including Montana, had multiple selections.

Students Earn Geomatrix Scholarships — Two UM graduate students in the Department of Geosciences recently received the AMEC Geomatrix Student Award in Applied Water Science. James Johnsen and Tabetha Lynch each received $5,000 from AMEC Geomatrix, a technical consulting and engineering firm with offices in Missoula and worldwide. Johnsen’s thesis work will be in the field of fluvial geomorphology, specifically working with sediment transport during the Milltown Dam removal and restoration of the Clark Fork and Blackfoot rivers. Lynch’s thesis work will focus on the occurrence, transport and fate of selected pharmaceuticals in groundwater, focusing on the Missoula aquifer. Geomatrix, which employs five graduates of the UM geosciences master's program in its Missoula office, donated the scholarship funding to help UM recruit and retain top graduate students.

Bird Researcher Lands Grant For Study In Borneo — UM researcher Tom Martin has been awarded a $600,000 grant to study the differences between populations of tropical birds in Asia and those in Africa and South America. Martin, assistant unit leader of UM’s Montana Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit, earned the three-year grant from the National Science Foundation. He has been continuously funded by NSF since 1986. Martin will study 25 to 30 Asian bird species in the mountainous jungles of Kinabalu Park, located in the Malaysian portion of the island of Borneo. A key part of his research will be studying how development speed and clutch sizes affect birds' abilities to fight off diseases and parasites. Martin intends to work five weeks in Borneo for the next three years, while his assistants will stay in the field for four and a half months each year.