The 19th century Native Hawaiian artist, after whom UH Hilo’s Hawaiian language immersion school in Keaau is named, now also has a crater on Mecury named after him.

From The Honolulu Star Bulletin:

Heavenly honor bestowed on Nawahi

The native of Puna was an artist, teacher, lawyer, publisher

When the Messenger spacecraft begins orbiting Mercury in March 2011, it will look down on “Nawahi Crater.”

A little smaller than Kauai, the crater is named for Kahooluhi Nawahi, also known as Joseph Kahooluhi Nawahiokalaniopuu.

The self-taught artist from Puna, who died in 1896 at age 54, was known as a Renaissance man with many talents and interests from art, law and teaching to newspaper publishing.

Jeffrey Gillis-Davis, University of Hawaii-Manoa planetary researcher and member of the Messenger space mission team, proposed Nawahi’s name for the crater in Mercury’s Calloris Basin after consulting the Honolulu Academy of Arts.

A Hawaiian language immersion school in Keaau on the Big Island, Ke Kula O Nawahiokalaniopuu Iki, also bears the artist’s name.

Tonight’s guest on Focus on UH Hilo cable TV show is Hawaii Small Business Development Center Network’s state director William Carter. Carter will discuss the business incubator’s role in development of small enterprises and services that promote job and sales growth.

The 30-minute show airs live tonight on local cable Channel 55 starting at 8:00 p.m. For those who do not have cable, please contact the marketing and alumni office for DVD of show.

Focus on UH Hilo, hosted by Chancellor Tseng and moderated by Ken Hupp, highlights UH Hilo programs, developments and partnerships with community organizations.

For more information, email Michelle Araki at melander@hawaii.edu.

Cathrine Edmonds’s defense of her PhD thesis, “The Reliability and Validity of the Maori Languge Proficiency in Writing Test: Kaiaka Reo Year 8,” will be held Thursday, Nov. 20, 10:30 a.m. at University Classroom Building, room #123. All members of the university community are welcome to attend.

Ms. Edmonds will be the first student to finish a PhD dissertation at UH Hilo under the new PhD program in Indigenous Language and Culture Revitalization at Ka Haka Ula o Keelikolani College of Hawaiian language.

An agreement between the Academia Sinica and the University of Hawai‘i at Hilo was signed this week by Chancellor Rose Tseng during a trip to Taiwan hosted by Hawai‘i Governor Linda Lingle.

The Hawai‘i-Taiwan joint partnership in undergraduate education, community outreach and astronomy research, stemming from the Taiwan-American Occultation Survey, will facilitate the enhancement of current TAOS research capabilities in Hawai‘i and initiate reciprocal educational, outreach, and research programs.

The purpose of the TAOS project (http://taos.asiaa.sinica.edu.tw) is to measure directly the number of Kuiper Belt Objects in the outer solar system. This knowledge will help scientists to understand the formation and evolution of comets in the early solar system.

“The TAOS-Hawai‘i partnership will lead to an increase in the number of under-represented minorities in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) professions, and expand the ability and mission of the UH Hilo ‘Imiloa Astronomy Center of Hawai‘i to interpret the relationship between science and culture,” Governor Lingle said.

“Astronomy and space science have become significant activities generating income and employment in Hawai‘i,” said Ted Liu, director of the Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism. “On the Big Island it is topped only by tourism. The Mauna Kea observatories bring in over $150 million dollars to the local economy and employ over 600 workers, including many kama‘aina.”

TAOS is an ongoing international research program led by the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics with a number of other institutions, including the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Taiwan’s National Central University (Institute of Astronomy), Yonsei University (South Korea), and, through this agreement, the newest member - UH Hilo.

Academia Sinica was founded June 9, 1928. As a prominent academic institution in Taiwan, Academia Sinica has two basic missions: conducting scientific research in its own institutions, as well as providing guidance, channels of communication, and encouragement to raising academic standards in the country.

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Teams of scientists from four universities, led by the College of Pharmacy at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, are presenting a large-scale research concept to the National Science Foundation (NSF) in order to study traditional medicine. The universities involved are UH Hilo, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Rutgers University and Purdue University.

“Research is becoming more of a collaborative effort because of fiscal limitations and the complexity of problems we face,” said Dr. John Pezzuto (pictured), dean of the College of Pharmacy in Hilo. “It’s important for us to reach out to other schools to share our expertise and also to show we are a competitive force in the educational arena. It’s also an important step in gaining final approval in the accreditation process, which will take place when our first class graduates in 2011.”

Using advanced analytical technology such as X-ray diffraction, spectroscopy and bioanalytics, the researchers will investigate how characteristics of traditional medicines affect how they work in people. The relationships will be pulled together with informatics and bioinformatics, or the computational organization and analysis of the data. The researchers hope to fill a gap in how to identify the important elements of traditional medicine to treat serious diseases.

“Many traditional medicines have hundreds, perhaps thousands of years of history and it is almost certain that some of them could provide important leads for new drugs or new uses for old medicines,” Pezzuto said.

Team leaders from UH Hilo are Dr. Robert Borris, associate dean for research in pharmacy, and Dr. Kenneth Morris, professor of pharmaceutics. Faculty from the departments of biology and chemistry are helping to lead the effort, as well as other faculty from throughout the College of Pharmacy.

The NSF Science and Technology program is designed to support large-scale research across institutions to advance and create new science. This pre-proposal will be decided on after April 2009, and will be one of the many ways UH Hilo’s College of Pharmacy is building a strong research reputation in the global healthcare industry, Pezzuto said.

To help communicate this vision, Pezzuto is presenting an invited lecture, co-authored with Morris, to scientists at the Seventh Annual International Conference on Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research. The conference, held in Washington, D.C. this week, is organized by the American Association for Cancer Research. Current work, conducted through a collaborative project involving UH Hilo College of Pharmacy, Purdue University, Scripts Institute of Oceanography and the University Illinois at Chicago, is funded by the National Cancer Institute. The lecture focuses on linking traditional medicine to advanced informatics, which is already used for the redesign of drug manufacturing and gene research.

Link to full story.

UH Hilo’s Pacific International Space Center for Exploration Systems, or PISCES, hosts team of NASA scientists this week, who are conducting research at Mauna Kea in preparation for space exploration.

From Big Island VideoNews.com:

NASA wrapped two weeks of tests on the volcanic soil of the Big Island of Hawaii’s Mauna Kea, and invited the media to take a look at the technological concepts that will assist future space missions.

The goal was to test systems that will one day assist astronauts in maintaining a sustainable and affordable lunar outpost, by drilling into alien soil and extracting water that could be used to create oxygen.

NASA’s lunar exploration plan currently projects that lunar resources could generate one to two tons of oxygen annually, or the same amount that four to six people living at a lunar outpost might breathe in a year.

The tests were held on Hawaii because Mauna Kea’s soil is so similar to the regolith that covers the moon’s surface. Three prototype systems were tested.

The tests were hosted by Pacific International Space Center [for Exploration Systems], or PISCES, based at the University of Hawaii - Hilo.

In this video, William Larson, Chief of NASA’s Applied Sciences Division, explains the tests in greater detail.