Sharks and rays represent one of the oldest offshoots in the evolutionary tree that gave rise to jawed vertebrate animals. This ancient lineage is represented today by a wide diversity of forms that range from the 6 meter "wing-span" Manta ray to the 20 centimeter long cigar sharks, from the sluggish wobbegongs of Australia to the high performance open ocean mako's that have burst speeds of 60 k.p.h., and from filter feeders like the whale shark to some of the most effective and notorious predators in the sea like the Great White Shark . The first stage in understanding how the evolutionary process might have shaped such a diversity of form involves understanding the inter-relationships among these animals.

Professor Michael Navon will be a keynote speaker at the 2008 International Conference on Hydro-Science and Engineering (ICHE2008) September 8^th through 11^th in Nagoya, Japan. The conference theme is New Challenges in Hydro-Science and Engineering for Sustainability through Flood Risk, Water Resources & Ecosystem Assessment. Professor Navon's keynote is entitled Reduced Order Modeling of an Adaptive Mesh Ocean Model.

With the support of the Provost and the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, the FSU Board of Trustees, at its June meeting, approved the formation of the new Department of Scientific Computing. The fifteen founding faculty of the new department are drawn from the School of Computational Science; these faculty formerly were affiliated with the Departments of Biological Sciences, Chemical and Biomedical Engineering, Chemistry, Geological Sciences, Mathematics, Mechanical Engineering, and Physics. Eppes Professor Max Gunzburger will serve as the first chair of the new department. The new department also inherits the graduate degree programs previously offered by the School of Computational Science.

Dr. Max Gunzburger, Eppes Professor and SCS Director, is the 2008 recipient of the Reid Prize in Mathematics. The prize will be awarded in July at the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) in San Diego, California. Click here for the complete article.

The 4th Annual Meeting of the Florida Society for Materials Simulation (FSMS) is held at the School of Computational Science May 5-7, 2008. FSMS is an annual forum for faculty and graduate students of various State of Florida universities where they discuss progress in the field and plan mutual collaborations.