The NAU Review — President Cruz Rivera’s vision for the year, new research questions an old conclusion and a look at anti-Roma discrimination

Aug. 21, 2024

In NAU’s third annual convocation, President Cruz Rivera talked about the university’s 125-year legacy of helping students find a better life, shared his goals for the coming year and cracked a few jokes. He also discussed the need for a strong financial foundation and the steps NAU will take this fiscal year to ensure the university can continue fulfilling its mission well into the future.

A lot less than we previously thought, it turns out. Students, alumni and faculty from the School of Earth and Sustainability leveraged the power of big data to take another look at the 4.2 ka event—a historic megadrought thought to have Earth-altering effects. What they found in the data pointed to a different conclusion, not only about that event but about how the climate may change in the future.

Driven by a desire to learn more about his ancestry, NAU sophomore Henry Petterson spent part of the summer at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum researching the history of anti-Roma law. He found that legal discrimination against his “gypsy” ancestors predated the Nazi regime by many decades.