About UNCAmemories.com
A Centennial Website Developed by Michael Ruiz
Professor Emeritus of Physics & Astronomy
Welcome. I am the Webmaster for UNCAmemories.com (alias UNCA-memories.com). This website is not an official website of UNC-Asheville, but one provided by me in order to add to the Centennial Celebration of 2027. I joined the UNC-Asheville faculty in the Fall of 1978 as an Assistant Professor of Physics. I served as Chair of Physics from 1980 to 2000 and retired after the Spring 2021 semester. I am very interested in history and have collected many UNCA publications over the years. For example, I acquired the UNCA catalogs starting with the academic year 1964-1965, when UNCA became a four-year institution, to the academic year 1977-1978: catalogs left behind by the first Chair of Physics, James Wills, when he retired in 1979. From year to year I saved all my catalogs and scanned them after I retired. I stopped with the 2004-2005 catalog since UNCA started posting pdf versions of the catalogs for 2005-2006 and beyond. All catalogs are posted at this website.
Photo Credit: John Warner
During the last 20 years of my tenure at UNCA I took tens of thousands of photos and hundreds of videos. This collection serves as a base from which I draw to include photos and videos at this website. I also scanned brochures and publications I found in my home office after I retired.
I discovered a wealth of scanned newspapers and yearbooks available at DigitalNC.com, a project of the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center, Wilson Special Collections Library at UNC-Chapel Hill. Then, there is the Special Collections and University Archives in our Ramsey Library at UNC-Asheville. Ashley Whittle, Head of Special Collections and University Archives, was most generous in sharing digital photos with me for this website. As a member of the UNCA Retired Faculty and Administrators Association (RFAA), I am receiving their assistance, especially from members Phyllis Betts and Arnold Wengrow.
UNCA-memories is not meant to be comprehensive in all its categories. It is simply a product of one retired faculty member collecting, editing, and posting materials in his retirement years. If you have something that you feel will enhance the website, please contact me. My Email address is in the Footer.
I hired my son Evan, a computer science graduate from Carnegie Mellon (2003) to assist me with the complicated technologies required to develop a website that looks good on the various devices used today to roam the Internet. By the way, as a high-school student in the late 1990s, Evan helped me launch our own course-management system for my general-education courses at UNC-Asheville: PHYS 101 Light and Visual Phenomena, PHYS 102 The Physics of Sound and Music, and ASTR 105 Astronomy. We were honored in 2002 when CNN chose to highlight our innovative course-delivery system, becoming the top story in science and technology for three days - our 15 minutes of fame!
I hope you enjoy the website, developed out of love for UNC-Asheville and in preparation for upcoming UNCA Centennial in 2027.
Michael Ruiz, Asheville, August 2026
Michael Ruiz, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus
Department of Physics & Astronomy
Faculty Member: 1978-2021
Physics Chair: 1980-2000
Lifetime RFAA Member