Tags: faculty

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Kudos, March 2021

Apples, amazing students, a major book prize and national research awards, from the NIH as well as the National Institute of General Medicine Sciences, headline the kudos for Franklin College faculty, students, and alumni during March: Foundation Fellow Zakiyya Ellington came to UGA in part for the big sports atmosphere and in part for the travel associated with her fellowship. She’s studied at Oxford and traveled to…

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Timothy Adams named University Professor

Two UGA faculty members have been named University Professors, a title bestowed on those who have had a significant impact on the university in addition to fulfilling their regular academic responsibilities. The 2020-2021 honorees are Timothy Adams Jr., the Mildred Goodrum Heyward Professor in the Hugh Hodgson School of Music, and James N. Moore, Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor, Distinguished Research Professor in the…

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Noted and Quoted, March 2021

COVID, Post-COVID, Fish oil and work/life balance were a few of the many recent subjects of media interest informed by Franklin College faculty expertise. A sample from the past the month: After years of early storms, forecasters consider moving start of hurricane season to May 15 – Marshall Shepherd, Georgia Athletic Association Distinguished Professor of Geography and Atmospheric Sciences, quoted by the Sun Sentinel Why is…

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Should you take fish oil? Depends on your genotype

Fish oil supplements are a billion-dollar industry built on a foundation of purported, but not proven, health benefits. Now, new research from a team led by a University of Georgia scientist indicates that taking fish oil only provides health benefits if you have the right genetic makeup. The study, led by Kaixiong Ye and published in PLOS Genetics, focused on fish oil (and the omega-3 fatty acids it contains) and its effect on…

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Rozario receives NIH Director’s New Innovator Award

One of UGA's newest faculty members, Tania Rozario has received a $2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health Director’s New Innovator Award Program, which supports early-career investigators of exceptional creativity who propose high-risk, high-reward research projects: Rozario is an assistant professor with a joint appointment in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences Department of Genetics and the Center for Tropical…

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COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2021 BANCROFT PRIZES

"Unworthy Republic, The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory" by Claudio Saunt, Distinguished Research Professor and Richard B. Russell Professor in American History, is one of two acclaimed works that will be awarded the 2021 Bancroft Prizes in American History and Diplomacy by Columbia University Libraries: The Bancroft Prize, which includes an award of $10,000 to each author, is administered…

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Kannan receives $2M NIH MIRA award

University of Georgia faculty member Natarajan Kannan is a recipient of a highly prestigious Maximizing Investigator Research Award, or MIRA, from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. The MIRA award is intended to provide investigators with greater stability and flexibility in funding to enhance scientific productivity and make important scientific breakthroughs. The program funds research by the nation’s most highly…

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Heritage Orchard Project

Hundreds of apple varieties thrived in orchards across North Georgia a century ago, before an evolving apple industry swept them off shelves and tables, never to return. But with the help of a dedicated group of University of Georgia researchers, Extension agents and volunteer enthusiasts, Georgia’s lost apple varieties are making a comeback. The newly planted Heritage Apple Orchard, located at UGA’s Georgia Mountain Research…

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CTSA team science award goes to 3 UGA researchers

UGA faculty members Katie Ehrlich, Brad Phillips and Ted Ross were honored with the Presidents’ Award of Distinction for Team Science from the Georgia Clinical and Translational Science Alliance at a virtual conference held March 5: The three UGA faculty were recognized for their interdisciplinary collaboration in studying immune responses to influenza vaccination, each from a different disciplinary perspective. Georgia CTSA is a…

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Trailblazing women in statistics

Women have been leaders in the field of statistics for decades, with contributions ranging from theoretical developments to applications in biology, climatology and medicine. A recent paper by University of Georgia statistics professor Lynne Billard, “Women Trailblazers in the Statistical Profession,” provides a historical introduction to these remarkable scholars from around the globe. Billard met or knew several of these extraordinary…

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Better guidelines needed to protect student-athletes

Every year, sports coaches have to navigate how to safely get their teams in shape to compete while temperatures during outdoor practices soar. New research from the University of Georgia aims to help them do just that Different states have different heat policies guiding outdoor practices. In areas less prone to extreme temperatures—Alaska, for example—strong heat guidelines aren’t as urgently needed as in hotter regions But for states…

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Noted and Quoted, February 2021

From winter storms and the polar vortex to volcanoes, COVID romance and insect couple longevity, Franklin College faculty expertise was present across global media during February. A sample: Is Texas really a serious rival in Silicon Valley? Stephen Mihm, associate professor of history, writing in the ExBulletin Research finds link between CO2, big volcano eruptions – research by assistant professor of geology Mattia Pistone reported…

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Kudos, February 2021

The 60th anniversary of UGA's desegregation, our newest Gates Cambridge Scholar and welcome news from the National Academy of Engineering headline Franklin College kudos for February: J. Marshall Shepherd, the Georgia Athletic Association Distinguished Professor of Geography and Atmospheric Sciences, elected to the National Academy of Engineering –UGA Today Athens CEO, WGAU University of Georgia commemorates 60th…

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‘Virtues of taking a risk’ helps shape a young scholar

Gregory H. Robinson, Foundation Distinguished Professor of Chemistry, wrote and published a scholarly tribute to Professor Jerry L. Atwood, who “inspired a generation of chemists to indulge their imaginations and to take risks in their pursuit of chemistry,” including Dr. Robinson: The most consequential friendship of my life inauspiciously began on a cold, late-November evening in 1979, in Jacksonville, Alabama. Of course, I did not see it…

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New materials provide link to innovative products

When we think about the links to the future – the global transition to solar and wind energy, tactile virtual reality or synthetic neurons – there’s no shortage of big ideas. It’s the materials to execute the big ideas – the ability to manufacture the lithium-ion batteries, opto-electronics and hydrogen fuel cells – that stand between concept and reality. Enter two-dimensional materials, the latest step in innovation. Consisting of a single…

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Morales-Franceschini awarded Anzaldúa Poetry Prize

University of Georgia faculty member Eric Morales-Franceschini has been awarded the 2020 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Poetry Prize. The Gloria E. Anzaldúa Poetry Prize is awarded annually, in conjunction with the Anzaldúa Literary Trust, to a poet whose work explores how place shapes identity, imagination, and understanding. Special attention is given to poems that exhibit multiple vectors of thinking: artistic, theoretical, and social, which is to…

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The link between CO2 and big volcano eruptions

Volcanologists from the University of Georgia and two Swiss universities found a link between carbon dioxide and the volume of gas trapped in magma, which could help predict the intensity and magnitude of a volcanic eruption. Higher levels of CO2, they found, lead to an increase in the total volume of gas in magma, which may result in violent, explosive eruptions. The new findings could one day lead to better early-warning systems for…

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Devos part of team to unlock switchgrass genome

As reported Jan. 27 in Nature, a nationwide team that includes UGA faculty member Katrien Devos has produced a high-quality reference sequence of the complex switchgrass genome, marking a critical step for a plant species that has long been studied for its potential application in the production of biofuels. The team was led by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology and the U.S.…

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Kudos, January 2021

Excellence in research and scholarship already abounds in the New Year. Congratulations on the many recently announced, fellowships, grants and honors for Franklin College faculty. A sample: Cassia Roth, assistant professor of History & Latin American and Caribbean studies, has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for research on her second book, “Birthing Abolition: Enslaved Women, Reproduction, and…

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Noted and Quoted, January 2021

“Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory,” by UGA history professor Claudio Saunt, was a 2020 National Book Award finalist and has found a place on several best books of 2020 lists, including the Washington Post and The Atlantic magazine. In it, Saunt argues that removal of the Southeastern native tribes was not a historical sidebar, but a critical event leading to the Civil War two decades later…

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Focus on the Faculty: Eric Ferreira

Eric Ferreira’s own early fascination with solving puzzles helps him inspire students to piece together the logic behind organic chemistry. “I was always interested in logic puzzles and things of that nature that as a kid,” said Ferreira, an associate professor in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences’ chemistry department. “As a sophomore in college, my first semester organic chemistry professor really illustrated the logic behind it,…

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Mountains as socio-ecological landscapes

The highest point in the state of Georgia, Brasstown Bald, is known to native Cherokee as Etonah and to many Georgians as among the best locations to view the changing fall colors. The term “bald” is used to describe deforested mountaintops in the southern Appalachians that have 360-degree unobstructed views. And the views can indeed be spectacular. But the high, grassland mountaintops, rather than naturally occurring, are part of a…

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Spring 2021 Innovation Fellows

UGA Faculty members Melanie Reber and Eric Harvill have been named Innovation Fellows for spring 2021, a semester-long fellowship designed to help faculty align their research activities with industry needs and bring their discoveries to the marketplace: Reber, an assistant professor of chemistry in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, is developing a cavity-enhanced, two-dimensional spectroscopy that uniquely combines…

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Roth awarded NEH fellowship

Cassia Roth, assistant professor of History & Latin American and Caribbean studies, has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship. Roth’s award is among the grants announced by the NEH Dec. 16 to support 213 humanities projects in 44 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. The fellowship will support Roth’s writing a book based on her scholarship, “Birthing Abolition: Enslaved Women, Reproduction, and…

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How people solve global problems

What do the 3,000-year-old actions of an Egyptian pharaoh say about how we should tackle the biggest challenges of the 21st century? Quite a bit, according to anthropologists at the University of Georgia who analyzed archeological evidence over thousands of years to examine how societies have approached adversity. Their work suggests that rigid, top-down approaches to complex problems have been a doomed strategy throughout human history.…
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