Kudos, November 2015

Faculty, staff and students excel in every area of endeavor on campus and (quite) beyond. A sampling of solid achievements by our colleagues shared over the last month:

The Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative (GoMRI) Research Board announced awards of nearly $38 million to individuals and teams studying the effects of oil on the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem and public health. Among the awardees are professor and head of the department of marine sciences Daniela Di Iorio ($1.2m) for her team's research on Vertical Upwelling and Bottom-boundary Layer Dispersal at a Natural Seep Site, and associate professor of marine sciences Adrian Burd ($1m) for his project, Oil-Marine Snow-Mineral Aggregate Interactions and Sedimentation during the 2010 Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

Congratulations to the sizable group of Franklin College faculty and graduate students who organized and participated in the “Borrowers and Lenders” conference sponsored by the Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation. The conference, “Appropriation in an Age of Global Shakespeare,” took place on the UGA campus Nov. 12-14 and included invited guests, presenters and speakers form around the world. Faculty from the departments of English, theatre and film studies, the Willson Center and other units put on a memorable conference at the Russell Special Collections Libraries

Franklin professor of English and director of the Institute of African American Studies Valerie Babb and Meigs Distinguished Teaching professor Music Jean Martin-Williams were among nine faculty members and administrators selected for the inaugural class of Women’s Leadership Fellows at UGA

UGA moved up six places to rank 11th among all U.S. institutions in the 2015 Open Doors Report on the number of U.S. students studying abroad. The majority of UGA students travel abroad while pursuing degrees from the Franklin College

Franklin College students and alumni made up the lion’s share of the ten recipients of Fulbright awards from UGA for 2015-2016

Researchers led by Boris Striepen, Distinguished Research Professor in Cellular Biology in the Franklin College and a member of the Center for Tropical and Emerging Global Diseases, received $1 million from the Wellcome Trust and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to speed the development of new drugs for the treatment of cryptosporidiosis, a major cause of diarrheal disease and mortality in young children around the world

And the Georgia Debate Union, which organizes and fields competitive policy debate teams at the University of Georgia, emerged victorious at the 2015 Vanderbilt intercollegiate debate tournament held in Nashville, TN. Congratulations to our students and their faculty advisors in the department of communication studies for their continued success in competitive collegiate debate

Image: statue of William Shakespeare at the centre of Leicester Square Gardens, London, with inscription from the play, "Twelfth Night." via wikimedia commons.