Improving Georgia and the World

This month's Discover feature highlights several examples of research excellence that reach to every corner of campus. UGA's key research themes provide context for the extraordinary work by our faculty and students:

Safeguarding and Sustaining our World includes research being conducted in fields as varied as cybersecurity, plant breeding and genetics, digital humanities and export controls.

UGA’s Plant Center, for example, is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year and has more than 50 faculty members. Plant center researchers have sequenced the genomes of commercially important crops ranging from peanuts to canola, and new crop and ornamental plant varieties developed by faculty members at the university generate approximately $4 million in annual royalties to the UGA Research Foundation. 

UGA is also home to the nation’s first standalone school of ecology, the Odum School of Ecology, and world-renowned researchers in marine and atmospheric sciences.

On North Campus, the Center for International Trade and Security uses its research findings to inform trainings given to government officials, academics and industry representatives from 60 countries. CITS has garnered more than $3.8 million in external research funding over the past two years alone and has made China a major area of focus, with workshops, research and corporate outreach.

There are so many disparate threads of fascinating research in our departments, centers and programs, tying them together thematically really helps us grasp the impact of the collective effort. We promote solutions that effect that state, that fulfill the mission of the university and provide its thrust as the state's Flagship institution to attract the best students and faculty even as it builds in the necessary innovation that leads to new questions. It's a self-reinforcing cycle that depends on great individual efforts and institutional commitments. And it works.

Image: Chemistry Ph.D. student Evan White, left to right, talks with professor Jason Locklin and fellow Chemistry Ph.D. student Anandi Roy about an experiment on a multiskop surface analytical instrument in Locklin's labs at the Riverbend Research South facility.