Tags: Human Nature

grid of six headshots
Kudos, April 2018

Awards season celebrates many of our best and the accolades continue for Franklin College faculty and students. Among the many honors, inductions and elections: Janet Westpheling, professor of genetics in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, is president-electof the Society for Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology. SIMB is a nonprofit, international association dedicated to the advancement of microbiological sciences,…

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2018 Josiah Meigs Teaching Professor Patricia Richards

Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies Patricia Richards is known as a demanding instructor who dares her students to accept challenges that make them want to think on a level beyond a single course or grade: Fostering intellectual excitement in the classroom that inspires students, she helps build some of UGA’s most forward-thinking interdisciplinary programs. In addition to her joint appointment in the sociology department and the…

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2018 Josiah Meigs Teaching Professor Michael Marshall

The Franklin College is home to two of the three 2018 Josiah Meigs Teaching Professors, profiled in the Honors & Awards issue of Columns. One of three is photography professor Michael Marshall: Michael Marshall believes that artists should have a role in facilitating change and shaping the world around them. He has put that philosophy into practice and guides others to do the same. “Change can be difficult, and I am consistently…

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Mellon grant will strengthen humanities programs

A $500,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will enable the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts to expand its Global Georgia Initiative, a public humanities program in place since 2013: In its first six years, the Global Georgia Initiative has engaged the humanities and arts in exploring global issues of public concern in a diversity of local contexts, serving audiences at UGA and throughout the Athens community…

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Thank a Donor

  UGA students are gathering Thursday at Tate Plaza from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. for Thank A Donor Day to show their appreciation for support of alumni and friends. At this celebration, students will have creative opportunities to thank those donors who have enriched their experiences at UGA. There will be prizes, photos with Hairy Dawg, music and more. It's another beautiful spring day on campus. Our students make it all the better by…

Photo one woman treating another in a lab
Undergraduates present research at CURO Symposium

Presentations on the best of UGA undergraduate research are underway at the annual CURO Symposium, held this year on April 9-10 at the Classic Center in downtown Athens: Hosted by CURO, the Center for Undergraduate Research Opportunities, this year’s symposium is the largest to date, with more than 575 participants. These undergraduates are pursuing 103 different majors from 14 UGA schools and colleges. Collectively, they are…

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Moran receives SEC Faculty Achievement Award

Distinguished Research Professor Mary Ann Moran has earned a number of honors over the course of her career. The latest is being named UGA’s recipient of the 2018 Southeastern Conference Faculty Achievement Award: The SEC award, which is administered by provosts at the 14 universities in the conference, recognizes professors with outstanding records in teaching and scholarship who serve as role models for students and other faculty members…

three heads shot - two women and one man
Kudos, March 2018

Awards season is always a time of celebration for the Franklin College, and we congratulate our colleagues (and students) on recent recognition, grants and professorships: Half of the six recipients of UGA’s highest recognition for excellence in instruction are from Franklin faculty members – Christine Alright from the department of Classics received the Russell Award for Excellence in Teaching – Athens CEO, UGA Today. Professor of…

photo of underwater autonomous vehicle
Noted and Quoted, March 2018

Great diversity of subjects, opinions, expertise and sources in this month's round-up faculty, students and alumni appearing in the media: Can narcissists actually change their ways? We asked the experts – professor of psychology  Keith Campbell quoted in Huffington Post Researchers receive $10M to create computational and informatics tools for glycoscience – project co-led by Professor of biochemistry and molecular biology …

photo of students holding Brazilian and American flags
UGA-Minas Gerais partnership receives NAFSA 2018 Spotlight Award

Building on interdisciplinary collaborations across campus made possible through the Portuguese Flagship Program, UGA is one of eight universities nationwide to be recognized for its exemplary international programs and partnerships by NAFSA, a nonprofit association dedicated to international education: The university’s network of partnerships within the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais received NAFSA’s 2018 Senator Paul Simon…

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Focus on the faculty: Hilda Kurtz

Professor of geography Hilda Kurtz has a strong belief in educational equity and diversity, as well as a great ability to tap into students’ curiosity in the classroom: My responsibilities include research, teaching and service. My research concerns alternative food politics, and more recently, organic certification. I currently teach courses in human geography at the introductory, upper-division and graduate levels. In addition to…

A Brief History of Time
Stephen Hawking, R.I.P.

On behalf of cosmologists everywhere, as well as all who share a love for knowledge and intellectual elegance, we salute the life of the great physicist and theorist Stephen Hawking: With mathematician Roger Penrose, Hawking used Einstein’s theory of relativity to trace the origins of time and space to a single point of zero size and infinite density. Their work gave mathematical expression to the Big Bang theory, proposed by Belgian priest…

photo of two people in a lab
Battling neglected diseases

Great overview of the work by Franklin College faculty in the Center for Tropical and Emerging Global Diseases, where multi-track efforts are yielding gains against some of the world's worst scourges: Founded 20 years ago by Regents Professor of Cellular Biology Rick Tarleton, CTEGD consolidates UGA’s extensive, campus-wide tropical disease knowledge and drug discovery expertise into an interdisciplinary research unit that focuses on…

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Adams receives 2018 DuPont award

Michael W.W. Adams, Distinguished Research Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, is co-recipient of the 2018 DuPont Industrial Biosciences Award in Applied and Environmental Microbiology from the American Society for Microbiology: He shares the award with Robert Kelly of North Carolina State University. They were recognized for their groundbreaking use and genetic manipulation of…

old postcard of campus
Old College, new students, Spring Break 2018

Thanks for the shoutout UGA, but of course the Franklin College has the largest enrollment at the university! We are the heart of UGA - the largest, oldest, most academically diverse college on campus. The arts, the [social, mathemical, physical, & biological] sciences, the humanities - it's all here and we provide the academic underpinning that supports all other schools and colleges. Franklin College students make every day a great day at…

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New glycoscience informatics portal: GlyGen

Glycoscience is the study of the structure and function of carbohydrates — organic compounds that play critical roles in nearly every aspect of biology. UGA is a partner in a new project that will soon be able to provide a way for questions asked by those studying glycoscience to be answered by big data: The National Institutes of Health has jointly awarded a $10 million grant to UGA and George Washington University to build a glycoscience…

logo graphic with thumbprint of the state of Georgia
NEH Application-Writing Workshop at UGA

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) will present a Regional Application-Writing Workshop on February 28, 2018 at the University of Georgia Center for Continuing Education in Athens: The workshop is supported by the University of Georgia Office of Research and is hosted by the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts and the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, in partnership with Georgia…

group photo of men and women
February Kudos

Accomplishments of note by students, faculty, staff and alumni over the past month include: 31 Franklin College alumni were recognized this year in the 2018 class of the Bulldog 100 fastest growing businesses owned or operated by UGA alumni The student-led UGA Small Satellite Research Laboratory is one of two projects chosen by the United States Air Force to build and launch satellites into space Inside the “Blue Planet II” dive into the…

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ClinEpiDB launch

An international team of researchers has launched the Clinical Epidemiology Database, an open-access online resource enabling investigators to maximize the utility and reach of their data and to make optimal use of information released by others: Population-based epidemiological studies provide new opportunities for innovation and collaboration among researchers addressing pressing global-health concerns. As with the vast quantities of…

photo of man and woman with plants
Researchers identify gene to improve plant yield, growth for biofuels

A research team led by professor of biochemistry and molecular biology Debra Mohnen has discovered that manipulation of the same gene in poplar trees and switchgrass produced plants that grow better and are more efficiently converted to biofuels: Due to the composition of plant cell walls, plant material is not efficiently broken down or deconstructed to the basic sugars that are converted to biofuels. In a paper published today…

photo of garbage on a conveyor
Leaning into the Plastics Problem

Once considered the key to all manner of convenience, practicality and profit, plastics turn out to be one of most dangerous and long-lasting pollutants to the natural environment. Georgia Magazine takes a look at how UGA faculty researchers are working to approach the problem from many angles, including the development of new materials with industry partners: Jason Locklin, an associate professor in UGA’s chemistry department, had a related…

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UGA to partner in new humanities grant for archeological study

An international research team that includes assistant professor of anthropology and geography Suzanne Pilaar Birch has been awarded Arts and Humanities Research Council UK funding for their four-year project on Radical Death and Early State Formation in the Ancient Near East.  Using new evidence from the Early Bronze Age graves of Başur Höyük, on the Upper Tigris, the project will examine how ritual killing was implicated in…

photo of jellyfish half in water
Joye featured in Planet Earth: Blue Planet II

  Georgia Athletic Association Professor of Arts and Sciences Samantha Joye is featured in the new BBC documentary series, Planet Earth: Blue Planet II: Presented by Sir David Attenborough and scored by Academy Award-winner Hans Zimmer, Planet Earth: Blue Planet II takes viewers on a revelatory and magical journey into the mesmerizing world of our oceans — by turn tempestuous and serene, exquisitely beautiful and bleakly…

photo man speaking at lecture
Kudos, January 2018

Congratulations on the many recent honors and accomplishments of faculty, students and alumni of the Franklin College and our colleagues around the university: The University of Georgia observed its anniversary as the birthplace of public higher education in America during the week of Jan. 22-26, and the UGA Alumni Association celebrated the occasion by hosting a weeklong series of events, including the 16th annual Founders Day Lecture Jan. 22…

brain graphic, with photo of two men
Study offers new insight into brain architecture and function

Great collaboration from computer science and engineering faculty: The researchers in UGA’s College of Engineering and the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences’ department of computer science say their study is the first to identify specific areas they call “three hinges.” They believe these junctions of three ridges along the brain’s surface play an important role in how the brain forms as well as how it works. “The traditional way of…
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