Tags: faculty

photo of man with sugar cane stalk, day
Culture and community resonate at the Penn Center

Culture and Community at the Penn Center National Historic Landmark District, a partnership between the Penn Center, on St. Helena Island, SC, and the Willson Center, continued its first year’s public programs with a five-day cycle of research residencies in early June, 2022. The residencies brought students, faculty, and community experts from across the southeastern U.S. for unique place-based studies on the theme of…

photo of two women talking on a couch
Feminism may lead to better body image

Important new research from communication studies describing how mothers and daughters who follow feminist principles speak more positively about their bodies. Published in Body Image, the study found that feminist mothers and their daughters felt more positively about their bodies and less shame about how their bodies look than those who don’t ascribe to feminist ideals. Additionally, the paper showed that how mothers view and speak about…

photo of woman leaning on counter, with healthy fruits
Women can live better with an improved diet

Women tend to live longer than men but typically have higher rates of illness. Now, new research from University of Georgia suggests these higher rates of illness can be improved by a better diet, one that is high in pigmented carotenoids such as yams, kale, spinach, watermelon, bell peppers, tomatoes, oranges and carrots. These bright-colored fruits and vegetables are particularly important in preventing visual and cognitive loss. “The idea is…

photo of woman sitting in chair with book, books shelves, and window
Jamie Kreiner and the quiet forces of history

War. Politics. Changing technology. Plagues and famine and migration and outsized personalities. These are major forces that shape the world we live in, and many historians spend their careers studying them. Jamie Kreiner takes a different approach. A professor of history in the Franklin College of Arts & Sciences who specializes in the early Middle Ages, Kreiner looks for the quieter agents at work. “I like getting beneath…

photo of reconstruct indigenous council house
The origins of democracy in the Americas

New research from the UGA Laboratory of Archaeology, together with its partners in the Muscogee Nation, indicates that inhabitants of the Americas may have been practicing democratic-style collective governance at least a millennium before European contact. According to a new paper published in the journal American Antiquity, artifacts from the Cold Springs site in central Georgia indicate the presence of a “council house” on the site…

photo of woman looking up, with sunglasses reflecting sky
Howe awarded for lifetime achievement by Society for the Study of Southern Literature

University of Georgia professor LeAnne Howe was awarded the Richard Beale Davis Award for Distinguished Lifetime Service to Southern Letters by the Society for the Study of Southern Literature for her work as a scholar and writer. Howe received the award at the 2022 SSSL conference in Atlanta on June 26. The Richard Beale Davis Award for Distinguished Lifetime Service to Southern Letters is awarded every other year at the biennial…

book cover graphic with text and spike of wheat
History professor's book unpacks the story of Black Sea grain

2019 Guggenheim Fellow Scott Nelson, Georgia Athletic Association Professor in Humanities in the department of history, published a timely new book this year recounting the story of how people have been growing wheat along Ukraine’s Black Sea coast since at least 2700 BC. Nelson's book Oceans of Grain (Basic Books, 2022) has met with widespread acclaim worldwide for both its insights on this global commodity as well as grain's…

studio headshot photo of man
Peragine named Director of the Lamar Dodd School of Art

After a national search and great anticipation, the Lamar Dodd School of Art announced the appointment of Joseph Peragine to the position of director, effective August 1, 2022. Professor Peragine, an accomplished practicing artist, is an alum of the school (BFA, '83), and brings a wealth of experience to this position through his committed work as faculty and director of the Ernest G. Welch School of Art & Design at…

photo of woman in office with laptop, with graphic text
New Unscripted: Expedition to Antarctica

The new episode of our interview podcast Unscripted focuses on Patricia Yager, professor of marine sciences, and her recent experience co-leading a research expedition to the Amundsen Sea Polynya in western Antarctica. While many research projects on the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration were focused on sea level rise and the physical processes related to the melting, Yager served as co-chief scientist and lead P.I. on the project…

aerial photo of tulip fields, with roads and trees
Antifungal resistance: From “Big Chicken” to Big Tulip

The Genes to Genomes blog reports on recent research by UGA fungal biologists Michelle Momany and Marin Brewer, who reported in their findings that Aspergillus fumigatus isolated from clinical settings is resistant to agricultural fungicides. Infections have long been a deadly problem for hospital patients. Though modern medicine has an impressive array of antimicrobial drugs at its disposal, pathogens continue to evolve resistance,…

photo of people with screen background
UGA establishes School of Computing

Shortly after the close of the Spring semester, the University of Georgia gave the final approval to create the School of Computing, a new academic unit to be jointly administered by the Franklin College and the College of Engineering. In response to rising student enrollment and the growing role of computing in a range of fields, the University of Georgia has elevated its longstanding department of computer science to a School of Computing…

photo of man with case of small plants
Schmitz nominated for Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists

University of Georgia faculty member Robert Schmitz was recently chosen as a finalist for a national award for young scientists. The Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists is the world’s largest unrestricted prize honoring early career scientists and engineers. Schmitz is a plant biologist who performs groundbreaking research on plant epigenetics—the chemical modifications to DNA and associated proteins that alter gene expression—to…

photo of sunny day with trees and buildings
UGA faculty participate in ‘Reflections on Race’ workshop

The University of Georgia Franklin College of Arts and Sciences and the Office of Institutional Diversity sponsored the inaugural “Reflections on Race” Workshop on May 18-19 on the UGA campus, an effort led by Franklin College Associate Dean Jean Martin-Williams. Nine faculty members from nine departments representing all tenured and untenured ranks were selected to participate in the workshop, which included a distinguished group of…

photo man, wearing bracelet
The complexity of mixed-race ancestry

Some people see themselves as part of a sole racial group, others identify with multiple groups Mixed-race ancestry, a widespread fact of the human population for centuries, does not uniquely translate to any specific racial identity. A new study authored by a University of Georgia sociologist describes the experiences, beliefs, and personal characteristics such as skin color that play a role in self-identification. While the current era…

photo of man in lab with tubes, gauges, equipment, monitor
Bioexpression & Fermentation Facility: BFF to Georgia’s bioeconomy

Biomanufacturing has been around for thousands of years, though it wasn’t called that when our ancestors were making beer, wine, cheese, bread and vinegar. Mankind has long understood the value of fermentation, the metabolic process of converting things like sugar or starch into alcohol or acid. At the University of Georgia, biomanufacturing is based at the on-campus Bioexpression and Fermentation Facility, which has been churning out…

photo of shovel with dirt, vegetable, and hand
Waste management can reduce greenhouse gasses

Earth Day 2022 – Make it Count The cycle of producing, consuming and eliminating waste in a closed system (a.k.a. Earth) is the primary challenge of our time. Sustainable stewardship of the products and processes common to everyday life is increasingly coming the fore as we reach limits on waste management practices and recycling capacity, and witness the changing conditions these limits precipitate. Scientists, governments and private industry…

map graphic of Eastern US coastline with two inserts
New study shows resilience of early coastal communities in Georgia

Archaeologists have hypothesized that more than 4,500 years ago, communities on barrier islands along the southeastern coastlines of the North America were abruptly abandoned due to a sudden shift in climate. But new research from the University of Georgia Laboratory of Archaeology indicates that environmental change was happening both during the settlement of these island villages and—over centuries longer than previously…

photo of man outdoors
UGA’s Saunt awarded 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship

Claudio Saunt, Regents’ Professor and Russell Professor of American History in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, has been awarded a 2022 Fellowship by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Saunt is one of 180 artists, writers, scholars, and scientists honored across 51 fields. Guggenheim Fellowships are intended for individuals who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or…

headshot of man
Yang awarded business history book prize

Timothy Yang, associate professor in the department of history, was awarded the 2022 Hagley Prize for the best book in business history. Yang won for his book "A Medicated Empire: The Pharmaceutical Industry and Modern Japan" (Cornell University Press, 2021), which explores the history of Japan's pharmaceutical industry in the early twentieth century through a close account of Hoshi Pharmaceuticals, one of East Asia's most influential…

photo of man on boat with arms in water, day
New study: Microbial metabolites in the marine carbon cycle

A new study led UGA Foundation Distinguished Professor in the department of marine sciences and member of the National Academy of Sciences Mary Ann Moran describes the current 'state of the art' of studying microbial metabolites, and sets out some new approaches for further investigation. The new paper was published last week in the journal Nature Microbiology: One-quarter of photosynthesis-derived carbon on Earth rapidly cycles through a set of…

photo of masked nurse administering nasal swab test to patient
UGA team develops faster, cheaper COVID tests

A University of Georgia nanotechnology research group entered the race to develop a rapid test for COVID-19 in August 2020, running experiments on a new sensor for an American manufacturing company. The group, led by Yiping Zhao and Ralph Tripp, tested nanotechnology-based optical sensors designed for COVID-19 detection and saw the potential for their home-grown technology. In March 2022, the group filed a patent application and published…

photo of woman with garden in background, day
Lewis, Shannon among 2022 Meigs Professors

Five University of Georgia faculty members have been named Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professors, the university’s highest recognition for excellence in instruction. “Meigs Professors are an elite group of faculty members at an institution that places a great value on outstanding instruction,” said S. Jack Hu, the university’s senior vice president for academic affairs and provost. “I congratulate the recipients of this significant honor…

photo of water with plants in the foreground, shore in the distance
National Academies Gulf of Mexico report

A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine says that assessing the success of the nation’s largest ecological restoration investment effort will require continued improvements in data collection and synthesis and coordination across the Gulf of Mexico region. The April 2010 Deepwater Horizon platform explosion and oil spill seriously damaged Gulf of Mexico ecosystems from Texas to Florida…

photo of man, two women, and rain/wind gauge, outdoors,
Kudos, March 2022

We'll begin with some great news from the Southeastern Conference and our own department of geography and atmospheric sciences program: Marshall Shepherd, the Georgia Athletic Association Distinguished Professor of Geography and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Georgia, has been named the 2022 SEC Professor of the Year Department of English doctoral student Chanara Andrews-Bickers has been selected as a 2022 National…

photo of woman standing next to outline of Africa
Databases to help cure diseases

Jessica Kissinger is using her expertise in biology and big data to help other scientists. Today, the University of Georgia professor not only studies deadly pathogens like malaria and Cryptosporidium (a waterborne parasite), but also is a driving force behind worldwide, groundbreaking collaborations on novel databases. During her time at UGA, she has received nearly $40 million in federal and private grants and contracts. These databases can…
Subscribe to faculty

Support Franklin College

We appreciate your financial support. Your gift is important to us and helps support critical opportunities for students and faculty alike, including lectures, travel support, and any number of educational events that augment the classroom experience. Click here to learn more about giving.

Every dollar given has a direct impact upon our students and faculty.