Kudos, April 2016

Honors Week shines a light on many of our best, plus several more wonderful accolades in April for Franklin students, faculty and alumni:

UGA Athletic Association Distinguished Professor of Geography and Atmospheric Sciences Marshall Shepherd will serve as commencement speaker at one of Florida State University’s three spring commencement ceremonies (April 29, 30)

Honors students Catherine "Cali" Callaway (biology) and Morrison Nolan (geology and chemistry) have received 2016 Barry M. Goldwater Scholarships, a premier academic award for undergraduate students pursuing careers in science, mathematics and engineering

Associate professor biochemistry and molecular biology Zachary Wood received a 2016 Richard B. Russell Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. Russell Awards recognize outstanding teaching by faculty early in their academic careers

Professor of English and Creative Writing Ed Pavlić’s Who Can Afford to Improvise?: James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners was selected as one of the best music books of the last year

Professor of genetics Rodney Mauricio was honored as a Josiah Meigs Teaching Professor. The professorship is the university’s highest recognition for instruction at the undergraduate and graduate levels

Valentine Nzengung, professor of environmental geochemistry received the Academic Entrepreneur of the Year Award, which recognizes a faculty member who has started a company within the past four years that originated from UGA research

Professor of psychology Jennifer McDowell received the William A. Owens Award, which honors distinguished creative research achievements in the social and behavioral sciences  

On April 7, David P. Landau, Distinguished Research Professor and Founding Director of the Center for Simulational Physics, presented an Invited Talk at the Conference on Phase Transitions and Critical Phenomena in Coventry, England. The title of his presentation was: Pushing the Limits of Monte Carlo Simulations for the 3d Ising Model. His lecture described results of very large-scale simulations performed in collaboration with a UGA graduate student Jiahao Xu and with Dr. Alan M. Ferrenberg of Miami U, of Ohio. Much of the work was performed on the computer clusters operated by the GACRC at UGA

A record number of UGA students and alumni have been offered National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships this year. These highly competitive awards recognize and support outstanding graduate students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines. Of the seventeen UGA students and alumni among the 2,000 fellows selected from nearly 17,000 applicants nationwide for the 2016 competition, 11 were from the Franklin College

Robin Shelton, professor in the department of physics and astronomy, will travel to Berlin, Germany, in spring 2017 to work on galactic computer simulations. The simulations will help determine whether some of the enormous clouds of gas that astronomers have found to be falling into the Milky Way galaxy are related to the spiderweb-like structure of material that stretches across the universe, called the "cosmic web"

Michael Bachmann, associate professor in the department of physics and astronomy and the Center for Simulational Physics (CSP), presented an Invited talk at the 2016 EMN (Energy, Materials and Nanotechnology) Meeting on Carbon Nanostructures, held March 24-April 1, 2016 in Honolulu, Hawaii. The title of his presentation, co-authored by former CSP members Thomas Vogel and Jonathan Gross, was Simulational Study of Nanotube Formation by Polymer Adsorption at a Nanowire

Professor of genetics and director of the Institute of Bioinformatics Jessica Kissinger was one of two UGA faculty awarded the Richard F. Reiff Internationalization Award. The Reiff Award honors a tenured or tenure-track faculty member who has made major contributions to the overall internationalization of UGA

SunKoo Yuh, ceramics professor in the Lamar Dodd School of Art, received the Mary Ann Kelly Open Arms Award, which honors UGA faculty or staff who have gone above and beyond their formal duties in facilitating the presence of international students and/or scholars at UGA

UGA Cortona, Italy, presented its Dedicato a Cortona Award to Alex Murawski, professor of graphic design in the School of Art