Kudos, summer 2016

The Franklin College is renowned for great students, faculty and staff and this summer has been full of great news, accomplishments and achievement. Here's just a sample:

The entering UGA Class of 2020 is the most academically qualified in history and is the most diverse in university history. There are more than 5,400 students in the entering class. They have an average grade point average of 3.98 on a 5.0 scale. The average score on the SAT college entrance examination was 1302, the highest in university history. The university accepted just over half of all applicants this year, down from 63 percent of all applicants in 2011. Some 1,730 students self-identify as students of color. More than 460 students self-identify as African Americans. This is an increase of 10 percent since 2015

Among the incoming class of 2020, Franklin College students are heavily represented among the 17 incoming Foundation Fellows and the eight Ramsey Scholars

External funding for research at UGA jumps 14 percent in one year, including many ongoing projects and investigations by Franklin College faculty

Franklin students and alumni were among the many UGA participants, coaches and staff at Rio Olympics

WeatherStem stations installed at two UGA locations will station provides tools such as text alerts for changing weather conditions and forecasts and provide new research opportunities

NSF linguistics grant to William Kretzschmar, Harry and Jane Willson Professor in the Humanities in the UGA department of English, and Margaret Renwick, assistant professor jointly appointed in the department of Romance languages and the Linguistics Program, to study southern language variation is one of the largest-ever humanities grants at UGA

Class taught by Cecelia Herles, assistant director of UGA’s Institute of Women’s Studies becomes centerpiece of UGA Campus Kitchen initiative, delivering home-cooked meal sot those in need

Amazing student and Double Dawg Whitney Ingram from Stone Mountain became the first African American woman to earn her Ph.D in physics at UGA

A new citizen science smartphone app, developed as a part of the NSF-funded CyberSEES project from computer science and geography faculty for early detection of blue-green algae (aka Cyanobacteria) blooms in lakes, ponds, lagoons, estuaries, and coasts called “CyanoTRACKER,” is now available

On July 12 David P. Landau, Distinguished Research Professor and Director of the Center for Simulational Physics, presented an Invited Lecture at the XXVIII IUPAP International Conference on Computational Physics CCP2016 in Pretoria, South Africa. The title of his presentation was: Replica Exchange Wang-Landau Simulation of Lattice Protein Folding Funnels.  The research that he described, which is at the interface between statistical physics and biochemistry, was carried out in collaboration with a UGA Ph.D. student Guangjie “Jerry” Shi and Dr. Thomas Wüst of the ETH Zurich.  It was supported in part by NSF and relied on computing resources provided by the NSF XSEDE facilities and by the GACRC at UGA

The UGA majorettes and feature twirlers' competition team won the National Open Half-time Show Twirl Championships at the 2016 America's Youth on Parade USA and World Twirling Championships

Image: Whitney Ingram, courtesy of UGA photographic services