News from the Chronicles - December 2019

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Noted and Quoted, November 2019

Gray's reef, the global carbon cycle and statistical significance were a few of the recent headlines supported with Franklin College faculty expertise. A sampling of the stories that appeared over the past month:   Scientists race to track oil from capsized ship – Regents Professor Samantha Joye quoted by GPB   After a giant ship goes belly up, many fear a shoreline is next – Samantha Joye quoted at…

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Kudos, Nov-Dec. 2019

Students and alumni lead the kudos as we count down to the end of 2019. Congratulations all: Herb Girls Athens, a two-woman team, won the 2018-19 FABricate competition with its signature product, a healthy coffee additive called Rally Coffee. The FABricate competition is designed to empower students to turn their great ideas into working businesses. Eileen Schaffer, an agribusiness master’s degree student, and …

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Nzengung elected to National Academy of Inventors

Valentine Nzengung, professor of environmental geochemistry in the Franklin College Department of Geology who has conducted groundbreaking research on phytoremediation techniques, has been named a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, becoming the eighth UGA faculty member to receive the honor, all since 2013: Nzengung is the founder and CEO of MuniRem Environmental, which provides remediation products and services for…

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Oscar-winning alumna Lynn Appelle

She might not claim to be a documentarian, but Lynne Appelle's body of work just goes to show the creative breadth of a film career that started with a BFA in photography: A quick glance at her 20-plus year career in the TV and movie industry backs her up. A majority of Appelle’s credits are for line production (akin to being a budget director) or production management. But that one documentary short she produced in 2001—that was a…

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Amazing student: Michael Bowler

From the impact of great mentors to lab opportunities and guiding campus tours, senior biochemistry and molecular biology /psychology double-major Michael Bowler has learned the importance of helping others pursue their passions: My experiences at UGA have been shaped by numerous organizations and their members. Dawg Camp, an extended orientation program, created immediate connections with upperclassman mentors and a vision for how I…

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UGA launches Master of Fine Arts in Film, Television and Digital Media

In a new partnership between the University of Georgia, the Georgia Film Academy and Pinewood Forest, the new community in Fayetteville, Georgia, located adjacent to Pinewood Atlanta Studios, the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication and Franklin College of Arts and Sciences have created a Master of Fine Arts in Film, Television and Digital Media program:  The…

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The [earning] power of humanities degrees

Fortune Magazine pushes back on the persistent misperception that links humanities degrees with low salaries: Robert B. Townsend, director of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences Washington, D.C. office, says that humanities majors secure jobs at pretty much the same rate as other people with degrees. “It’s certainly not in line with that picture that gives you the impression that they’re all baristas drowning in debt, and…

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Fall Commencement 2019

The University of Georgia will welcome its newest alumni Dec. 13 as 1,799 undergraduates and 1,263 graduate students—a total of 3,062—have met requirements to walk in the university’s fall Commencement ceremonies. The undergraduate Commencement ceremony is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. in Stegeman Coliseum, and tickets are required. The graduate ceremony does not require tickets and will follow at 2:30 p.m. Regent Kessel D. Stelling Jr…

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AI researchers tackle the 'curse of dimensionality' with new algorithm

In the context of dynamic programming, the curse of dimensionality refers to various phenomena that arise when analyzing and organizing data with hundreds or thousands of dimensions. In order to obtain a statistically sound and reliable result, the amount of data needed to support the result often grows exponentially with the dimensionality. In a recent paper published in the proceedings of the prestigious machine learning and…

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Cori Bargmann: Reshaping science to save lives

UGA celebrates Franklin alumna Cori Bargmann (BS '81) as a Georgia Groundbreaker for her work revolutionizing research in neurobiology: For over a decade, Bargmann ran a lab at the University of California at San Francisco. Today, she is the Torsten N. Wiesel professor of genetics and neurosciences at Rockefeller University in New York, and she leads the Chan Zuckerberg Science Initiative in California. In 2003 she was…

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