News Archive - 2012


Photo of the Day

View of Moscow at sunrise from the top of the Peter the Great monument, from a photo gallery on Der Speigel. Kids in Moscow are taking to climbing up onto some of its highest building, statues and construction sites, and are appropriately adored by the Russian media as "roofers." A law student, the young man who took the photo said that he discovered 'roofing' after doctors told him he could not play sports because of a weak heart. One of his…


UGA Engineering

Congratulations to our engineering colleagues around campus, which means faculty in many Franklin College departments including chemistry, physics and astronomy, mathematics, computer science, biology and microbiology, marine sciences, genetics, geography, art and anthropology, as well as numerous interdisciplinary research centers created thereof. This list alone explains why it was important for UGA to put together a formal engineering…


President's Pledge Against Global Poverty

A core group of university leaders have organized themselves in a new initiative to address one of the world's most difficult issues: Today, 28 current and former college leaders will publicly come forward as charter members of the Presidents' Pledge Against Global Poverty. (The site is scheduled to go live at 8 a.m.) In so doing, they commit to join Reverend Svennungsen by donating 5 percent of their total compensation this year to…


Liberal Arts Under Scrutiny

That fount of conventional wisdom, National Public Radio, aired a segment this morning on pressures faced by liberal arts colleges during the current economy, though it could have run anytime in the last 25 years such did it trot out the tried-and-true elements of a good news story:   Liberal arts schools have long had a rap of being a kind of luxury, where learning is for learning's sake, and not because understanding Aristotle will come…


Dean's Staff Appreciation Lunch

With over 600 faculty teaching in 84 undergraduate majors (and over 80 graduate degree programs), the Franklin College requires a lot of people to function properly. Especially in lean budgetary environments like the current epoch, faculty and support staff, development officers and instructors are pressed to do more and more with less and less. Interim Dean Hugh Ruppersburg will express his appreciation for all the effort and committment that…


The Morrill Act: the building of a country

First proposed in 1857 and passed in 1859, President Lincoln signed the first Morrill Act on July 2, 1862, whereby the federal government granted each state 30,000 acres of public land for each member of congress that state had. In exchange, the states would sell the land and create an endowment meant to support the establishment and perpetuation of institutes of higher learning. UGA historian Nash Boney: As soon as the war ended the Confederate…


New study links hypoxia to cancer growth

  A research team led by Ying Xu, Regents-Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar and professor of bioinformatics and computational biology in the Franklin College, has published some compeeling new findings on the growth of cancer cells: Low oxygen levels in cells may be a primary cause of uncontrollable tumor growth in some cancers, according to a new University of Georgia study. The authors' findings run counter to widely accepted…


NSF Graduate Fellowships

Ten UGA students and alums received graduate fellowships from the National Science Foundation to conduct research during their master's and doctoral studies, including four from Franklin College: Christopher Abin, of Miami, Fla., is pursuing a doctorate in microbiology at the University of Georgia. As a Florida International University undergraduate student, Abin made the dean’s list every semester and received a National Institutes of Health…

Photo of Fossil Brachiopods
Predicting risks of extinction

Brachiopods are marine shell fish that have hard "valves" (shells) on the upper and lower surfaces. The Ordovician is a geologic period and system, the second of six of the Paleozoic Era, and covers the time between 488.3±1.7 to 443.7±1.5 million years ago. Both are crucial to understanding a new study from Franklin scientists: A team of scientists analyzed more than 46,000 fossils from 52 sites and…


Franklin alum Mitcham named Georgia's Poet Laureate

UGA alumnus Judson C. Mitcham (AB '69, MS '71) was named by Governor Nathan Deal as the new poet laureate of Georgia. Mitcham succeeds David Bottoms in the post. A former adjunct professor of creative writing at UGA, Mitcham was very active on campus as a Man of Letters during his time in Athens and has many connections to Franklin College. A recipient of numerous awards and honors, Mitcham currently teaches creative writing at Mercer…