News Archive - 2014


Georgia Sea Grant planning for port expansion

UGA faculty members and Georgia Sea Grant are doing important work along the Georgia coast, helping communities plan for a major expansion of the Savannah Harbor: "Most of the regional attention to the Savannah Harbor deepening has focused on the ecological effects to the river and adjacent wetland ecosystems," said Charles Hopkinson, Georgia Sea Grant director. "We want to shift the focus to local communities so that they are prepared to handle…


Shepherd named Captain Planet Protector

The award sounds funny, but the prestigious Captain Planet Foundation has honored Marshall Shepherd for his very serious efforts on educating the public about climate change:  Marshall Shepherd is a Captain Planet Protector of the Earth, according to the Captain Planet Foundation, which recently added him to a list of outstanding real-life environmental superheroes. Shepherd, the UGA Athletic Association Professor in the Social Sciences,…


Summer Kudos

 


Faculty in the media, Summer 2014

The summer slows on campus but our faculty have been very busy in the national and international media. A sampling of the active engagement of faculty scholarship and expertise across a braod range of subjects: When predators vanish, so does the ecosystem – The New York Times reports on a study that shows recreational fishing and crabbing may be responsible for dying salt marshes off the coast of New England.  But “it’s still a leap to…


2014-15 Dodd Professorial Chair: Zoe Strauss

The Lamar Dodd School of Art welcomes Philadelphia-based photographer Zoe Strauss to campus as this year's Dodd Professorial Chair: For a decade between 2001 and 2010, Philadelphia photographer Zoe Strauss (b. 1970) showed her photographic works once a year in a public space beneath an I-95 highway overpass in South Philadelphia. In these annual one-day exhibitions, Strauss mounted her color photographs to the concrete bridge supports and…


Renovations around campus

It's that time of year (in which I start out several posts with 'It's that time of year...') when the town begins to be once again flooded with people and cars, returning students, parents, futons, and hopes (we hope). Instead of showing a picture of a very congested Milledge Avenue during sorority rush, we'll preview some renovations to campus buildings that will soon re-open. The University Architects office does a great job keeping our…


Educator/alum addresses school reformers

Some great plain talk on school reform from Franklin College alumnus and Clarke Central High School literature teacher Ian Altman in the Washington Post: 7. Don’t tell us to leave politics out of the classroom.  Don’t be naïve.  Learning always has some kind of political efficacy. Some opinions are more sensible than others, some arguments stronger than others, some interpretations and theories better supported than others. It is okay…


Anthropocene Lectures

What are we doing to the planet? Is that even an accurate formulation? In the great words of Tonto, what do you mean 'we'? Humans are of the Earth, and yet at the same time our impact on it has been a great force, often working against it. This can be a complex line of inquiry and to help shed some light on it, our division of biological sciences has devised and will host an important series of public lectures this fall spanning the breadth of…


Science Learning Center: breaking ground

The D.W. Brooks mall on South Campus is about to [begin to] change for the better, with much-needed science instruction space in the new Science Learning Center: The University of Georgia will break ground on its newest building-the 122,500-square-foot Science Learning Center-on Aug. 26 at 11:30 a.m. at the south end of the S10 parking lot located just off Carlton Street. ... The Science Learning Center will be situated on South Campus adjacent…


The Humanities: towards greater empathy

News and current events today challenge us to be able to see the world from the persepctive of others. The more insulated we become - socially, economically, politically - the more difficult it can be to understand the broader issues and events swirling around us. Of course, an education steeped in the humanities can go a long way towards making us better people, better citizens who can relate to our fellow citizens constructively, who want to…