Kudos, January 2018

Congratulations on the many recent honors and accomplishments of faculty, students and alumni of the Franklin College and our colleagues around the university:

The University of Georgia observed its anniversary as the birthplace of public higher education in America during the week of Jan. 22-26, and the UGA Alumni Association celebrated the occasion by hosting a weeklong series of events, including the 16th annual Founders Day Lecture Jan. 22 presented by J. Marshall Shepherd, Georgia Athletic Association Distinguished Professor of Geography and Atmospheric Sciences.

Congratulations to our faculty and staff colleagues in the UGA College of Family and Consumer Sciences, which is celebrating its centennial anniversary in 2018. The college traces its origins back to February 1918, when the Division of Home Economics within the UGA College of Agriculture was approved. The first students enrolled in September 1918.

Marcus Williams (Ph.D. geography) and his co-authors Christy M.S. Hawley, Marguerite Madden, and Marshall Shepherd are recipients of the 2018 ESRI Award for Best Scientific Paper in Geographic Information Systems from the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS) for their paper “Mapping the Spatio-Temporal Evolution of Irrigation in the Coastal Plain of Georgia, USA.” Williams, a research meteorologist with the U.S. Forest Service, was the first African American to earn his doctorate from the department of geography.

Rishi Masalia, Ph.D. candidate in the department of plant biology, has been named one of seven K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders for 2018 by the American Association of Colleges and Universities.

Three recent alumni from the department of theatre and film studies — Benjamin Davis (AB 2013, Theatre; BS 2013, Psychology), Shelli Delgado (AB 2013, Theatre), Sarah Newby Halicks (AB 2013, Theatre) — were highlighted among the “8 Young Atlanta Actors to Watch” by the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

Second-year psychology major Georgia House won the “People’s Choice Award,” voted on by the audience, at the Miss University of Georgia 2018 annual scholarship pageant held Jan. 20 in the UGA Fine Arts Auditorium.

Distinguished Research Professor Yiping Zhao in the department of physics and astronomy has been named Fellow of the American Vacuum Society (AVS) “for seminal contributions to the study of surface morphology and groundbreaking studies of the growth and application of nanostructures.” AVS is an international community of scientists, engineers and instrument manufacturers, which strives to promote research and communicate knowledge in the important areas of surface, interface, vacuum, and thin film science/technology for the advancement of humankind. 

Jed Rasula, Helen S. Lanier Distinguished Professor in the department of English won the second annual Matei Calinescu Prize for a distinguished work of scholarship in twentieth- or twentieth-first-century literature and thought awarded by the Modern Language Association of America, for his book History of a Shiver: The Sublime Impudence of Modernism, published by Oxford University Press.

David P. Landau, Distinguished Research Professor of Physics and Director of the Center for Simulational Physics, presented the Keynote Invited Lecture at CompPhys17, the 18^th International NTZ-Workshop on New Developments in Computational Physics in December 2017   The title of his presentation was “Complexity and Optimization: Physical Science Meets Biological Science via Computer Simulations”. The meeting, held in Leipzig, Germany, drew participants from throughout Europe, the U.S., Asia, and Australia.

Adjunct professor in the department of physics and astronomy Simona Hunyadi Murph received the 2017 Director's Award for Exceptional Scientific and Engineering Achievements from the Savannah River National Laboratory, recognizing her contributions to advance understanding about nanotechnologies as well as her application of nanoscience.

Image: Professor Marshall Shepherd told a Founders Day Lecture audience that a big challenge researchers face is how to overcome people’s perceptions and beliefs. (Photo by Wingate Downs)