Tags: research

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Ehrlich recognized for early career work

UGA faculty member Katie Ehrlich is a recipient of the 2019 Association for Psychological Science Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions. The award, named for the first elected APS president, celebrates the many new and leading-edge ideas coming out of the most creative and promising investigators who embody the future of psychological science. Ehrlich, assistant professor in the UGA Franklin College of…

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UGA to collaborate on Haitian library conservation project

History faculty member Jennifer Palmer, along with Julia Gaffield of Georgia State University and Conservateur-en-Chef of the Bibliothèque Hatïenne des Pères du Saint-Esprit Patrick Tardieu, will collaborate on a project to digitize materials printed before 1820 during the colonial, revolutionary, and early independence periods in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti). The materials are housed at the Bibliothèque hatïenne…

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Georgia Coastal Ecosystems research program renewed

Georgia Coastal Ecosystems, a research program based at the University of Georgia Marine Institute, was renewed for another six years by the National Science Foundation with $6.7 million in funding: The award marks the third renewal of GCE’s long-term ecological research, or LTER, grant from NSF and ensures that the group’s research will continue into its third decade from its base at the Marine Institute’s headquarters on Sapelo…

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Noted and quoted, January 2019

Franklin College faculty appeared in a wide variety of media over the month of January: New method to classify schizophrenia symptoms should improve care - assistant professor of psychology Gregory Strauss quoted by Psych Central   Scientists could engineer a spicy tomato. Is it worth it? Research by professor of plant biology Esther van der Knaap reported in Popular Science, Tahlequah Daily Press…

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Health Psychology Professorship honors past faculty member

The Franklin College of Arts and Sciences department of psychology will add a new professorship this year in memory of a former Professor Emerita who studied health psychology in older adults and was among the first to document the interconnected challenges confronted by the elderly and their caregivers.   The Gail M. Williamson Distinguished Professorship in Health Psychology will bring a senior researcher to the department who will…

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Diverse lineages of human pathogen live on old oaks

Commensalism is a term for one kind of biological relationship between species in which members of one gain benefits while those of the other neither benefit nor are harmed, contrasted with mutualism or parasitism. One obligate commensal is a common human fungal pathogen, the yeast Candida albicans, and the focus of new paper by assistant professor of plant biology Douda Bensasson published in…

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$2M NIH grant for mass spectrometer

The National Institutes of Health has awarded University of Georgia researchers $1.956 million for a high-resolution mass spectrometer that will enhance capabilities for scientists in many fields across campus: The award by the NIH High End Instrumentation program, which provides grants in the range of $600,000 to $2 million for a variety of expensive instrumentation, including MRI imagers, electron microscopes, DNA sequencers, and mass…

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Amazing student: Katie Irwin

Senior biology major - with a neuroscience emphasis - Katie Irwin found her passion for advancing science through her own work studying neurodegenerative diseases and helping encourage others — especially young girls — to pursue successful careers in STEM fields: During my freshman year, I was able to join Jim Lauderdale’s developmental neuroscience lab in the department of cellular biology. In the lab, I direct my own…

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Undergraduate research at scale: C.U.R.E.

How do students find their way into the laboratory? Integrating research experiences into lab courses, where students are tackling a problem related to a faculty member’s ongoing research, can introduce undergraduates to a world of career paths and opportunities as they come to understand research. Students learning research skills in the context of solving real research problems is the focus of work by Georgia Athletic…

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New study upends timeline of Iroquoian history

New research by an international team based at UGA raises questions about the timing and nature of early interactions between Indigenous Peoples and Europeans in North America: The European side of first contact with indigenous people and settlement in northeast North America is well known from European sources. Until now it's been assumed that the finds of dated European artifacts provide a timeline for the indigenous peoples and…

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Anderson Foundation support for statewide climate project

Important news for The Georgia Climate Project, a statewide consortium of university researchers focused on helping Georgia localities facing the challenges of a changing climate: The Ray C. Anderson Foundation has awarded a $650,000 grant to Emory University to advance the Georgia Climate Project, a state-wide consortium co-founded by Emory, the University of Georgia, and the Georgia Institute of Technology, and joined by Agnes Scott…

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$10M weather and climate project will refine models, forecasting

UGA geography faculty member Gabriel Kooperman will lead one of 13 new DOE projects to enhance and refine computer models that help scientists understand weather patterns: This past July, the U.S. Department of Energy announced $10 million in funding for 13 projects aimed at further enhancing one of the world’s most sophisticated computer models for understanding weather and climate patterns. The projects will support…

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Franklin College faculty members elected to AAAS

Six UGA faculty members, including three from the Franklin College, have been named Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), an honor bestowed by their peers for “scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications.” These six faculty members are among 416 new AAAS Fellows who will be presented with an official certificate and a gold and blue—representing science and…

rendering of a new building
New Interdisciplinary STEM building

With the infrastructure demands of science and technology research collaborations reaching higher levels each year, the university will break ground on the new Interdisciplinary Science, Technology, Engineering and Math Research Building at 2 p.m. on Nov. 27. The groundbreaking marks the beginning of the construction of the ISTEM Research Building, which will house engineering, chemistry and related disciplines to promote…

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New study opens possibilities for smaller, more powerful light-control in quantum materials

The transfer of energy, as light or information, from one point to another is a big part of the science behind the phone in your hand and the images on your screen. Manipulating light wavelengths to transmit information represents the next frontier in optoelectronics, though many obstacles remain. Among the primary challenges in using light for information processing is the difficulty of squeezing light to very small space to fit in ever-…

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Focus on the Faculty: Elizabeth Wright

Professor of Spanish Elizabeth Wright builds research opportunities into her teaching that help students develop skills that will last a lifetime—whether as educators, scholars, entrepreneurs, public servants or world travelers: My scholarship ponders an abiding paradox of empire building in the early modern era (circa 1490–1800). That is, the expanding horizons of the Spanish monarchy—both geographic and cultural—coincided with the…

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Noted and Quoted, October 2018

Franklin College faculty expertise is regularly featured in media around the world.  A sample from the past month: Report: Georgia justice, prison reforms slowly showing results – assistant professor of sociology Sarah Shannon quoted at CorrectionsOne   Professor looks at science and religion – Davis Enterprise features an October talk by Henry F. Schaefer, Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry and…

capuchin monkey is striking a nut with a stone hammer.
Up on two feet

Millions of years ago, before humans became fully bipedal, ancestral hominins used stones to break bones and nuts, probably while standing upright. A new study from the Primate Cognition and Behavior Lab in the department of psychology published today by the Royal Society journal Proceedings B documents how contemporary bearded capuchin monkeys likewise use stones to break nuts: [B]ecause the fossil record is…

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UGA recognizes 11 new CURO Honors Scholars

And speaking of amazing undergraduate students and a diversity of opportunities, UGA recently awarded 11 undergraduates - 7 with Franklin majors - from the incoming class of 2018-2019 with its CURO Honors Scholarship, the university’s top undergraduate research scholarship: CURO Honors Scholars receive $3,000 in annual funding renewable for up to four years; mentoring and community support; and special seminars, workshops,…

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Ehrlich receives NIH New Innovator Award

The National Institutes of Health Common Fund supports unusually innovative research from early career investigators with the High-Risk, High-Reward Research program. Assistant professor of psychology Katherine Ehrlich received a New Innovator award in the program to determine whether stressful life experiences have more immediate effects on children’s health: The $2.3 million Director’s New Innovator Award from the NIH Common…

diagram of blood cells with chemical abbreviations
New study on heme synthesis for red blood cells

A plenary paper featuring students and faculty from the UGA department of biochemistry and molecular biology and the department of microbiology was recently published, highlighted, and given commentary in the journal Blood, the publication of the American Society for Hematology. The paper, which originated in the lab of professor emeritus Harry Dailey, addresses how erythroid cells acquire sufficient carbon for heme synthesis…

man in lab
Doctoral candidate awarded Department of Energy fellowship

University of Georgia doctoral candidate Jordan Russell was awarded a fellowship by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) program. The program prepares graduate students for science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) careers critically important to the Department of Energy Office of Science mission by providing graduate thesis research opportunities at DOE laboratories in areas…

historical photo of women seated on steps
Women at UGA: 100 years of evolving gender roles

Coeducation at the University of Georgia opened up a variety of fields where opportunities had been few, and over the decades has begun to change how women see themselves and engage their intellectual and career interests. Doctoral candidate Michelle Ziadie shares this thoughtful perspective from a scientist: It wasn't until I started graduate school that I really began to reflect on the challenges I faced as a woman of…

MRI program NSF
Grant brings new equipment, research potential to campus

The University of Georgia will soon be home to a new state-of-the-art spectrometer that will benefit researchers across campus and beyond. The instrument, known as an electron paramagnetic resonance spectrometer (EPR), is funded by a nearly $350,000 grant through the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) program. “The MRI program serves to increase access to multi-user scientific and engineering instrumentation…

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Professor's work figures in 2018 Fields medal

Finding a proof for a mathematical conjecture – a strong guess illuminating a way forward – has helped shape the course of mathematical history. The mathematics world recently celebrated the achievements of a proof that proved a conjecture partially formulated by UGA faculty member Valery Alexeev. Professor Caucher Birkar of the University of Cambridge was awarded the 2018 Fields medal, widely considered to be an equivalent of a…
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