Georgia State University Magazine, Spring 2017 by Georgia State University Magazine

Q 1 . 1 7 M A GA Z INE.GS U.E DU

M A G A Z I N E

HELP LIGHT THE WAY

CONTENTS 7 No Surf, No Problem Californian Eric Elliot (B.F.A. ’03) owns Ambush Boards, the Southeast’s largest board sport retailer. 9 Garden State Georgia State is feeding students with a hydroponic farm in the heart of the concrete campus.

16 HOME OF THE PANTHERS

It’s not Turner Field anymore. It’s Georgia State Stadium.

11 Building History Stephanie Drake (B.B.A. ’98) helped construct the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.

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THE RENAISSANCE KID Will Anderson (B.A., B.S. ’17) might be the most interesting undergrad in the world .

WAY DOWN SOUTH

The redevelopment of the 67-acre Turner Field parcel is now underway.

A Georgia State professor is leading a group of scientists to build a solar observatory in Antarctica.

COVER AND THIS PAGE: BULLETIN BOARD PHOTOS BY RYAN HAYSLIP

M A G A Z I N E. G S U. E D U

FROM THE PRESIDENT We’ve proven students from all backgrounds can succeed at the same level, and we continue to receive incredible national attention from our peers and the news media for our success.

AN INSTITUTION OF INNOVATORS

HE CHANGES, ideas and innovations that have fueled Georgia State’s steep trajectory over the past several years have been the foundation of the university’s burgeoning national reputation. Colleges and universities across the country, political leaders and news media have recognized Georgia State’s achievements, leadership and creativity as we continue to solve the challenges of higher education. That’s why U.S. News & World Report ranks Georgia State alongside MIT and Stanford as one of the top four most innovative institutions in the country. We’re making waves and having an impact on all fronts. We’ve completed the purchase of the facility formerly known as Turner Field, now Georgia State Stadium, and proudly display the university’s name on the stadium’s digital marquee billboard seen by thousands of commuters each day. We are changing the way our students learn and helping them graduate faster, be more

BY DOING THINGS THE #STATEWAY, WE’RE ADVANCING LEARNING, RESEARCH AND ECONOMIC ENTERPRISE. productive and save millions on the pathway to their degrees. We’ve proven students from all backgrounds can succeed at the same level, and we continue to receive incredible national attention from our peers and the news media for our success. Our faculty scholars are at work every day pursuing solutions to some of the world’s most pressing problems. It is hard to imagine we became an official research university just 20 years ago. The Carnegie Foundation now lists us among the nation’s most productive and fastest growing research institutions. Our funding has skyrocketed by 75 percent over the last five years. And since just 2014, our annual research awards have climbed more than $40 million. We’re a well-recognized catalyst for Atlanta’s growth and development. Our economic impact across the metropolitan region tops $2.45 billion each year. We’ve built a modern campus downtown through our adaptive reuse of vacated high rises and office buildings, and our construction of new buildings. Since

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consolidating with Perimeter College two years ago, we’ve expanded to seven campuses across metro Atlanta. We’re now the largest university in Georgia with more than 50,000 students. We’ve earned our national reputation. And we need you to help us spread the Georgia State story far and wide. As our alumni and friends, you are our best advocates and most persuasive champions. We do things the #thestateway, and we know you do, too. (For more information, visit thestateway.gsu.edu.) We want you to share your stories of success with us so we can proclaim them loudly and proudly. Without you, Georgia State wouldn’t be the university it is today. Sincerely,

Mark P. Becker President

ILLUSTRATION BY ANDY FRIEDMAN

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Michelle C Parkos She was in one of my Art History classes! Like • Reply Krista McRea Tarleton Walmsley-Morris her cute little story made me want to share this with you! A fellow artist and antique dealer. Like • Reply Jessica Nissenbaum Lia Kramer omg did you see this Like • Reply Judy Ondrey I love Joyce! Like • Reply

VIA TWITTER @raegan_hodge congrats on being featured in @gsumagazine & hope your @CARE project makes it to @sundancefest @Danie11eWi1cox Danielle Wilcox LOVED this article, @ gsumagazine! Plus, Maryellen’s History of Interior Design class was one of my favorites! :-) magazine. gsu.edu/article/ joyce @JLJMcCarron Jessica McCarron

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Correction: In our last issue, the article “Grounded” incorrectly reported that the William J. Usery Jr. Chair of the American Workplace is in the J. Mack Robinson College of Business. It is in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies.

I enjoyed very much reading about Carolyn Lee Wills contributing her collection of Eastern Air Lines material to Georgia State. She and I were classmates, and both of us were on the staff of the 1957 “Rampway,” the college’s yearbook. Carole E. Scott B.B.A. ’59, MBA ’65, Ph.D. ’69

Spring 2017, Vol 8, Number 1 Publisher Don Hale Executive Editor Andrea Jones Editor William Inman (M.H.P. ‘16) Assistant Editor Benjamin Hodges (B.A. ’08) Contributors Jim Auchmutey (B.A. ’77), LaTina Emerson, Charles McNair, Matt Nixon, Sarah Joy RIchards (B.A. ’15), Creative Direction & Design Metaleap Creative Contributing Illustrators Adam Cruft, Andy Friedman, Daniel Krall, Martina Paukova, Thomas Porostocky, Marco Ventura Contributing Photographers Brinson+Banks, Ryan Hayslip, Greg Kahn, Andrew Thomas Lee, Ben Rollins Send address changes to: Georgia State University Gifts and Records P.O. Box 3963 Atlanta Ga. 30302-3963 Fax: 404-413-3441 email: update@GSU.edu Send letters to the editor and story ideas to: William Inman, editor, Georgia State University Magazine P.O. Box 3983 Atlanta Ga. 30302-3983 Fax: 404-413-1381 email: winman@GSU.edu Georgia State University Magazine is published four times annually by Georgia State University. The magazine is dedicated to communicating and promoting the high level of academic achievement, research, faculty scholarship and teaching, and service at Georgia State University, as well as the outstanding accomplishments of its alumni and the intellectual, cultural, social and athletic endeavors of Georgia State University’s vibrant and diverse student body. © 2017 Georgia State University

M A G A Z I N E. G S U. E D U

IN THE CITY

CAMPUS ON TRACK Graduation rates rise at Perimeter College. Since the consolidation of Georgia State and Georgia Perimeter College last January, associate degree graduation rates at Perimeter College have risen by five percentage points, the highest increase in the college’s history. Perimeter’s three-year graduation rate, now 11.9 percent, has almost doubled since 2014, when it was 6.5 percent. “We still have a very long way to go, but these gains will only grow exponentially,” said Tim Renick, vice provost and vice president for enrollment management and student success. “We will continue to look proactively for ways to bring our student success programs to all students.” In the year since consolidation, Georgia State officials have begun analytics tracking for Perimeter students, expanded the university’s successful Panther Retention Grant program to hundreds of Perimeter students and started hiring 30 new advisers to help students. Georgia State has redirected more than $6.5 million in administrative savings from the consolidation into student-focused initiatives and academic programs. LAW DEAN STEPS DOWN Steve Kaminshine, law school dean since 2004, will return to the faculty. Steven J. Kaminshine will step down as dean of the College of Law this summer and return to the faculty. Kaminshine’s highly successful tenure is reflected by the college’s rise in U.S. News and World Report’s national rankings from 97th in 2007 to 57th in 2017, as well as the college’s consistent top 10 ranking among best value schools by National Jurist. “It is time for this great CONT’D ON P. 9

RUN AND GUN

THE GEORGIA STATE PAINTBALL CLUB SPLATTERED SIX TEAMS TO WIN THE NATIONAL COLLEGIATE PAINTBALL ASSOCIATION’S WORLD CUP. SCORE TO SETTLE: The paintball club, one of 25 sport clubs sponsored by the university’s Recreational Services, has made five consecutive trips to the round-robin national championship tournament. Last season, they finished second — their highest finish until this season’s victory in the final competition Nov. 5–6 in Kissimmee, Fla. VICTORY LAP: In the preliminary stage, Georgia State beat teams from the Uni-

versity of Florida, Embry-Riddle University, Florida Gulf Coast University and the University of Tennessee. In the semifinals, they defeated Clemson University to set up the final versus the University of South Florida. CAPTAIN’S LOG: “We beat [South Florida] without any of our players getting shot

out,” said team captain Austin Tian, a junior accounting major. “For context, when you beat a team, you need to press the buzzer on their side of the field for the referees to know the match is over. We were all grouped around the buzzer, and it was an incredible feeling to see everyone there knowing that we had just won.”

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ILLUSTRATION BY DANIEL KRALL

RIDING THE WAVE Eric Elliot (B.F.A. ’03) channeled his love of surfing into building the Southeast’s largest board sport retailer. BY MATT NIXON

PHOTOS BY BEN ROLLINS

M A G A Z I N E. G S U. E D U

RIDING THE WAVE

here’s no surfing in Woodstock, Ga. It’s more than 2,200 miles from the surfing meccas of California. For Eric Elliott — 16-year-old San Francisco Bay Area transplant, surfing acolyte and new member of Etowah High School’s class of ’97 — this was a problem. Eric and his twin brother Lee got enraptured by surfing culture early. At age 12, they scrounged up $10 and bought their first board at a garage sale. “Surfing was more than a hobby. It was a passion, almost like religion — the communion of my feet on the board, riding a wave of energy from the sun,” Elliott said. When they couldn’t get a ride to the coast to surf, Eric, Lee and their friends would hit the shops that catered to their passions. After a day of hauling Eric and Lee around to their favorite spots, their stepfather, Chuck Morrow, joked that he was going to open a store that sold clothing, music and surf gear so he’d only have to take the twins one place. Imaginations stoked, and Eric and Lee silently thought, “What if?” When they moved to Woodstock in 1995, the geographic and cultural distances between north Georgia and the San Francisco Bay Area were roughly equal: about two thousand miles apart. Eric soon found kindred spirits in Little Five Points enclaves such as Criminal Records and Stratosphere, and at live music venues such as the Masquerade. As with his favorite Bay Area haunts, it wasn’t really the products that attracted Eric; it was the community. These spaces were where he socialized, discovered and connected with others like him. This was the dream he and his brother had carried across the country. Just two weeks after their high school graduation, Eric and Lee — with their stepfather’s backing — opened Ambush Boarding Company in June 1997. Weeks after opening the shop, Eric enrolled at Georgia State to pursue his art degree. He spent weekdays downtown in class or at the studio, working odd jobs and internships and

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assisting art professor Matthew Sugarman on the side. On the weekends, he worked at his shop in Kennesaw from open to close. Six years later, Elliot graduated debt-free with a bachelor of fine arts degree while Ambush, an early adopter of e-commerce, was growing at a steady clip. “With the microeconomy I’m in charge of and the jobs we’re able to provide, I’ve got more to offer here than I do in the art world,” Elliott said. “Ambush is my life’s work.” Ambush has grown from a small skate shop into the largest retailer of its kind in the Southeast, a major player online and the proprietor of a huge showroom. Though metro Atlanta has changed immensely in the last 20 years, a surfboard in north Georgia is still as useful as a space heater in summertime. But surf-, skate-, wake- and snowboarders seeking gear and peers can find what they’re looking for at Ambush Boarding Company.

• Making The Bigs Visit magazine.gsu.edu for a story about three former Georgia State

baseball players trying to work their way out of the minor leagues and into the big show.

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college to grow with the benefit of a new set of eyes and fresh ideas, building on what we have accomplished,” Kaminshine said in a statement. “I am not retiring but simply stepping down to rededicate myself to teaching and writing.” Kaminshine led the college’s efforts to redesign its curriculum in response to changes in the legal profession, incorporating more experiential education classes and opportunities and integrating skills with doctrinal coursework. CREATING CHANGE New bachelor’s degree highlights social entrepreneurship. Georgia State’s new bachelor of interdisciplinary studies (B.I.S.) in social entrepreneurship degree program accepted students for the first time this semester. The program is believed to be the first interdisciplinary undergraduate degree in social entrepreneurship in the state, if not the nation. It will prepare students to lead social change by transforming communities with innovative, problem-solving businesses. “Social entrepreneurship is a growing field,” said Chris Markl, social entrepreneur and co-founder of Kourage Athletics, who joined the university to design curricula, manage programs and recruit students for the new degree program. “Social entrepreneurs develop business solutions to social problems, from drones that deliver medicine in Rwanda to websites that crowdfund new homes in Haiti.” Core courses in the new degree program include entrepreneurship, nonprofit organization and management, and financial resource development. An internship at a social enterprise is required. The social entrepreneurship degree program is in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies in partnership with the Robinson College of Business’s Entrepreneurship and Innovation Institute. THE GREAT NEGOTIATOR In memoriam of Bill Usery, labormanagement troubleshooter and Georgia State supporter. W.J. “Bill” Usery Jr. is best remembered as one of the sharpest and most effective labor mediators in Washington, D.C., and beyond, known for avertCONT’D ON P. 10

ILLUSTRATION BY MARTINA PAUKOVA

CITY GROWN

PANTHERDINING SOUS CHEF CAMERON THOMPSON TELLS HOW GEORGIA STATE IS FEEDING CAMPUS WITH THE SOUTHEAST’S FIRST HYDROPONIC FARM. Georgia State has a farm? PantherDining is using a system developed by a Boston company named Freight Farms to grow fresh food inside a shipping container repurposed for farming. A complex computer system called Agrowtek controls everything — light, air, water and nutrients. We farmers monitor and maintain the farm with a program called FarmHand, which tells us what’s going on, complete with alerts and status snapshots. We keep the farm at 65 degrees and

use 10 gallons of water and 60 amps of light every day.

What do you grow? We mainly focus on lettuce, planting and harvesting more than 1,000 heads every week. I like to grow lettuces that students know, such as romaine, Bibb and buttercrunch, and that look and taste good, like red salanova, red cross and wasabi arugula. PantherDining catering and eateries like Legal Grounds, Miss Demeanors Café and Centennial Café use the let-

tuce in sandwiches, salads, wraps and more. Soon, we’ll use the lettuce in our dining halls as well.

What’s next? Georgia State is working to become a pioneer in sustainability. One day, we hope to use the farm to help students learn about agriculture and the benefits of fresh, local food. We hope it’s a start to many other innovations across campus and Atlanta. • Read more at magazine.gsu.edu

M A G A Z I N E. G S U. E D U

IN THE CITY ing or mediating strikes in the public and private sectors. With little formal education or training, he earned his chops on the job, speaking for the machinists as Grand Lodge Representative at the Kennedy and Marshall space centers in the 1960s, serving the Department of Labor and the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service under Presidents Nixon and Ford in the 1970s and helping to build workplace agreements among the United Auto Workers, General Motors and Toyota Motor Corporation through his highly successful Bill Usery and Associates mediation firm in the 1980s. Usery was also a great supporter of Georgia State. In 1985, he donated his vast personal collection of papers, photographs and recordings to the Southern Labor Archives, part of the University Library’s Special Collections and Archives. In 1997, the W.J. Usery Workplace Research Group was founded at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, which later established the William J. Usery Jr. Chair of the American Workplace in 2004. Usery was named a Distinguished Executive Fellow by the Andrew Young School in 2005. Despite his formidable presence and razor-sharp negotiation skills, those who knew him also knew of his generous spirit and his compendium of fascinating stories, all taken from his diverse work and life experiences. Usery died on Dec. 10, 2016, in Eatonton, Ga., leaving behind a legacy of service to the federal government and enduring impact in the field of labormanagement relations. Learn more about Bill Usery at library.gsu.edu/usery.

DISCOVERY VISCERAL REACTION Researchers make strides addressing the causes of colorectal cancer. On the rise since the mid-20th century, colorectal cancer is the fourth leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide, claiming nearly 700,000 lives in 2012. Ac-

cording to researchers from the Institute for Biomedical Sciences, processed food additives may be contributing to the disease’s dramatic increase. Modern medicine has known for some time that an altered intestinal microbiota (the vast population of microorganisms that lives in the gut) plays a role in the development of colorectal Percent jump in cancer, but how or research funding at why has not been Georgia State over so clear. No strangthe last five years. ers to the subject, Emilie Viennois, Didier Merlin, Andrew Gewirtz and Benoit Chassaing wanted to figure out what could make a microbiota change for the worse. “The [disease’s] dramatic increase,” Chassaing said, “has occurred amid constant human genetics, suggesting a pivotal role for an environmental factor.” The same research team had already demonstrated that dietary emulsifiers, additives such as polysorbate 80 used in processed foods to improve texture and extend shelf life, promoted intestinal inflammation. And while inflammation was already associated with colorectal cancer, scientists did not know where to lay responsibility. Provable causes remained a mystery. Published in Cancer Research, the team’s newest study provides a missing piece of the puzzle. Emulsifiers do not just promote intestinal inflammation. They are drastically modifying gut bacteria. The altered microbiota then leads to inflammation, which creates favorable conditions for cancer to develop.

COOL IT Performance-enhancing drugs may improve athletic endurance but do so at significant risk. It’s no secret the human body survives and thrives on self-regulation. During exercise, for example, increased heat production in the muscles raises the body’s core temperature. When that core temperature exceeds a certain threshold, it signals exhaustion, a vital safety mechanism that keeps people from overheating and harming themselves. Until the body can cool itself down to a CONT’D ON P. 12

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MULTI-PURPOSE BUILDING Stephanie Drake (B.B.A. ’94) left the corporate world to start her own construction company. She’s built much more than structures. BY SARAH JOY RICHARDS (B.A. ’15)

PHOTO BY GREG KAHN

n 2001, Stephanie Drake was vice president for Allied Capital, the firm’s first African-American woman to hold the position. Then, at the top of her game at age 32, she retired. She set out on her own and started Drake Incorporated, a construction and real estate firm based in Washington, D.C. The heart of her mission was to make a difference in her community — to build not only better structures and landscapes, but better relationships as well. For someone with a career in commercial real estate, Drake’s transition meant acquiring new skills. “I had plenty of experience with finance but very little when it came down to brick and mortar,” she said. So she put on a hard hat and learned as she went. “I renovated homes, sanded floors, I pretty much touched all of it,” she said. In 2003, her company landed a small contract at the Museum of Natural History. True to her mission, Drake turned that gig into a longstanding relationship with the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum and research complex. Years later, the Smithsonian awarded Drake’s firm a lead contract to help build the National Museum of African American History and Culture — her highest profile project yet. Drake’s next move is developing a community-focused nonprofit to provide mentoring and career advice to youth in the Washington, D.C., area. “The sky’s the limit for every child. I want that to be my legacy — building structures and building people,” Drake said.

M A G A Z I N E. G S U. E D U

IN THE CITY safe level by sweating and widening blood vessels, the individual knows to halt further exertion. Scientists call this the thermoregulatory system. But what if the body can cool its core temperature during exercise while muscles continue to heat up? According to Yaroslav Molkov, associate professor of mathematics and statistics, performance-enhancing psychostimulants such as amphetamine trick the thermoregulatory system into hiding fatigue, which can result in serious health problems. In Molkov’s study, rats injected with amphetamine ran much longer with significantly lower body temperatures than those not injected. This discrepancy indicates the drug increased their ability to cool themselves, improving performance by postponing exhaustion. “But while heat dissipates more quickly from the core, it’s not the same for muscles,” Molkov said. “Your body is tuned to know that if core temperature — and hence muscle temperature — reaches certain levels, you should stop. But when you inject yourself with amphetamine, you don’t know that anymore because your core temperature is not that high even though your muscle temperature can be dangerously high.” Continuing to exercise with overheated muscles is extremely dangerous. Published in Physiological Reports, Molkov’s research bolsters existing arguments against using psychostimulants to improve athletic performance. While most athletic organizations and competitions already prohibit amphetamine, use is not uncommon among athletes in other situations.

51,000

Face-to-face academic advisement sessions prompted each year by the student success system. Curatorial Fellowship from Atlanta’s High Museum of Art. A studio art major concentrating in textiles and minoring in art history, Keith will gain rare museum experience and receive personalized mentorship during her twoyear fellowship. She will help curators with exhibitions and collections, study art and work with acclaimed partner museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Sarah Schleuning, curator of decorative arts and design at the High Museum, will be Keith’s principal mentor. “It is an immense pleasure to work with these talented, driven students,” said Rand Suffolk, director of the High Museum. “We’re honored to continue this important program, which fosters a more diverse, inclusive foundation of leadership for the future of the field.” Supported by a $2 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the fellowships provide students of ethnically diverse backgrounds with specialized curatorial training, seeking to develop gifted curators who are committed to engaging with the full spectrum of museum audiences. In partnership with five leading art institutions, the program awards fellowships each year to 10 students from across the U.S. STARS ON THE BELTLINE Art professor brings vision to Atlanta’s public spaces.

CREATIVITY HIGH ART, HIGH PRAISE Student artist awarded coveted arts fellowship at the High Museum of Art. Carson Keith has become the second Georgia State student to receive a prestigious Andrew W. Mellon Undergraduate

Mike Wsol, assistant professor of studio art in the Ernest G. Welch School of Art and Design, recently debuted his latest sculpture on the Atlanta Beltline. Entitled “Laborer,” the 15-foot composition of welded metal stands near Ponce de Leon Avenue in the shadow of Ponce City Market. According to Wsol, the piece depicts “a worker in the act of a difficult task,” capturing a figure in a strong, hunched stance who marches forward while carrying an enormous load of boxes. From the front, the figure’s body and clothing make a hollow shell that contains

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steps and a platform, inviting viewers to interact with the piece — one of Wsol’s trademarks. Viewers can climb into the figure and crawl through to the boxes on the other side. Inside the boxes, sunlight passes through thousands of tiny holes set against a black interior to form a star chart, giving participants the sensation of “being in space among the stars.” “I hope it provides the viewer a place to think about how humble tasks support larger ideas with seemingly infinite potential,” Wsol said. “Laborer” was commissioned by Art on the Atlanta Beltline, the region’s largest temporary public art exhibition. Showcasing the work of hundreds of visual artists, performers and musicians, the initiative invites residents and visitors to some of the city’s unique public spaces for powerful, new perspectives on Atlanta, its history and revitalization.

ATHLETICS HEAD PANTHER Shawn Elliott, former University of South Carolina offensive line coach, named new head football coach. Shawn Elliott, former offensive line coach and co-offensive coordinator for the University of South Carolina Gamecocks, was introduced in December as Georgia State’s new head football coach. Elliott spent the last seven seasons at South Carolina under Hall of Fame coach Steve Spurrier and Will Muschamp, helping lead the program to three consecutive 11-win seasons between 2011–13, the most successful run in the Gamecocks’ history. He was elevated to interim head coach after Spurrier’s retirement in 2015. “The future is bright at Georgia State UniverMajor motion picsity and that statures and television dium we’re about programs filmed on to move into,” Elthe Atlanta Campus liott said, referring since 2013.

• Model Student Visit magazine.gsu.edu for a story on Marissa Brown (B.S. ’16), an in-

ternationally recognized model for Nike, Guess and others, who finished her degree in two years.

• Meet the Board The Georgia State Alumni Association recently added new members to

its Board of Directors. Visit magazine.gsu.edu to meet the new Panthers on the Panel.

to Georgia State Stadium at the former Turner Field site. “We’re going to bring effort and enthusiasm, and we’re going to attack every single day as if it’s our last. I know that’s easy to say, but it’s the truth.” Before heading to South Carolina in 2010, Elliott spent 13 seasons as an assistant coach at Appalachian State. He was an integral part of the team’s three consecutive NCAA titles from 2005–07 as well as the Mountaineers’ historic upset at Michigan in 2007. In 20 seasons as a Division I assistant coach, Elliott has been a part of 19 winning seasons and has helped coach 16 teams to the NCAA playoffs or a bowl game. “We set out to find a head coach who would energize the university’s football program and assemble a coaching staff to recruit the city of Atlanta and state of Georgia with zeal,” said Athletics Director Charlie Cobb. “Shawn Elliott is the perfect coach to do just that.”

BUILDING BETTER BRIDGES IT’S 2017, AND ENGINEERS ARE STILL DESIGNING FAULTY BRIDGES. A GEORGIA STATE RESEARCHER THINKS HE CAN STOP THAT. In 1940, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsed just four months after its construction. Fluttering, twisting and disintegrating amid heavy winds, the bridge dubbed “Galloping Gertie” stands out in engineering history as a cautionary tale of design failure. But dancing bridges aren’t relegated to history books. Since 2000, Russia’s Volograd Bridge and England’s London Millennium Bridge closed soon after opening due to dangerous vibrations. The bouncing Squibb Park Bridge in Brooklyn, N.Y., made it a year before shutting down. Other examples

ILLUSTRATION BY THOMAS POROSTOCKY

abound the world over. Igor Belykh, associate professor of mathematics and statistics, thinks he knows what today’s engineers are still missing. From a swing set to a skyscraper, every object has a natural frequency — a measure of how quickly it moves back and forth after given a push. If a bridge’s natural frequency syncs with the gait of its pedestrians, the bridge can resonate, bending and swaying with increasing intensity until it fails or the vibrations peak. Unfortunately, conventional calculations cannot predict if or how these fre-

quencies might overlap. With funding from the National Science Foundation, Belykh is modeling the interaction between bridges and the loads that make them wobble. His research uses biomechanical pedestrian models — the crash test dummies of bridge design — to determine the effects of different degrees of interaction. He can even estimate a bridge’s critical crowd size. Once his work is publicly available, engineers will be able to test bridge designs in ways never before possible and perhaps make resonance disaster a relic of the past.

ALUMNI PIANO MANAGEMENT Grammy-nominated artist John Burke (M.P.A. ’11) puts his professional degree to work in the music business.

John Burke, a classically trained pianist with four solo albums under his belt, came to Georgia State to study management and finance. “I’m a pianist instead of a budget analyst or politician, but the master of public administration program prepared me in many ways for my music career,” he said. “As an independent artist, I have to run myself like a business. I need to budget, market, provide a service and work with people.” His latest release, “Orogen,” was nominated for Best New Age Album for the 59th Annual Grammy Awards. “When I saw my name right next to Enya, my heart skipped a beat. I jumped and screamed and hollered and probably came close to getting evicted,” Burke said. As a completely independent artist with no record contract, CONT’D ON P. 15

M A G A Z I N E. G S U. E D U

A FORCE OF TALENT Noel Braham (B.A. ’11) parlayed his Star Wars fan film into a promising acting and filmmaking career. BY LATINA EMERSON

PHOTO BY BRINSON+BANKS

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oel Braham is a man on the go, splitting his time between Atlanta and Los Angeles as he pursues his dreams of becoming a professional actor and filmmaker. His leap of faith is paying off. Last year, he wrote, directed, produced and starred in an official selection to the Star Wars Fan Film Awards. His film, “Star Wars Exile,” made it to the contest’s final round. He first got hooked on “Star Wars” after seeing “The Empire Strikes Back” when he was 7 years old. “I fell in love with ‘Star Wars’ because it made me think about my own purpose,” he said. “Beyond the science fiction, the lightsabers and the blasters, the message is inspiring.” In January, Braham appeared in “The New Edition Story,” BET’s three-night biopic on the rhythm and blues group New Edition. He played the role of Ray Parker Jr., an American guitarist, songwriter and producer. He was also recently selected as one of 12 finalists out of 10,000 nationwide applicants for the CBS Drama Diversity Casting Initiative, a new program aimed at reaching untapped acting talent across the country and increasing opportunities for underrepresented groups. Braham earned a callback on the strength of his audition tape, becoming one of just 450 applicants selected to advance. He auditioned in Atlanta and heard he was a finalist while celebrating another victory — the nationwide commercials he had just booked with GEICO. “It was definitely eye opening,” he said. “The network wanted to see us within scenes to evaluate how we look — our acting, blocking and so on.” CBS’s new program allows the network to showcase a broad array of talents representing communities across the nation, said Tiffany Smith-Anoa’i, executive vice president of Entertainment Diversity, Inclusion and Communications at CBS Entertainment. The casting directors searched for fresh actors who have studied their craft. “Obviously, you want someone who is very authentic,” Smith-Anoa’i said. “And that’s what [Braham] brought — not only to his monologue but to his subsequent auditions and ultimately his screen test. His demeanor on set, his likeability and his talent really shined through.”

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booking agent or band manager, Burke takes special pride in the nomination. “Orogen” was the only independently produced album in the category. His first two records, “Synesthesia” and “Reverie,” released in 2011 and 2013, respectively, were critically acclaimed. For “Orogen,” Burke found his inspiraStudy abroad protion in nature: The grams and exchangorogen is the region es in 36 countries of the Earth’s crust around the globe. where mountains are formed. “Each piece in ‘Orogen’ represents a tectonic occurrence, and within each piece, there is a subtle melody that grows gradually throughout the album,” he said. “‘Orogen’ is a story of melodic development.” While Burke didn’t take home the Grammy this year, the 28-year-old said the experience of seeing himself on the big screen at the biggest music celebration in the world was a rewarding one. He’s already working toward getting on the ballot again. “I’m so grateful to achieve this nomination and, honestly, I feel like I won,” Burke said. “But I’m crazy motivated to get back out there with a new project later this year.”

the Georgia State license plate when you purchase or renew your tag.

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GOOD WORKS Juanita Velez (M.I.B. ’13) blends her love of business with building communities. Business runs in Juanita Velez’s blood, but community pumps in her heart. She’s the international integrated communications supervisor at UPS, managing the flow of information across four regions, and also the chair of the Hispanic Young Professionals and Entrepreneurs (HYPE) organization. In recognition of her contributions to her community, the Georgia Hispanic Chamber of Commerce named her the 2016 Young Professional of the Year. “The Hispanic community in Georgia is growing fast, and their impact on the economy is increasing every day,” Velez said. “HYPE will be a place for them to

5,000

At-risk students with unmet financial need helped to stay in school and graduate thanks to Panther Retention Grants.

ILLUSTRATION BY ADAM CRUFT

JOHN BURKE (M.B.A. ’15)

“I’m so grateful to achieve this nomination, and honestly, I feel like I won. I’m crazy motivated to get back out there with a new project later this year.” connect, grow and develop their careers.” HYPE has financial backing from the UPS Foundation and an impressive board of directors from companies such as Wells Fargo and Telemundo Atlanta. Velez attributes her sense of community obligation to her parents, who collected used clothing to distribute every Christmas to people in need in her native Colombia. Her father also ran a free dental clinic for orphans. “I always have been involved in giving back to the community,” Velez says. “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t

exposed to helping others.” Velez notes the obstacles that stand in the way of Hispanics’ success, particularly learning English, adapting to the many cultures they encounter in the U.S. and balancing dedication to their families with the need to move ahead. “I want to be a motivational figure for the community as more and more Hispanics strive to develop their lives and elevate their status,” she said. Got a promotion? A new addition to the family? Go ahead, brag a little. Visit magazine.gsu.edu for news from your classmates and fellow Georgia State alumni.

M A G A Z I N E. G S U. E D U

BELOW: Work begins on Centennial Olympi c Stadium in 1993.

RIGHT: The repurposed Georgia State Stadium will have seating for 23,000, with a future phase adding another 10,000 seats.

RIGHT: Baseball will move downtown from Panthersville to play in a new ballpark on the outline of the Braves’ old diamond, Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, where Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s home run record in 1974.

By Jim Auchmutey (B.A. ’77) Bulletin board photos by Ryan Hayslip

Georgia State University Magazine Spring 2017

ABOVE: A rendering of what Capitol Avenue could look like in the not-too-distant future.

The news that would lead to the most dramatic expansion in the history of Georgia State University came with a vibrating cell phone. It was November 2013, and Mark Becker, who had been president of the university for almost five years, was attending a conference in Washington, D.C. During a lunch break, his phone lit up and he saw a familiar name on the screen: a high-ranking official with the Atlanta city government. “I’d better take this one,” Becker told his lunch partners. “Mark, I just wanted you to know that I’m telling everyone that Georgia State ought to be at Turner Field,” the official began. “What are you talking about?” “You haven’t heard? The Braves are moving.” Becker was astonished. The Atlanta Braves, who had played professional baseball since 1966 at two successive stadiums a few blocks south of the State Capitol, had announced they were vacating their home at Turner Field when the lease expired in 2016. They were leaving downtown to build a new stadium across the Chattahoochee River in suburban Cobb County. “Unless you say you’re not interested,” the official added, “I’m going to tell everyone that Georgia State ought to be at Turner Field.” Becker considered his response. The university had been looking for a way to bring its baseball program closer to the core campus. The team played eight miles away at the Panthersville Recreation Complex in DeKalb County, a round-trip commute that could take more than an hour, depending on traffic. If nothing else, Turner Field could end that inconvenience. But a 50,000-seat Major League Baseball stadium — did Georgia State really need such a large facility? The biggest crowd that had ever come to see the Panthers play any sport was the 30,000-plus who attended the football team’s inaugural game in 2010. “We’re definitely interested,” Becker replied, searching for the right balance of enthusiasm and caution. “But obviously, we need to know a lot more.” Turner Field is now Georgia State’s baby. After a competitive bidding process, the Atlanta Fulton County Recreation Authority, the government entity that controlled the stadium and the vast parking lots surrounding it, decided in December 2015 to sell the site to Georgia State and the private developers Carter, Oakwood Development and Healey Weatherholtz. The $30 million transaction, handled through the Georgia State University Foundation, closed Jan. 5. Changes are coming quickly. “This is what we’re looking at,” Becker says, opening a thick binder of plans on the conference table in his office atop Centennial Hall. The maps show the football team playing in a retrofitted Turner Field, which was itself retrofitted from the immense coliseum that hosted the opening and closing ceremonies of the1996 Summer Olympics. Across Georgia Avenue to the north, the university’s baseball team would play in a new 1,000-seat ballpark on the outline of the Braves’ old diamond, Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, where Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s home run record in 1974 and where the franchise won its only World Series here in 1995. “We’re playing football in a new Georgia State stadium this fall,” Becker says.

Beyond those marquee attractions, the plans show buildings dotted throughout the site: housing for students and nonstudents, restaurants, retail, offices and a parking garage, all threaded with green space. The overriding idea is to get rid of the asphalt wasteland that isolated Turner Field from the rest of the city and to replace it with a dense urban village anchored by education and athletics. However it materializes, it’s clear Turner Field will be transformational for Georgia State. The 67-acre site is almost as large as the entire downtown campus, which amounts to about 71 acres. The development promises to be the culmination of three decades of expansion that have seen the university bust out of the small footprint that once confined it to five blocks along Decatur Street. “We’ve never been a traditional campus,” Becker says. “We’re more like New York University, which is interwoven with Greenwich Village. We want Georgia State to be interwoven with Atlanta.” With Turner Field, that process should take its biggest leap forward.

Connecting Campus A NUMBER OF DEVELOPERS contacted Geor-

gia State after the Braves dropped their bombshell. The university knew it couldn’t buy and build out the property by itself, that it would need a partner if the Recreation Authority accepted its bid. After weeks of discussions, Georgia State chose Carter, an Atlanta-based real estate company with a long resume of work on campuses such as Georgia Tech, Boise State, the University of Michigan and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. The company also undertakes complicated mixeduse projects in urban settings, including a new city center for Sandy Springs, north of Atlanta, and a huge development between two professional sports stadiums along the Ohio River in Cincinnati. Scott Taylor, Carter’s president, expects to start work at the site as early as this summer. “We want it to be a great place to walk down the street for 365 days a year,” he says, “not just on game days.”

That was always the problem with Turner Field. It was an exciting place to be on the 81 days a year when the Braves played. The rest of the time, it was locked gates surrounded by empty parking lots. Well, not entirely empty. Georgia State has leased thousands of spaces from the Recreation Authority since 1969, allowing students to park there and board shuttle buses for campus. You wouldn’t know it to look around now, but the Turner Field neighborhood was once a thriving residential area with its own stores, restaurants and movie theater. Summerhill was one of the first Jewish enclaves in Atlanta. The real-life model for the heroine of “Driving Miss Daisy,” playwright Alfred Uhry’s grandmother, grew up there. Atlanta’s only Jewish mayor, Sam Massell (B.C.S. ’51), was born there at Piedmont Hospital, which once occu-

pied the site of the Braves’ first stadium. By the 1950s, the neighborhood was changing, becoming lower-income and predominantly African-American. The city decided it was ripe for urban renewal and cleared several blocks for interstate highway construction, public housing that was never built and finally the stadium that brought professional baseball and football to the South. In many ways, Summerhill never recovered. The coming of the Olympics during the 1990s brought some hope as parts of the neighborhood were spiffed up to impress visitors and filled in here and there with some nicer homes. But the momentum withered, and the streets closest to Turner Field were marred by vacant lots and boarded-up businesses. David Greenberg (M.H.P. ’16), a planner with Cherokee County, lives in one of those houses near the stadium. Given

the history, he understands the mixture of wariness and optimism that many of his neighbors feel toward any proposal for Turner Field. “Some residents worry about getting displaced, about rowdy students, about the university taking over and everything becoming more congested and dense,” he says. “I’m excited about what Georgia State could do with the property, but it’s going to be complicated moving into a residential area like this. Communication and transparency are going to be very important.” Carter has heard the residents’ concerns and promises to alleviate problems such as the stormwater that runs off the parking lots into the neighborhood. The company knows people badly want a grocery store in the retail mix, something Summerhill hasn’t had in decades. “I think we all want the same thing here,”

The Panthers will open the football season under the lights at the new Georgia State Stadium Thursday, Aug. 31, against Tennesee State. They’ll play another Thursday night game Oct. 26 against conference foe South Alabama.

Taylor says. “We want a safe environment. We want better services. We want the development to be walkable and open.” Part of the challenge will be connecting the project not just to the neighborhoods surrounding it but to downtown and the Georgia State campus a mile north. As thousands of Braves fans know, Capitol Avenue can be bleak and windswept as it crosses Interstate 20. “We want to soften that stretch and make it more pedestrian and bicycle friendly,” Taylor says. “We need to make this place part of Atlanta again.” He’d like to see the bridge over I-20 fashioned into something more architecturally interesting. Ultimately, he’d love to see transit such as the Atlanta Streetcar, run down the avenue. That hope became an official civic goal in December when the Atlanta City Council approved a new Streetcar System Plan that would send railcars up and down Capitol Avenue and Hank Aaron Boulevard, and east and west along Ralph David Abernathy Boulevard and Georgia Avenue. The plan would effectively create a streetcar intersection between Georgia State’s football and baseball stadiums.

Home of the Panthers that Georgia State would play football at Turner Field. In fact, Becker was initially dubious that the baseball edifice would work for the Panthers. “In the early days of this,” he says, “I thought the stadium would have to be demolished and we’d need to build something new. And then along comes Charlie Cobb, who convinces me otherwise.” Cobb, Georgia State’s athletic director, wasn’t even at the university when the Braves made their announcement; he was the athletic director at Appalachian State in Boone, N.C. But he had longstanding ties to Atlanta and the stadium site. He was a football player in college, an offensive lineman at North Carolina State, and participated in the Peach Bowl at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, getting to use the locker of one of his baseball heroes, Braves star Dale Murphy. Cobb spent much of his early career in Atlanta working for the Georgia IT WAS NEVER A GIVEN

All Systems Go

There is much to do before the Panthers open Georgia State Stadium for the Aug. 31 football season opener. RETROFITTING A MAJOR league baseball stadium for college football is no small feat. Doing it in seven months? Almost unheard of. With a tight construction schedule and the home opener against the Tennessee State Tigers a few months away, units around the university are working to make sure everything comes together in time for kickoff. Crews started working on the field in late February and plan to finish by August. Fans will see Phase One of the renovation this season, with concession stands, a reordered seating chart, food trucks and other upgrades. The Athletics Department is finalizing tailgating and parking areas and looking for new ways to build tradition at the stadium. They’ve created a Panther Fan Council to allow fans, alumni, staff and the community to weigh in at open forums at the stadium to talk about how to build the buzz. There are dozens of spreadsheets with thousands of details that have to be worked out ahead of opening day. Take the stadium’s giant video screen for example. The Braves had a full-time technician dedicated to the nine-story behemoth, which is at its “end of life.” (Read: old and outdated.) When James Amann,

Georgia State’s senior information technology project manager, first toured the stadium he had no idea what the university was inheriting in the way of audiovisual equipment, much less how it all worked. Less than an hour into his tour, he ran into Athletics Director Charlie Cobb, who had a request. “Can we get the JumboTron working by next week?” Cobb asked. The video panels use outdated technology that is no longer supported. Amann’s team had no experience with the unit, nor did they know which wires or computers made the thing go. Two days of work later, Amann’s team felt confident they could get it up and running, but there was still one major concern. The 71-foot-tall screen might burst into flames when it was turned on. “That was a legitimate concern,” Amman says. Amman wrote Cobb, letting him know what could happen when the video screen powered up. “I am comfortable with this approach,” Cobb wrote back. “So what I’m reading is you are ready for us to do a power-on test?” Amann asked again. “Absolutely!” Cobb replied. Eyes shielded and fingers crossed,a member of Amman’s team pushed the button. Success! A few days later, Cobb hosted football recruits and their families at the new stadium in the university’s most successful signing day ever, the Georgia State Athletics logo shining down from above.

Dome and was involved in big events such as the Olympics and the Super Bowl, so he knew the venues and the city. When he saw the news about Turner Field pop up on his computer screen, his first thought was: “Holy smoke, Georgia State needs to be there.” Nine months later, Cobb was there himself, hired in large part because of his experience developing athletic facilities at Appalachian State. “I went to college with every intention of becoming an architect,” he says. “I still like to draw and paint. I’ve done a lot of drawings about Turner Field.” For a couple of years after he was hired in 2014, Cobb would jog down Capitol Avenue to Turner Field from his office in the Georgia State Sports Arena. “I don’t run very fast,” he says, “so I had a lot of time to look around and think about things. I’d go down there and imagine the students walking, the athletes play-

ing and the bands practicing.” During the first week of 2017, all that imagination moved closer to reality when Georgia State closed the deal and took possession of the property. Less than a month later, Cobb and the university’s new football coach, Shawn Elliott, recently arrived from the University of South Carolina, welcomed several hundred Panther supporters to Turner Field for National Signing Day, when colleges announce their new recruiting classes. “We didn’t have to beg a single player to come here,” Elliott told the gathering. “We showed them our campus, we showed them Atlanta, we showed them our new stadium.” The evening served as a coming-out party for a landmark in transition. As boosters arrived, they saw a huge artist’s rendering of the reconfigured stadium on the back of the centerfield scoreboard. Georgia State cheerleaders shaking pompons welcomed

One of the most popular features at Turner Field is a statue of Hank Aaron taking the swing that broke Babe Ruth’s home run record. The Braves wanted to move it to their new stadium in Cobb County, but the Recreation Authority claimed ownership, and the team relented. The statue will stay and may be part of Georgia State’s new baseball park, on the site of the record-setting homer.

guests into the complex, where they were directed to the 755 Club overlooking the former baseball field. A video display running around the bottom of the upper deck blazed with Georgia State blue and the message: “Welcome to Georgia State Stadium, Home of the Panthers.” Plans call for a football stadium of 25,000 to 30,000 seats, with the gridiron running along the third-base line, putting one end zone where the home dugout used to be and the other in left field. The upper decks will likely be covered in tarp until they’re needed. The neon tomahawk above the scoreboard will be gone, but the foul poles might be kept as a reminder of the stadium’s baseball past. The multistory building where the Braves had their offices will probably house elements of the athletic department and other academic programs. “We’ve got a lot of Jim Auchmutey work to do, but we’ll spent almost 30 be ready for football,” years as a writer Cobb says, taking it and editor for The all in as he stands at a Atlanta Journalbank of windows in the Constitution, spe755 Club. cializing in stories On the field below, about the South he could see a blue and its history and Panther logo painted culture. He is auin the outfield grass thor of “The Class behind what had been of ’65: A Student, a second base. Divided Town, and Little by little, Turner the Long Road to Field is becoming GeorForgiveness.” gia State Stadium.

By Benjamin Hodges (B.A. ’08) ❇

Illustration by Marco Ventura

❇

Georgia State University Magazine

❇

Spring 2017

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Page 23

WUNDERKIND WILL ANDERSON (B. A., B.S. ’17) HAS BEEN OUTDOING THE WORLD FOR YEARS. AT JUST 21, HE’S A GLOBETROTTING ARCHAEOLOGIST, PUBLISHED AUTHOR, ATHLETE, HUMANITARIAN, OPERA SINGER . . . WHO LOVES TAKING CARE OF BONES.

The RENAISSANCE Kid

G E O R G I A S TAT E U N I V E R S I T Y M A G A Z I N E S P R I N G 2 0 1 7

“ HE IS AN INVENTOR. HE TAKES A PROBLEM APART AND FIGURES OUT ITS MOST BASIC ELEMENTS AND BUILDS UP FROM THERE.”

On the top floor of Sparks Hall, around the back on the Library Plaza side, a long, dark hallway stretches to the northwest. There’s no one up here. The doors are all shut, and there’s not a light in sight. For a weekday afternoon at the state’s largest public university, the quiet is borderline unnerving. Halfway down, behind a closed door, Will Anderson slides the cast of a 100,000-year-old Neanderthal tooth out from under a microscope and gently places it back in its case. When he’s done, he grabs a keyring and pulls the door closed behind him with a hollow clap that echoes down the corridor with the jingle of his keys. He glides down and approaches a set of heavy doors marked “Do Not Enter: Authorized Persons Only,” complete with a stop sign and a warning about 24-hour surveillance. He punches in a code and wends around a corner, arriving at a dead-end room guarded with another keypad. Here, some 2,500 specimens and casts of remains are kept behind locked display cases or tucked away amid stacks on stacks of deep drawers in industrial-grade cabinets that line the back wall. Anderson unlocks a case in the corner and cradles a tiny cranium, disproportionate and split into more than a dozen bones. It belonged to a newborn baby. He explains that humans are born with more than 450 bones, many of which fuse and combine in time to constitute the 206 in an average adult. These bones never had the opportunity. “This is very important to have — very rare,” he says, He moves over the cabinets and grabs a pelvis and rotates it around to the back where the sacrum should connect. But on this specimen, the sacrum has completely fused to the pelvis. It’s one solid mass of bone now. He points to the extensive fat deposits. These indicate obesity. Then he finds the acetabulum, or hip socket. It’s been smashed flat, eroded away — the result of an injury compounded with excessive weight. Over time, walking had become impossible, and this person had to give up the fight — immobile for the rest of his life, always seated or lying down. And if a joint surface doesn’t move, the bones will eventually fuse. “Ever since I was 16, I wanted to work in forensic anthropology, in bones,” Will explains. “Dig up the bones, figure out what

happened, find out who they were.” Now a senior with a double major in anthropology and chemistry, he turned down acceptance letters from Penn and Duke when Georgia State offered him a Presidential Scholarship, the university’s most coveted award: a full ride complete with tuition, fees, housing, a living stipend, and paid research and study abroad opportunities. Larry Berman, dean of the Honors College, helped recruit Will for the Presidential Scholarship when he was in high school. “He was in the top cohort,” Berman says. “Once I met him, I found him to be — as I still do — an extraordinarily interesting and eclectic person. A renaissance man. There is no box that Will Anderson fits.” “Will hit the ground running when he came here,” recalls Frank L’Engle Williams, professor of anthropology and Will’s faculty adviser and mentor. Under Williams’ direction, Will inventoried the entire collection with excruciating detail and continues to keep the bones clean, organized and secure.

ou may have guessed it already, but Will is something of a prodigy. Homeschooled through the eighth grade, he credits his parents with making knowledge and the arts such high priorities. An excellent piano player, his father works at the Supreme Court of Georgia as a staff attorney where he drafts decisions for the state’s top justices. His mother, a dazzling soprano and English teacher, directed Will and his siblings as their primary instructor. (His twin sisters have dual degrees in French and violin performance while his brother, an alumnus of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, is one of the nation’s top pipe organists under 30.) While the only child in his family without a primary career in music, he’s still minoring in music and, in fact, contemplated a music major before deciding on the sciences. His mother remembers how, from his earliest days, he loved watching his sisters play their violins. He was begging to learn the instrument himself as soon as he could talk and started training at just two years old. He later transitioned to the viola and began performing publicly

PHOTO BY ANDREW THOMAS LEE

M A G A Z I N E. G S U. E D U

After asking to participate in the family music over Christmas, Will, 2, shows off on the violin with months of practice already behind him.

“ IT’S TOO EARLY TO TALK ABOUT WILL’S ACCOMPLISHMENTS. HE’S JUST GETTING STARTED.”

in the sixth grade, making Georgia’s All-State Orchestra seven years in a row and earning a seat with the Atlanta Symphony Youth Orchestra for four. And yet his true artistic passion is voice. In fact, you might have heard him before. He not only nailed roles in the School of Music’s opera productions of Humperdinck’s “Hansel and Gretel” and Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro,” but he also sang the national anthem at the university’s winter 2015 and spring 2016 Commencement ceremonies in the Georgia Dome. He even sings baritone professionally with the Atlanta Opera and the choir at the Cathedral of Christ the King. “He didn’t give up music,” Berman says, “but through his experience with his faculty members and classes, he developed a whole new set of inquiries, and that is the essence of an honors education.” But that’s not even the half of it. He’s also a paid organic chemistry teaching assistant, giving lectures and running labs in one of the university’s most difficult subjects. “It’s fun to watch them cry,” he admits, “but it’s always awkward when I have friends in class.” He parlayed a freshman assistantship with the Anthropology Department into a relationship with Williams, which led to his opportunity to work with the collection. But he soon needed another challenge, and Williams got to see just how much he could do. First, he inventoried Williams’ vast, private collection of dental casts — hundreds and hundreds of specimens. Then came the research. When Williams returned from a Fulbright trip to Belgium with molds of an immense collection of Neanderthal teeth, he had big plans. He wanted to compare them with their contemporary counterparts, trace their evolution, and mine them for insights into diet, region, age and more. Minor detail: This had never been done before, and there wasn’t even a method in place. So Will created one. After teaching himself elliptical Fourier analysis (major-league trigonometry used to represent and analyze shapes) and some advanced software, he invented a photo technique that uses a low-magnification microscope to digitally trace the outline of each tooth and capture every deformation down to the micron. He then processed the images and calculations through the software to create a description of each specimen never before available.

“This is big time,” Williams says. “This is the kind of work a doctoral student would do. And he learned it all on his own.” Later, some colleagues approached Williams about analyzing scratches on some ancient South African bone tools. Williams wondered if Will could adapt his method for analyzing teeth to figure out what these digging tools were used for: what surfaces they encountered, what foods they pulled up from the ground. He did that, too. And that research earned him a first-place prize at last year’s Sigma Xi Student Research Conference, one of the sciences’ most prestigious venues for student researchers. “He is an inventor,” says Williams. “He takes a problem apart and figures out its most basic elements and builds up from there.” Drawing from these projects and more, Will is already an established author in his field, earning three presentations (including one as a first author) at the 2016 and 2017 meetings of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (AAPA), the most important conference of the discipline. His scholarly abstracts are a matter of AAPA record. And he has more research he hasn’t submitted yet. “Incredible. Through the roof. Off the charts,” says Williams. “It’s unheard of.” Will loves busy summers, too. Just last year, he got back from Romania, where he helped a licensed archaeology firm excavate a mass grave left by Vlad the Impaler in the 15th century. In 2014, he flew to Chengdu, China, to analyze water pollution, dipping buckets off Jinjiang River bridges and taking samples back to a nearby university lab, where he hunted for contaminants using a gas chromatograph micro spectrometer he built himself. (“I only fell in once,” he says.) A year before that, he set off for Belize with a team from a local nonprofit to help excavate Dos Hombres, the country’s fourth largest Maya site, left undisturbed for nearly two millennia. He built bridges and hiked through virgin jungles full of jaguars, peccaries and uncatalogued insects to unearth architecture and an abundance of artifacts. He even jousted with packs of spider monkeys who frequently ganged up to pelt the team with sticks, nuts and excrement when they crossed invisible territorial boundaries. “We were in the middle of a 300,000acre preserve — all jungle, no humans,”

State’s 1913 Society. And he took 21 hours in the fall in preparation for graduation this spring, admitting during his interview he had slept a little on only two nights of the preceding week.

he recalls. “I can’t even express how small you feel. It’s like nothing else. It’s so raw, so humbling.” He impressed the group so much they invited him to come back in 2015, this time as a supervisor. “He’s been an incredible champion of the academic experience in all of its facets, not just with research and teaching but in the service,” says Williams. “He’s a model student, and he’s definitely one of my heroes. I don’t think you can get much better.” Will competed with USA Swimming for seven years. Played soccer for 14. He’s an avid cyclist and bike commuter. He’s been volunteering with StandUp for Kids as a counselor for homeless youth for three years, providing food, medical care, friendship and other needs to some of Atlanta’s most disadvantaged young people. He’s a presidential ambassador with Georgia

n 2006, Will offered to care for his grandfather, Paul Daniel Bryan, a former lieutenant with the U.S. Navy and a veteran of World War II and Korea who fought in battles like Okinawa and Iwo Jima. Paul was suffering from advanced Parkinson’s disease and needed a daily caretaker — a duty Will embraced for eight years until Bryan died in 2014. Bryan told Will many stories from his days in the service, and their cherished relationship encouraged Will to pursue a specific career. The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) is an organization within the Department of Defense charged with recovering missing U.S. soldiers from past wars and conflicts. Its work relies heavily on forensic anthropologists who travel the world to investigate, excavate and identify the remains of servicemembers who never made it home. It’s a calling that perfectly unites Will’s penchant for the sciences with his drive to honor his grandfather’s service. With trademark determination, he spent the following years balancing his musical talent with the legwork necessary for a career at the DPAA: scholarships, grad school, practicums, research and really long hours manhandling human remains. But in the light of some recent epiphanies, Will has reevaluated the options and challenges ahead of him. On one hand, the DPAA now depends more and more on contractors and is no longer a reliable place to settle in for a long career. On the other, he has realized he could use a break from the sciences he’s mastered so marvelously — because, while forensic anthropology may still have much to teach the 21-year-old, it’s not challenging him like it used to. “If I feel like I’m not being challenged, I’m going to move on to something else,” he says. “Or if I feel like I’ve done as much as I can do with something, I’m going to go find something new. I’m an adrenaline junkie. That’s what keeps me alive.” And so, next August, Will is heading to Naval Station Newport in Rhode Island to begin training as a U.S. Navy nuclear surface warfare officer. He’ll learn how to man the biggest guns on the most capable submarines in the world. It’s an enormous jump — from labs and trowels to subs and nukes — but for Will, it’s “something I have to do and a stepping stone to whatever I do next.” Once his time in the armed forces is served, he can make another momentous decision: what to conquer next. He can use his G.I. Bill benefits to go back to grad school, scoop up a doctorate, teach, research or maybe even pick up some contracts with the DPAA. Or he might go in an entirely new direction. His horizons will be broader than they are even now. “It’s too early to talk about Will’s accomplishments,” Berman says. “He’s just getting started. But even now, he can do almost anything he wants because of his intellect, energy, friendliness and incredible level of engagement. So I think we’re going to be talking about his accomplishments 20 or 30 years from now. His will be a lifetime of distinction and achievement. I really believe that.” With just a few classes left, Will is set to graduate in May as one of the most interesting and gifted young scholars in the university’s 104-year history. And we can’t wait to write his next story when he’s an alum — you know, once he actually gets to work on this little thing called life.

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G E O R G I A S TAT E U N I V E R S I T Y M A G A Z I N E

Following the Sun to the End of the Earth

M A G A Z I N E. G S U. E D U

Professor Stuart Jefferies leads a multi-institutional crew of scientists

SPRING 2017

opening a solar observatory in the most inhospitable place on the planet â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Antarctica.

By Charles McNair

A tracking platform vital to the success of an expensive, carefully planned solar experiment worked exactly 13 minutes. Then it stopped cold. Very cold. Minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit cold. South Pole cold. The glitch sent a chill through Stuart Jefferies and his team. In December 2016, the professor in Georgia State’s Department of Physics and Astronomy led a six-man crew representing five institutions in three nations to Antarctica. Their mission: Set up and operate telescopes and other instruments that record high-resolution images of the sun. Jefferies and his team had worked for months to coordinate their seven-week expedition. They arranged transportation and procured scientific equipment. They mapped logistics and shipped supplies. In Christchurch, New Zealand, they selected special extreme cold weather gear. Once in Antarctica, atop ice miles deep, they established a remote observatory site more than three miles from the relative warmth and comfort of the American Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. They spent two weeks preparing the site. They built instruments in a confined remote building with no infrastructure for dealing with complicated optical systems. They spent 10 days testing and debugging the whole operation. Then, exactly 13 minutes into the experiment, the tracking platform froze up and refused to budge. In most places, repairing mechanical problems requires only a wrench, a strong arm and opposable thumbs. In Antarctica, the rules change. “Because of the extreme conditions down here at minus 20 to minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit,” says Jefferies, “jobs that may be relatively straightforward back on the mainland can be a challenge, and we can’t just go to the local parts shop for things we need.”

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It’s not Jefferies’ first experience at the pole. This is his seventh expedition. His perceptions haven’t changed since his first trip 30 years ago, a 1987 project with the Bartol Research Institute at the University of Delaware. “This is a place of unbelievable beauty,” he says, “but it is also very harsh.” Harsh. In ice tunnels below the polar station, temperatures routinely plunge to minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit, this in the Antarctic summer. A cup of water tossed into the air turns into fine ice crystals. Touching anything metal left out of doors can be a painful reminder that skin adheres to super-cold metallic surfaces. Still, solar scientists flock to Antarctica like moths to a flame. Here, despite unpredictable weather, the sun can theoretically be visible 24 hours a day for six months straight. The Antarctic is a land of the midnight sun. Sponsored by the National Science Foundation’s Division of Polar Programs, Jefferies’ project will allow researchers to measure and characterize gravity waves in the sun’s atmosphere. Scientists want to know how those waves transport energy, and they seek wave data to map the sun’s structure and study changes in its atmosphere. Mysteries abound — the solar coronal heating enigma, for instance. Scientists have long wondered why the temperature of the sun’s atmosphere rises from about 6,000 degrees at its visible surface (the photosphere) to several million degrees in its outer atmosphere (the corona). “By studying the magnetic, acoustic and gravity waves in the sun’s atmosphere,” says Jefferies, “we hope to improve our understanding of some causes of space weather, like solar flares and coronal mass ejections.” As Jefferies points out, adverse space weather disables satellites, causes power grid failures and disrupts communications. “All of this has a significant impact on society.”

Gremlins in the Gizmos The glitch with the tracking platform was unusual, but Antarctica means business as unusual. “We place our telescopes on top of a platform that follows the sun,” Jefferies explains. “The platform was built in the early 1980s and has worked flawlessly

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Thirteen minutes.

Secrets of the Sun

PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF STUART JEFFERIES

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ever since. This year, our experiment was about 150 pounds heavier than previous years, and it appears that we didn’t quite get the balancing right when we set everything up at our remote site.” Did the platform’s bearings seize up? Did the clutch fail? Jefferies and his team brought the device indoors to warm it and started troubleshooting. The workdays stretched to 20 hours. Still, spirits remained high. It takes special people to work in special conditions, and Jefferies’ team is a wellseasoned, good-natured crew, he says. “Everyone on the team was picked for two reasons,” Jefferies says. “First, personality and ability to work in a team environment under pressure. Second, some unique expertise that will help enhance the project’s scientific return.” Bill Giebink, the project manager, hails from the University of Hawaii, one of Jefferies’ career stops before joining Georgia State in 2016. Biebink is a sort of scientific Swiss army knife, experienced in mechanics, electronics and telescope optics. “Most of all,” says Jefferies, “he has phenomenal organizational skills, a must for expeditions like this.” Neil Murphy, like Giebink, accompanied Jefferies on a 2007 polar expedition and is on loan from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. Murphy brings with him varied skills as an accomplished instrument builder, plus expertise working the atomic vapor cells used in instruments. From the European Space Agency, Bernhard Fleck adds extensive experience in seismic probing of the sun’s atmosphere, along with unique analysis skills. Francesco Berrilli and Stefano Scardigli from the University of Rome Tor Vergata build instruments that study the sun’s convective properties. Data these instruments capture have space weather applications that complement Jefferies’ search for atmospheric gravity waves. Camaraderie counts. “Every single team member has not only a fantastic work ethic but also a great sense of humor,” says Jefferies. “That’s something you definitely need here as things don’t always go as planned. “The other trait that they all share is this — nobody has an ego that gets in the way of things. I am very lucky to have these guys on my team. Despite the harsh conditions, we have a lot of laughs at our ups and downs.”

Important South Pole structures: The container on the right houses a generator that provides electricity to a subterranean dwelling, and the black building on the left is a solar-heated lavatory known as “The Duke.”

Ice-cold Speed Bumps Nobody laughed when the tracking platform stopped after 13 minutes. No one panicked either. “Actually, one of the things you learn about working in Antarctica,” Jefferies says, “is that there are always unexpected speed bumps to navigate. It wasn’t a complete surprise when things got complicated.” Even simple things get complicated. One afternoon, Jefferies left the observation site shelter (called “The Smurf” and painted bright blue) to put eight small bolts on the side of the instrument box. “The bolts are small, so I had to take my gloves off,” he says, “but the temperature with the wind chill was about minus 40 Fahrenheit. After about two minutes, my hands were so cold I couldn’t feel them.” Jefferies dropped a few of the bolts on the ice, and he couldn’t make his fingers work to pick them up. “I had to go inside for 15 minutes to warm up before I could retrieve the bolts,” he says. After the tracking platform failed, the team removed its sides — outdoors — to examine the electronics.

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Worldly Pursuits

“We were working with frozen cables and trying to diagnose the problem with the temperature way below zero and the wind hitting us at 20 miles an hour,” says Jefferies. “Let’s call it a challenge.” Necessity mothers a lot of invention at the South Pole. “We don’t have the resources we do back at home, of course,” Jefferies says. “You have to be a jack-of-all-trades with MacGyver tendencies.” (MacGyver, a weaponless secret agent in a popular television show that ran from 1985–92, used encyclopedic scientific knowledge to thwart enemies. In one well-remembered episode, he used a paper clip to foil the plans of a villain.) Good neighbors help, too. The National Science Foundation runs the South Pole station, supporting science primarily conducted by United States institutions. But harmonious collaborations take place with scientists from around the world. “The local community at the South Pole is fantastic,” Jefferies says. “Everyone wants science projects to be successful, and they go out of their ways to help if they can. It is a very supportive environment.”

Jefferies says that same kind of supportive environment drew him to Georgia State after 10 years at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii. “I was attracted to Georgia State because of the forward-looking philosophy of the upper administration, and the supportive atmosphere both in the Astronomy Department and at the university level,” he says. In the second semester of 2016, Jefferies taught a graduate class (ASTR 8900), and he started teaching an introductory astronomy class for undergraduates (ASTR 1000) after he returned from the South Pole at the end of January. If this year’s experiment proves successful, he plans a return polar trip in 2018, this time with a Georgia State graduate student on the team. Jefferies says his journey into solar physics has been a stroke of fortune, filled with MacGyver moments and little planning. He earned his Ph.D. in neutron physics at the University of London, where he lectured and produced papers with sexy titles (if you’re a sun scientist) such as “Modeling Solar Oscillation Power Spectra. II. Parametric Model of Spectral Lines Observed in DopplerVelocity Measurements.” He eyed a job at a nuclear reactor in Russellville, Ark., but a newspaper advertisement changed that. “Birmingham University needed someone to help set up solar observatories around the world,” Jefferies says. “I have a passion for travel, and so I applied. To my surprise, I was offered the job even though I knew essentially nothing about astronomy.” For the next five years, Jefferies traveled the world setting up a global network of instruments for solar studies. (“It was a crash course in solar physics,” he says.) He stopped at Maui, Hawaii, where he worked at Mees Solar Observatory atop Mt. Haleakala. (“I was known locally as Crater Man,” he says.) He worked at Caenarvon, Western Australia, then on Tenerife in the Canary Islands. Between assignments, he would fly back to Birmingham, England, to build instruments for the next installation. He traveled between gigs, too — Fiji, Tahiti, New Zealand, all over. These worldly adventures let him indulge his hobbies — mountain biking, surfing, ocean swimming and trail running. He passed along his love of traveling to his daughter, Danielle, a sophomore now at Long Island University Brooklyn, whom he would take on those long summer trips. On Maui, his wife, Colleen, teamed up with him to coach age group swimming. (Jefferies’ LinkedIn profile calls him “Professor of Physics and Astronomy and Head Swimming Coach.”) “I’m hoping to find a team I can help out in Atlanta once I get back from the South Pole,” he says. Last, but not least, Jefferies says he “loves trying new foods.” He must have been thrilled when the producer of super-chef Anthony Bourdain’s “Parts Unknown” television series contacted him as part of a special edition on science in Antarctica. The episode will air later this spring. No thrill, though, matched the one Jefferies got in mid-January. The team had taken apart the balky tracking platform. They rebuilt the clutch and made other adjustments. They reassembled it and crossed their fingers. On test day, Jefferies and the team pulled out of the Amundsen-Scott base station in a van fitted with large tires deliberately left partially flat to help with traction. The Italians played Pink Floyd on the way to the observatory site. It was minus 30 outside, with wind. They left behind a warm galley serving hot meals three times a day; a mini theatre with an extensive movie collection, a gym, a recreation room with a pool table, a music room with drums, guitars and amps, and a sauna including two weekly Charles McNair pubtwo-minute-maximum hot showers. (Polar visitors can join the lishes nationally and 300 Degree Club by pumping the sauna temp to 200 degrees internationally. He is Fahrenheit, then cooling down outside in 100 degrees below.) the author of two novJefferies and his team put the tracking platform in place. They els, “Pickett’s Charge” mounted the equipment. They manned the controls and glanced and “Land O’ Goshen.” at the heavens for luck. He was books editor at The tracking platform worked perfectly. The experiment would Paste Magazine from proceed. The science could start. 2005–15. McNair lives At the bottom of the world, Stuart Jefferies stood on top of the in Bogota, Colombia. world.

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INSIDE INSIGHT FIRST PITCH • On April 19, 1966, a capacity crowd of 50,671 packed into Atlanta Stadium for the first Major League

Baseball game in the South. The Braves and Pittsburgh Pirates, shown here during pregame festivities, treated the fans to an extra-inning classic. With the game tied 1-1 going into the 13th inning, the Pirates’ future Hall of Famer Willie Stargell hit a two-run homer to make the score 3-1. The Braves mounted a comeback in the bottom of the inning as future Hall of Famer Joe Torre hit a solo home run to bring it to 3-2, but the Braves couldn’t get around the bases again. Atlanta Stadium, later known as Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, was demolished in 1997. Soon, the Georgia State baseball team will play on an outline of the stadium’s field in a new ballpark.

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PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION PHOTOGRAPHIC ARCHIVES. SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES, GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY.

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