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Nine Grady College students to cover Paralympic Games in Rio for Associated Press CAMPUS NEWS
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‘Keep your seats ...’ exhibit looks at history of UGA Redcoat Marching Band Vol. 44, No. 7
September 6, 2016
columns.uga.edu
Exploratory Center provides personal advising services By Tracy Coley tcoley@uga.edu
David Barnes
From right: UGA swimmers Hali Flickinger, Chantal Van Landeghem and Olivia Smoliga meet with a fan during the celebration held Aug. 31 for UGA student-athletes who participated in the 2016 Rio Olympic Games.
Olympians return
University welcomes home its student-athletes from 2016 Summer Games in Rio
By Aaron Hale
aahale@uga.edu
UGA welcomed home its Olympic student-athletes with a reception Aug. 31 at the ButtsMehre Heritage Hall. Admiring Georgia Bulldog and Team USA fans, including many families, got a chance to meet Olympic athletes who had a strong showing in Rio de Janeiro last month. UGA’s contingent of 37 current and former student-athletes and coaches were the greatest number in school history. UGA athletes, representing 10 different countries, won 10 medals at Rio (see infographic, page 2). UGA President Jere W. Morehead told the 20 studentathletes and coaches in attendance that they made the university proud. “Thank you for what you mean to the University of Georgia.Thank you for what you mean to the state of Georgia,” Morehead said.“Thank you for what you mean to all of the
young people who are assembled here today and look up to you for the examples you represent.” During the event, studentathletes and coaches autographed posters provided by event sponsor BMW Athens. The faces of children like 10-year-old Madison Taylor, of Monroe, beamed as they exchanged words with the athletes they saw compete on primetime TV. “Just to see their faces was amazing,” Madison said. “They’re so famous and such good role models.” The cherry on top for the fans was a chance to pick up and take photos with the gold, silver and bronze medals that some of the athletes brought with them. UGA coaches who trained these Olympic athletes also spoke at the event. Gymnastics head coach Danna Durante, who trained recent UGA graduate and Canadian gymnast Brittany Rogers, thanked the university community for the
support it showed to their studentathletes. UGA’s track and field head coach Petros Kyprianou, who was assistant coach for the Estonian national team in Rio, praised the diversity of international studentathletes who come to UGA—which helped give the Bulldogs such a strong showing in Rio. And Jack Baurle, head UGA swimming coach and an assistant coach for Team USA, congratulated the athletes for their performance on the world’s biggest sports stage. Even after this event, the Bulldogs aren’t done in Rio. Four UGA alumni—Wanda Dennis, goalball; Lindsay Grogan, swimming; Michelle Gerlosky Schiffler, sitting volleyball; and Jarryd Wallace, track and field—are scheduled to compete in the 2016 Paralympic Games in Rio, which begin Sept. 7. Nine students from UGA’s Grady College also will be in Rio to cover the Paralympics for the Associated Press (see story, page 2).
New visual identity for university unveiled as comprehensive capital campaign launch nears By Aaron Hale
aahale@uga.edu
university logo is part of the institution’s new visual identity system, which will use consistent colors, fonts and design elements to align the university’s many schools, col-
UGA dedicated on Aug. 24 the Exploratory Center, a new resource that provides personalized advising services for students who need help choosing a major, as well as for intended business and journalism majors. Across UGA, advisors in each school and college assist students with established majors. The 13 advisors in the Exploratory Center, which is located on the first floor of the Tate Student Center, are specially trained to help students identify a major that aligns with their interests and skills. In addition to housing advisors who work exclusively with students with unspecified majors, the Exploratory
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Center houses advisors for students who plan to pursue careers in business and journalism. Led by coordinator Jennifer Eberhart, the advisors also refer students to partner units on campus that can assist them with career assessments, campus engagement and experiential learning opportunities that may help them identify the best academic path for them. Recent data show that nearly 70 percent of UGA students change majors, with about 25 percent of those students changing their majors more than once. “Our goal is to help every student make the most of their first year of college and work through career goals while taking core classes that count toward their
See CENTER on page 8
COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING
UGA civil engineering program earns initial ABET accreditation By Mike Wooten
mwooten@uga.edu
The UGA College of Engineering’s undergraduate degree program in civil engineering has earned its initial accreditation from the Engineering Accreditation Commission of ABET, the recognized global accreditor of college and university programs in applied science, computing, engineering and engineering technology. In addition, the college’s undergraduate degree programs in agricultural engineering, biochemical engineering, biological engineering, computer systems engineering and environmental engineering have been re-accredited by the Engineering Accreditation
Commission of ABET. ABET accreditation demonstrates a program’s commitment to providing its students with a quality education. “Earning initial ABET accreditation for our civil engineering program is a tremendous milestone for our growing college,” said Donald J. Leo, dean of the College of Engineering. “We’re also extremely proud to receive re-accreditation for five other programs. This accomplishment demonstrates the college and its faculty are meeting the high standards of the engineering profession.” ABET accreditation is a voluntary peer-review process that evaluates program curricula, faculty expertise, facilities, institutional
See ENGINEERING on page 8
COLLEGE OF FAMILY AND CONSUMER SCIENCES
DIVISION OF MARKETING & COMMUNICATIONS
UGA has updated its academic logo with all of the familiar elements of the old: the signature red and black, the iconic Arch and the university’s founding date as the nation’s first state-chartered university. The logo was updated in preparation for the launch of the public phase of the comprehensive capital campaign in November. Debuting with UGA’s public service announcement during the Sept. 3 football game, the
UGA GUIDE
leges and units. Like most U.S. colleges and universities, UGA will continue to have distinct athletic and academic marks. See IDENTITY on page 8
New inclusive post-secondary program will begin in 2017 By Cal Powell
cjpowell@uga.edu
Students with intellectual or developmental disabilities will be able to enjoy the full UGA experience with the launch of an inclusive post-secondary education program, Destination Dawgs, beginning in spring 2017. The program, housed within the College of Family and Consumer Sciences’ Institute on Human Development and Disability, aims to assist those students’ transition into adulthood by fully immersing them in UGA life. Destination Dawgs aspires to
have students reside in on-campus housing, attend classes or be included in UGA courses and be supported by peer mentors who will assist the students in courses and on campus to improve their independent living skills. “The goal is for Destination Dawgs participants to come out of the program with a platform for getting a good job and for leading a good adult life,” said Carol Britton Laws, an assistant clinical professor and coordinator of UGA’s Disability Studies Certificate program within the institute. “The unemployment
See PROGRAM on page 8
2 Sept. 6, 2016 columns.uga.edu
GRADY COLLEGE OF JOURNALISM AND MASS COMMUNICATION
Around academe
Required entrance exams boosts likelihood of college enrollment
Requiring students to take college entrance exams during high school increases their likelihood of attending a four-year college, according to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education. More than 25 states require students to take either the ACT or SAT. Researchers argue that removing the cost barrier opens the door to higher education for underserved students, though the cost of attending college continues to pose a problem for students from low-income families.
Growth in donations to universities for 2015-16 less than predicted
Higher education fundraisers brought in less money than expected in the 2015-2016 academic year, according to a survey by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. Institutions saw giving increase by 4.5 percent, a full percentage point below average donation growth over the past 20 years. UGA, however, received record donations of $183.3 million, a 28 percent increase from last year’s $144 million. Private gifts serve a variety of purposes, including funding student scholarships, recruiting and retaining faculty, and increasing research at the university.
Tips offered to help pedestrians walk safely to, from and across campus
News to Use
With fall semester classes in session, more students and employees are walking to, from and across campus. John Lambeth, manager of industrial hygiene and occupational safety in UGA’s Environmental Safety Division, offers the following suggestions to increase the safety of foot-powered travelers: • Always walk facing traffic if there are no sidewalks available. Many of the neighborhoods around the campus have sidewalks on one side of the street. Take advantage of them and do not walk on the opposite side of the street, even it appears more convenient to not have to cross the street. • Wear clothes that drivers can see, especially at night. Wear bright or reflective clothes if walking is necessary at night. • Wear comfortable shoes with good soles. Smooth soles or shoes with small heels can cause slips or falls. • Use crosswalks and obey traffic signals. Walkers should remove their headphones or ear buds when crossing streets. • Look for oncoming traffic if you are walking around the front of a bus. Many drivers will not be expecting a pedestrian to step in front of a bus. This is especially true on Carlton Street at the bus stop near Aderhold and in front of Peabody Hall on Jackson Street. Being alert and prepared can help ensure walkers safely get where they are going. Source: Environmental Safety Division
Nine journalism students to cover Paralympics for news organization By Christina Kirchner
christina.kirch25@uga.edu
In addition to the four athletes from UGA taking part in the 2016 Paralympic Games in Rio, nine students from the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication will cover the 2016 Paralympics, which open Sept. 7, for the Associated Press. The students—David Barnes, Jenn Finch, Josh Jones and Casey Sykes from visual journalism and Jamie Han, Emily Giambalvo, Emily Greenwood, Kendra Hansey and Kennington Smith from Grady College’s Sports Media Certificate program—will be fully credentialed press, producing multimedia content for global distribution by the AP. “It will be a great experience for the students,” said Michael Giarrusso, the AP’s global sports editor, “and a great service to newspapers, broadcasters and digital operations in the U.S. and around the world.” Two Grady College professors, Vicki Michaelis, director of Grady Sports, and Mark Johnson, head of the visual journalism program, will supervise and edit the students’ work in Rio. Michaelis was the lead Olympics reporter for USA Today from 2000-2012. She has covered nine Olympic Games. Michaelis also accompanied two sports media certificate students, Nicole Chrzanowski and Jaylon Thompson, to the recent Olympic Games in Rio.
The students wrote stories about U.S. medalists for TeamUSA.org, the U.S. Olympic Committee’s website. For the student coverage of the Paralympic Games, Grady College is collaborating with Penn State’s John Curley Center for Sports Journalism program, directed by John Affleck. Now a professor, Affleck worked at the AP for 22 years, covering two Olympic Games and managing AP’s coverage of major sport events, including the Final Four and college football national title games. “The bureau will contribute to the students’ social and global awareness and give them a deadline-driven, realworld experience that will improve their readiness to navigate the ever-evolving
PUBLIC SERVICE AND OUTREACH
media landscape,” said Michaelis. “The students also will be providing a public service to the Paralympic audience.” The students will be helping to meet an underserved audience demand for coverage of Paralympic sports. The Grady College students will cover the first half of the Sept. 7-18 Rio Paralympic Games, and Penn State’s students will cover the second half. To prepare, several of the students covered the Paralympic Team Trials in early July in Charlotte, North Carolina. Coca-Cola is funding a portion of the students’ travel expenses, and ThinkTank Photo donated and Canon USA loaned equipment for the visual journalism students.
CAES
SBDC program helps small companies learn how to export goods
‘Everyone at the table’: CAES issues challenge to young entrepreneurs
By Christopher James
By Merritt Melancon
Thanks to UGA, small companies like Commercial Fluid Power in Rome are expanding their markets outside of the U.S. The company, which manufactures steel tubing and chrome-plated bars for mining and construction equipment, began shipping its wares to Chile in 2009 after its managers took the ExportGA course offered through the Small Business Development Center, a public service and outreach unit. The SBDC partners with the UGA Terry College of Business to offer companies traditional workshops as well as help from international business majors. Students attend the workshops and do a lot of the footwork necessary to allow the companies to sell to other countries. “What’s nice is both the student and company are getting classroom instruction from professionals in the various subject areas,” said Rick Martin, director of the SBDC’s International Trade Division and manager of the ExportGA program. Students are encouraged to draw on knowledge acquired from their academic and internship experiences to create an international action plan, which their companies can follow. The program began as a traditional SBDC workshop series, but Martin and his colleagues realized companies were too busy with their operations to act on what they learned. The partnership with Terry has provided the resources to handle the work necessary to implement an export plan. ExportGA has grown into a “flagship” program for international business students, said Jay Mathias, a program specialist with the Terry College. At least three interns have been hired by the company they worked with during the program. “If they graduate from Terry with an international business degree, this is something they can point to as realworld experience when they’re entering the job market,” Mathias said.
From the development of the iron plow to the noble impulse to turn peanuts into a delicious sandwich spread, groundbreaking visionaries have repeatedly reshaped the way the world eats. This fall, the UGA College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences is challenging students to become one of these groundbreakers through FABricate, a contest that will enable student ideas to help feed the world. “For more than 150 years, this nation’s land-grant universities have been the epicenter of innovation in agriculture and food production, making our system of education, research and extension the envy of the world,” said CAES Dean Sam Pardue. During the multimonth contest, each student team will develop a new piece of agricultural equipment or software, a new food product or a business plan for a novel service that will help make the food system and other agricultural sectors better, whether that means being more efficient, more sustainable or more profitable. Three finalists from each of these categories will be selected in October and given up to $1,500 in seed money to help bring their products as close to fruition as possible. Top winners in each category will be recognized in March 2017. Each winning team member will receive $1,000. The contest is open to undergraduates and graduate students from across the university, from all majors and all three CAES campuses, but at least half of the team members on each team must be made up of CAES students. A networking and information meeting will be held from 6-8 p.m. Sept. 8 in the fourth-floor rotunda of the Miller Learning Center. The winning entries in each category must be able to demonstrate the problem that their idea will solve or the market void it will fill and must explain how their idea will remedy the situation. The winners must develop a working business plan and present their idea to a panel of judges.
ON THE WEB
ON THE WEB
chtjames@uga.edu
www.georgiasbdc.org/international-trade Jackie Baxter Roberts
Casey Sykes
Grady College student Casey Sykes, left, and Penn State student Antonella Crescimbeni take photos during the Paralympic Team Trials in Charlotte June 30-July 2.
jmerritt@uga.edu
http://t.uga.edu/2zh
RESEARCH NEWS
columns.uga.edu Sept. 6, 2016
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Digest University Woman’s Club marks start of yearly activities with fall coffee Sept. 13
Laurie Reitsema is an assistant professor of anthropology in the UGA Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. She also directs the Bioarchaeology and Biochemistry Laboratory.
‘Record from past’
Franklin College faculty member finds link between diet, surviving childhood in medieval Italy By Leigh Beeson lbeeson@uga.edu
For the past five years, UGA’s Laurie Reitsema has been researching how early childhood living conditions affect individuals’ health outcomes as adults. As a bioarchaeologist and assistant professor of anthropology in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, Reitsema studies human remains as a “record from the past.” She recently set out to discover whether medieval Italian children’s diets affected their ability to reach adulthood in a study published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. She also was curious about whether class influenced what foods people ate. The bottom line, she found, was children who did not have much animal protein and were not breastfed had a lower chance of survival into adulthood. “The medieval period was a really interesting time for people’s diets because society was so stratified,” said Reitsema, who directs the Bioarchaeology and Biochemistry Laboratory at UGA. “When it came to a person’s nutrition, there were really sharp divisions in class; there were sharp divisions between the sexes.”
A previous study Reitsema conducted in Trino Vercellese, a small town in Italy’s piedmont region about 30 miles from Turin, investigated the link between status and diet during both childhood and adulthood, finding that the majority of people who lived to adulthood ate roughly the same foods as children and differentiations between diets of different class members really only appeared when looking at lowstatus adult males. Trino Vercellese, a location where many studies have been conducted and much is already known about people’s diets and the plants and animals they could have consumed, was a “regular old agrarian village” that typified regular life in the medieval period, Reitsema said. There were clear status differences between church elites and the general populace in Trino, making it an ideal site to analyze class differences in diet. For Reitsema, these findings raised the question of whether one’s childhood diet ultimately influenced survival to adulthood. She found that high- and low-status children ate essentially the same diet, with an emphasis on animal-based protein. As the children matured, however, their diets diverged some, with low-status men no longer eating
as much protein. For her new research, Reitsema went back to Trino Vercellese but switched the focus from people who reached adulthood to people who died as children to see if their diets differed as shown by ratios of different isotopes in their teeth and bones. Different foods have different atomic makeups, and those “signature” makeups are incorporated into people’s own tissues, making it possible to essentially tell what someone’s diet was by what’s present in their bones, she explained. And that is done through studying isotopic levels. She believed nonsurvivors of childhood would have lower nitrogen isotope ratios, indicating that they ate less animal protein. Her analysis confirmed this suspicion. The role animal protein plays in supporting childhood growth and development is nothing new, but she wondered if this had always been the case. The ability to study human nutrition in the past using isotope ratios enables Reitsema to track how food relationships have evolved and changed. Giuseppe Vercellotti of Ohio State University and Rosa Boano of the University of Torino, Italy, co-authored the study.
ODUM SCHOOL OF ECOLOGY, COLLEGE OF VETERINARY MEDICINE
Sexual transmission of Ebola likely to impact disease By Beth Gavrilles bethgav@uga.edu
Sexual transmission of the Ebola virus could have a major impact on the dynamics of the disease, potentially reigniting an outbreak that has been contained by public health interventions, according to research by UGA ecologists published in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters. The research was prompted by the publication of data showing that viable Ebola virus remained in the semen of disease survivors for months after it was no longer detectable in their blood— and by a study reporting at least one instance of sexual transmission of Ebola. “We realized that this could be a hidden source of the virus,” said senior author Andrew Park, an associate professor in the UGA Odum School of
Ecology and the College of Veterinary Medicine’s infectious diseases department. “We wanted to find out what role sexual transmission might play in the dynamics of an outbreak.” The researchers developed a mathematical model to test various outbreak scenarios. They created a model population of 1,000 individuals and introduced the Ebola virus to track its spread via regular transmission. Based on the experience of the 2014 outbreak, they assumed that many actions would be taken, from individual behavior changes to public health interventions, to control the outbreak. In the parameterized model, this resulted in one in four individuals infected throughout the population. Next, they set out to determine the impact that sexual transmission could have.
“We wanted to know what it would mean in terms of the size of an outbreak, how long an outbreak lasts, how likely an outbreak is to occur and the reproductive ratio of the parasite, a measure of how effectively the parasite transmits in populations,” said the study’s lead author, John Vinson, a doctoral candidate in the Odum School. Their results showed a clear impact from sexual transmission. When the values of both parameters—the number of sexually infectious individuals and the rate of transmission—were low, outbreaks were smaller and ended more quickly, but as the values increased, so did the size and duration of outbreaks. Co-authors are John Drake, an associate professor in the Odum School, and Pejman Rohani, a professor in the Odum School and the College of Veterinary Medicine.
The University Woman’s Club will host its annual fall coffee Sept. 13 from 10-11:30 a.m. at the President’s House, 570 Prince Ave. A social/service organization, the University Woman’s Club is open to anyone who, through their own or their family’s affiliation, past or present, is associated with the UGA community. Members are a very diverse group of UGA graduates, professionals, faculty, retirees and their spouses. Established in 1924, the fall coffee marks the start of yearly activities for the University Woman’s Club. Other annual traditions are the holiday luncheon in December and the spring luncheon and fashion show. Dues for a full year of membership are $25. Anyone interested in joining should visit www. womansclub.uga.edu and download the membership form. For additional information, contact Trina von Waldner at tvonwald@uga.edu or 706-546-5133.
Full test of university’s emergency notification system scheduled for Sept. 15
A full test of UGAAlert, the university’s emergency notification system, will be conducted Sept. 15 at 10:45 a.m. Periodic tests of the system are necessary to evaluate the university’s ability to issue timely emergency messages when immediate action is required. Prior to the test, it is very important that students, faculty and staff review their contact information (phone numbers and email addresses) in the UGAAlert system to ensure that their personal contact information and their specific preferences for being notified are accurate. Contact information may be checked at www. ugaalert.uga.edu. The UGAAlert desktop system is available for free to all students, faculty and staff. The desktop software will scroll an emergency message across the bottom of a computer screen; however, action is required by computer users to install the current version of the software on their computer. The desktop software is at http://t.uga.edu/2zP under the section for UGAAlert Desktop. UGAAlert messages also can be received via Twitter by following @UGAAlert, @UGAevents, @Universityofga or @UGAOEP. In the event of severe weather on Sept. 15, the drill will be rescheduled to a day when more favorable weather conditions exist.
OLLI@UGA, Piedmont College to produce play about Georgia author Lillian Smith
In partnership with Piedmont College, OLLI@ UGA will host a one-woman show about Georgia author Lillian Smith. Atlanta actress Brenda Bynum will portray Smith in the production to be held Sept. 18 at 3 p.m. at Piedmont College’s Meeting House auditorium, 595 Prince Ave. The play, Jordan is So Chilly: An Encounter with Lillian E. Smith, is open free to the public. At the behest of Smith’s niece, Nancy Smith Fichter, Bynum developed the play based on the writings and dialogue from Lillian Smith, who died in 1966. During her life, Smith actively supported the civil rights movement in America by publishing books and promoting actions that would end segregation and accord full civil rights to all citizens. Smith had strong ties to Athens as a student and speaker at Piedmont College, and many of her papers are housed in UGA’s special collections libraries. A longtime actor and director, Bynum was a resident artist and member of the theater studies faculty at Emory University for 17 years. In 2015, she received the Governor’s Award for the Arts and Humanities. For more information about this performance, visit www.OLLI.uga.edu.
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4 Sept. 6, 2016 columns.uga.edu
RESEARCH NEWS
COLLEGE OF PHARMACY
UGA researchers receive grant to study effects of public policy to curb opioid addiction By Erica Hensley
erica.hensley25@uga.edu
UGA researchers will use a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, part of the National Institutes of Health, to study the effect of public policy aimed at limiting potential misuse and potentially inappropriate prescribing of opioids in vulnerable populations. The research grant provides $675,000 over three years to fund the study. In the last few months, the federal government has mandated stricter warning labels for prescription painkillers and handed down the first-ever set of practitioner guidelines for prescribing painkillers. Also, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s office is planning to release the first-ever Surgeon General’s Report on substance use, addiction and health this year. In 2013, Georgia became one of few states to enact a new policy to try to curb opioid addiction. The state is doing so by adapting its Medicaid program to more carefully monitor prescription opioid refills, limiting the number of prescriptions for opioids a patient can receive per month and ensuring that certain medications are not used at the same time as opioids. However, until now, the policy’s effectiveness has not been tested. In the UGA College of Pharmacy, assistant professor Jayani Jayawardhana and professor Matthew Perri are leading the investigation to study the impact of the Medicaid policy change. The study focuses on two aspects of opioid prescribing practices that potentially lead to addiction— prescribing too much and refilling too soon—both of which are risk factors for patient misuse. If prevented, it could lead to lower addiction rates and decreased associated health care costs, according to the research hypothesis. The research comprises a statewide study of opioid prescriptions and overdoses within Georgia’s Medicaid population from 2009 to 2014. North Carolina will be used as a control group, as the state has not implemented a policy change and has a similar Medicaid population. Jayawardhana and Perri are using Medicaid pharmacy prescription drug claims data because it provides opioiduse data from a vulnerable population often comprised of people from low socio-economic backgrounds or with substance use disorders. For the five years of data, the researchers will be poring through over 50 million prescriptions from Georgia alone. The study will examine data from before and after the Georgia policy to track trends and evaluate its impact on several variables: overprescribing of opioids by health care providers and misuse by patients; patterns in patients’ use of health care facilities, like doctor and emergency room visits; and deaths by opioid overdose. In addition to Perri and Jayawardhana, the UGA research team is comprised of Amanda Abraham in the College of Public Health, Henry Young in the College of Pharmacy and David Bradford in the School of Public and International Affairs. As co-investigators, the researchers contributed to the grant’s development and will play an important role in its completion.
Andrew Davis Tucker
Xianqiao Wang and his collegues believe their work may lead to new insights into mechanical factors that may influence brain disorders, including schizophrenia and autism.
In the grooves
College of Engineering researchers explore mechanics of brain development By Mike Wooten
mwooten@uga.edu
To demonstrate the concept of cortical folding in the human brain, Xianqiao Wang picks up a piece of paper from his desk and slowly crumbles it into a ball. “Crumbling a piece of paper into a ball and the folding of the cerebral cortex both involve mechanical processes,” said Wang, an assistant professor in UGA’s College of Engineering. “Similar rules of mechanical instability regulate both the behavior of the paper as it is crumbled and the behavior of the cortex as the brain develops.” While researchers have presented several theories over the years for why the brain folds, Wang wants to shed new light on how cortical folding occurs from a mechanical viewpoint. He is leading research aimed at unraveling the processes governing cortical folding and the relationship of these mechanisms to the brain’s functional organization. The convoluted pattern of grooves and ridges created by cortical folding is found in the brains of a limited number of species, including dolphins, elephants and pigs. In humans, the fetal brain is relatively uniform and smooth until about the 22nd week of gestation. At this point, the brain begins to develop at a faster pace and the surface, or cortex, begins to crease and fold. This process continues until the child is about 18 months old. The resulting ridges are known as gyri and the grooves are
called sulci. “I hope my research may eventually lead to earlier diagnosis and intervention for brain diseases,” said Wang. “Many brain disorders may be partly mechanical or structural in nature besides biological abnormalities.” Researchers have identified differences in the number of cortical folds in patients with various brain disorders, according to Wang. In some cases, such as lissencephaly (in which the brain fails to form folds) and polymicrogyria (in which the brain forms more folds than usual), researchers have observed differences in the thickness of the cortex. Wang believes his work can lead to new insight on mechanical factors that may influence these disorders and others, including schizophrenia and autism. To study the mechanisms governing the development of the brain, Wang is working with Tianming Liu, a professor in the computer science department, to develop multi-scale computational models that mimic cortical folding. “Neuroimaging or brain imaging provides unlimited ‘static’ structural data, but brain development is a complex, dynamic process,” said Wang. “Computational modeling is an approach that compensates for what ‘static’ observations and measurements lack. We can explore potential mechanisms in unlimited combinations, such as parts of the brain developing at different rates or neural axons pushing brain tissue in different directions.” By fine-tuning the parameters of
the models, such as the thickness and stiffness of the brain’s gray matter and white matter, Wang and Liu can efficiently process vast databases and multiple scenarios to validate or repudiate various hypotheses. Although researchers have made significant progress in recent years in modeling the structure of the developing brain, Wang said there are questions that require further investigation. For example, why is the primary convolution pattern in the cortex highly correlated and consistent rather than random? What factors regulate this consistency? What is the fundamental mechanism of consistent gyrus formation? In recent studies published in Scientific Reports and Physical Review E, Wang and his colleagues presented an integrated theoretical and computational tool designed to investigate the evolution of a developing brain’s shape based on a mechanical model. The team’s computational simulations demonstrated that gyral convex patterns, or the ridges in the cortex, may occur in locations where the outer layer of the cortex grows faster than the inner layer. In the future, Wang and his colleagues plan to explore the formation of certain repeating patterns in cortical folds known as brain hinges. Wang believes the new research will contribute to an improved understanding of brain formation and the relationship between the brain’s structure and its function.
COLLEGE OF EDUCATION
First two weeks of football practice most dangerous for heat-related illness, incidents
By Kristen Morales kmorales@uga.edu
As the college football season starts, a new UGA study finds players are more likely to suffer from heat-related illness during the first two weeks of practice, especially those in the Southeast. The four-year study evaluated the rates of exercise-related heat illness among NCAA football players at 60 colleges across the U.S. Bud Cooper, associate clinical professor in the kinesiology department at UGA’s College of Education, said the results show the need for players to get acclimated to the environmental conditions during the first two weeks of practice, especially during hot weather. “Environmental stress, especially hot weather, can be a key
component when assessing this stress,” said Cooper, the lead author on the study. “Certain variables can be manipulated to reduce that risk.” Intense workouts over consecutive days, along with the high temperatures of late summer, can cause a higher rate of exertional heat illness. Researchers found the greatest risk of heat illness came during the first three practices and the first three practice days. When “two-a-day” practices began at practice day six, there was an increase in heat illnesses on practice days seven and 10. Where the practices took place also influenced the rate of illness. Athletes in the Southeast had the highest rate of exertional heat illness, averaging around three per 1,000 athlete exposures, a rate that was nearly five times
higher than the ratio of athletes in the lower Midwest, the next highest region. In total, the study collected data over four football seasons from NCAA Division I or Division II colleges and universities, noting more than 365,000 incidents of athlete exposures and 553 cases of exertional heat illness. Temperature plays a key role, and researchers found that when the wet bulb globe temperature was above 82 degrees F, the incidents of heat illness jumped to six times the level compared to when it was 76 to 78 degrees F. When the temperature was over 90 degrees F, the rate of heat stress or exhaustion was 4.12 per 1,000 athlete exposures. “Heat illness is 100 percent preventable as long as the appropriate steps are taken to ensure an occurrence does not happen,” Cooper said.
UGAGUIDE
columns.uga.edu Sept. 6, 2016
For a complete listing of events, check the Master Calendar on the Web (calendar.uga.edu/) The following events are open to the public, unless otherwise specified. Dates, times and locations may change without advance notice.
Learning.” This session will build upon active learning research and provide a range of practical, active learning strategies that participants can employ in classrooms of all sizes. 9 a.m. CTL North Instructional Plaza. 706-542-1355. edwatson@uga.edu
Redcoat Band history on exhibit at special collections libraries
STAFF COUNCIL MEETING 2:30 p.m. 213 Miller Learning Center. mmoore10@uga.edu
By Jean Cleveland jclevela@uga.edu
For decades, fans in Sanford Stadium have been told, “Keep Your Seats Everyone …The Redcoats are Coming!” This fall, the colorful history of the UGA Redcoat Marching Band will be on display in the rotunda of the Richard B. Russell Building Special Collections Libraries. For several years, there has been a football-related exhibit drawn from the UGA Athletic Association Archives, a part of University Archives. This year’s exhibit materials are from the Redcoat Band. Tours of the exhibit will be offered Fridays at 3 p.m. before each home football game. The Keep Your Seats exhibit features memorabilia, photographs, uniforms and sheet music celebrating the 110-year history of the band. An original copy of the “Red & Black March,” Keep your seats .... looks back at the UGA Redcoat the first music composed specifically for UGA, Marching Band’s history, including past uniforms. will be on display. The sheet music, composed in 1908, was thought to have been lost but was discovered by a graduate student researching his dissertation and donated to the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Sheet music composed for the Redcoats by longtime director Roger Dancz also is included. Highlights of the exhibit include photos of the band through the years, from its beginning in 1906, and the Sudler Trophy, given by the John Phillip Sousa Foundation to recognize special merit. UGA became the first SEC school to win the Sudler Trophy when it was awarded in 2000. “There are also band, flag line, Georgette and featured twirler uniforms from different eras of the band’s history,” said Jason Hasty, exhibit curator. “We hope visitors will come explore the traditions and people who helped make the band one of UGA’s most visible (and audible) symbols.” The exhibit will be on display through Dec. 23.
MUSICIANS, EDUCATORS JOIN UGA FACULTY FOR CHAMBER RECITAL By Clarke Schwabe cschwabe@uga.edu
Members of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and a former member of the Medici String Quartet will perform with UGA Hugh Hodgson School of Music faculty members in a special performance in Ramsey Concert Hall Sept. 12 at 8 p.m. Violinist Kenn Wagner and cellist Joel Dallow from the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Ivo-Jan van der Werff, professor of viola at Rice University, join the School of Music’s Michael Heald and Maggie Snyder, associate professors of violin and viola, respectively. The quintet will perform Brahms’ String Quintet No. 2 in G major and Mendelssohn’s String Quintet No. 2 in B flat major. “The Brahms and Mendelssohn string quintets are marvelous examples of contrast in the Romantic era,” said Heald. “They both represent the characters of each composer. The Brahms is rather dark and brooding in character, while the Mendelssohn has a swashbuckling feeling of heroism.” Heald expressed excitement over the wealth of experience and talent assembling for this performance. “There will be a freshness to the performances as musical colleagues come together for the first time in pursuit of chamber music pleasure,” Heald said. Open free to the public, the recital will be streamed live on the Hodgson School’s website at music.uga.edu/streaming The UGA Hugh Hodgson School of Music sponsors more than 350 performances each year. To view the performance calendar, subscribe to the weekly email concert listing or learn more about the School of Music, go to music.uga.edu
Calendar items are taken from Columns files and from the university’s Master Calendar, maintained by Marketing & Communications. Notices are published as space permits, with priority given to items of multidisciplinary interest. The Master Calendar is available at calendar.uga.edu/
EXHIBITIONS Keep Your Seats. Through Dec. 23. Special collections libraries. 706-542-8079. (See story, above). Gifts and Prayers: The Romanovs and Their Subjects. Through Dec. 31. Georgia Museum of Art. 706-542-4662. hazbrown@uga.edu
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 6 SEMINAR “Why Fly Now?: Documenting Insect Phenology and Abundance Helps Us Understand Their Biology and Potential Environmental Threats,” John Pickering, Odum School of Ecology. 4 p.m. 201 ecology building. 706-542-7247. bethgav@uga.edu
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 7 WORKSHOP “Introduction to Service-Learning Course Design.” This workshop delivers an overview of service-learning pedagogy, benefits and best practices for those interested in enhancing existing courses or creating a new servicelearning course. 9 a.m. Conference Room, Office of Service-Learning Building. 706-542-0892. pmatthew@uga.edu LEARNING SESSION “Active Learning Strategies that Promote
BOOK READING Country music’s “Whisperin’ Bill” Anderson will read from his new autobiography and perform a set of specially selected songs. 4 p.m. Special collections libraries. 706-542-3879. lnessel@uga.edu
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 8 THURSDAY SCHOLARSHIP SERIES The UGA Symphony Orchestra performs with Martha Thomas, UGA’s Despy Karlas Professor of Piano. $20; $6 with a UGACard 7:30 p.m. Hugh Hodgson Concert Hall. 706-542-4752. ccschwabe@uga.edu
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 9 BFSO FOUNDERS’ SCHOLARSHIP LUNCHEON Keynote speaker: Shirley Sherrod, executive director, Southwest Georgia Project. Noon. Grand Hall, Tate Student Center. Ticket required. 706-202-4748. WOMEN’S STUDIES LECTURE “TrowelBlazers: Women in Archaeology and Earth Sciences,” Suzanne E. Pilaar Birch, geography. Part of Friday Speakers Series. 12:20 p.m. 214 Miller Learning Center. 706-542-2846. tlhat@uga.edu CONCERT Edward and Stephanie Neeman, husband and wife piano duo. 3:35 p.m. Ramsey Concert Hall. 706-542-4752. ccschwabe@uga.edu
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 10 FOOTBALL vs. Nicholls State. Noon. Sanford Stadium. Call for ticket information. 706-542-1231.
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 11 WOMEN’S SOCCER vs. Kennesaw State. 5 p.m. Turner Soccer Complex. 706-542-1621.
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 12 EID AL-ADHA Islamic religious observance. CTL LECTURE “The Science of Successful Learning and Memory,” Henry L. Roediger III, Washington University. Part of Center for Teaching and Learning’s National Speaker Series. 10:15 a.m. Russell Hall Auditorium. 706-583-0067. tchagood@uga.edu OUTREACH SEMINAR Emily Conron, student outreach coordinator for the Sabin Vaccine Institute’s END7 campaign, will speak about
TO SUBMIT A LISTING FOR THE MASTER CALENDAR AND COLUMNS Post event information first to the Master Calendar website (calendar.uga.edu/). Listings for Columns are taken from the Master Calendar 12 days before the publication date. Events not posted by then may not be printed in Columns.
Any additional information about the event may be sent directly to Columns. Email is preferred (columns@uga. edu), but materials can be mailed to Columns, Marketing & Communications, 286 Oconee Street, Suite 200 North, Campus Mail 1999.
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efforts to end seven neglected tropical diseases. 1 p.m. 404E biological sciences building. 706-542-9417. donnah@uga.edu. CTL PRESENTATION “The Study of People Who Deliberately Memorize,” Henry L. Roediger III, Washington University. Part of Center for Teaching and Learning’s National Speaker Series. 2 p.m. Grand Hall, Tate Student Center. 706-542-8802. lcoco@uga.edu FACULTY CONCERT Michael Heald, violin, and Maggie Snyder, viola, will be joined by guest artists Kenn Wagner and Joel Dallow from the Atlanta Symphony and Ivo-Jan van der Werff, former member of the Medici String Quartet and professor of viola at Rice University. 8 p.m. Ramsey Concert Hall. 706-542-4752. ccschwabe@uga.edu (See story, below)
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13 SEMINAR “Sea Star Wasting Disease along the West Coast of North America,” Ben Miner, Western Washington University. 4 p.m. 201 ecology building. 706-542-7247. bethgav@uga.edu BOOK TALK Kaye Minchew will discuss her book, A President in Our Midst: Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Georgia. A reception and book signing will follow. 4 p.m. 271 special collections libraries. 706-542-5788. jhebbard@uga.edu CONCERT Hodgson Wind Ensemble performance of David Maslanka’s “A Child’s Garden of Dreams” and Karel Husa’s “Music for Prague.” $12; $6 with a UGACard. 8 p.m. Hugh Hodgson Concert Hall. 706-542-4752. ccschwabe@uga.edu
COMING UP FACULTY CONCERT Sept. 14. David Zerkel, the Hodgson School of Music’s professor of tuba and euphonium, performs with Anatoly Sheludyakov, Opal Clark and Scott Pollard. 8 p.m. Ramsey Concert Hall. 706-542-4752. ccschwabe@uga.edu WORKSHOP Sept. 15. “Exploring Kaltura.” 10 a.m. 372 Miller Learning Center. 706-542-6585. cnbishop@uga.edu WORKSHOP Sept. 15. “Working Effectively with Community Partners.” 10 a.m. Conference Room, Office of Service-Learning Building. 706-542-0892. pmatthew@uga.edu TEST OF UGAALERT EMERGENCY NOTIFICATION SYSTEM Sept. 15. 10:45 a.m. 706-542-5845. ugaalert@uga.edu (See Digest, page 3). CONCERT Sept. 15. Brandon Craswell. $12 general admission; $6 With UGA student ID. Part of Hugh Hodgson Faculty Series. 8 p.m. Ramsey Concert Hall. 706-542-4752. ccschwabe@uga.edu
NEXT COLUMNS DEADLINES Sept. 7 (for Sept. 19 issue) Sept. 14 (for Sept. 26 issue) Sept. 21 (for Oct. 3 issue)
6 Sept. 6, 2016 columns.uga.edu
The American Taxation Association honored Benjamin C. Ayers, dean of UGA’s Terry College of Business, with the Ray M. Sommerfeld Outstanding Tax Educator Award during its annual conference in August. Ayers, who also holds the Earl Davis Chair in Taxation, has been at UGA since 1996, where he has received 11 teaching awards at the school, college and university levels. He is the former director of the J.M. Tull School of Accounting and was recognized as being in the top 5 percent of the most productive Benjamin Ayers accounting researchers over the last 50 years. Funded by the Ernst & Young Foundation, the Outstanding Tax Educator Award honors superior contributions by a faculty member in tax-related teaching, research and service and is the ATA’s highest honor, according to the association’s website. The award is named in memory of Ray M. Sommerfeld, a longtime professor at the University of Texas and the first recipient of the award. Ayers is the second Terry faculty member to be honored with the award, following former Tull School Director Silvia Madeo in 2003. David P. Landau, Distinguished Research Professor and director of UGA’s Center for Simulational Physics, presented an invited lecture July 12 at the XXVIII IUPAP International Conference on Computational Physics CCP2016 in Pretoria, South Africa. His presentation, “Replica Exchange WangLandau Simulation of Lattice Protein Folding Funnels,” described his research, which is at the interface between statistical physics and biochemistry and was carried out in collaboration with UGA doctoral candidate Guangjie “Jerry” Shi and Thomas Wust of the ETH Zurich. Supported in part by the NSF, the research relied on computing resources provided by the NSF XSEDE facilities and by the GACRC at UGA. Tom Lawrence, mechanical engineering program coordinator in the UGA College of Engineering, has been named a director-at-large of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air Conditioning Engineers. With more than 55,000 members from 132 nations, ASHRAE represents building system design and industrial processes professionals around the world. ASHRAE is dedicated to the advancement of research, standards writing, publishing and continuing education of the sciences of heating, ventilation, air Tom Lawrence conditioning and refrigeration. A member of the UGA faculty since 2004, Lawrence holds a bachelor’s in environmental science from Purdue University, a master’s in mechanical engineering from Oregon State University, a master’s in engineering management from Washington University and a doctorate in mechanical engineering from Purdue. His areas of teaching and research include green buildings, the smart grid and building energy management, HVAC systems and energy informatics. As a distinguished lecturer for ASHRAE, he has presented on these topics in 27 countries around the globe. As a director-at-large, Lawrence will serve on the ASHRAE board of directors and on the Technical Activities and Environmental Health Committees. He will serve a three-year term. Kudos recognizes special contributions of staff, faculty and administrators in teaching, research and service. News items are limited to election into office of state, regional, national and international societies; major awards and prizes; and similarly notable accomplishments.
FACULTY PROFILE
Chad Osburn
Tawny Waltz’s interest in goverment led her to a unique career path in emergency preparedness, where she develops emergency management literature, trains health care professionals and teaches courses in the College of Public Health.
College of Public Health researcher prepares hospitals to manage disasters By Lindsey Kudaroski
lkudaroski@jacksonspalding.com
As a UGA undergraduate, Tawny Waltz always expected to pursue a career in government. After all, she earned her bachelor’s degree in international affairs and political science from the university’s School of Public and International Affairs in 2010, followed by her Master of Public Administration from SPIA in 2012. But during that program, she took two classes taught by Cham Dallas and Curtis Harris, director and associate director, respectively, of the College of Public Health’s Institute for Disaster Management. “When I was about to graduate, Dr. Harris called me into his office and asked if I would like to stay on and work for them,” Waltz said. “I told him that I knew absolutely nothing about public health and disaster management except for what I learned in class.” Four years later, Waltz’s role as the institute’s manager of emergency preparedness has provided her with opportunities to be part of the process of developing academic literature on emergency management, training hospitals and health care systems in emergency preparedness, and designing and teaching graduate-level courses in the College of Public Health. She is a certified hospital trainer for decontamination and also trains workers at health care facilities throughout the state in
incident command, two roles that allow her to supplement her teaching with real-world experience. Waltz’s primary focus at the institute is health care disaster preparedness. She assists with large-scale, mass casualty exercises for hospitals and health care systems throughout the state of Georgia, a role the institute has managed through a contract with the Georgia Department of Public Health since 2006. With Waltz’s help, this program has become the national standard. “The goal is really for them to become better prepared and identify gaps and opportunities for improvement in their planning and coordination so that when a real emergency happens, they’re more prepared than they would have been otherwise,” said Waltz, who is working on numerous research projects that will add to existing literature on emergency management, a field that has greatly advanced in recent years. “I fell in love with this field because it’s really not one where there’s a lot of information out there, especially from academics,” Waltz said. “Emergency management is something that came to the forefront over the years as we saw disasters, but especially after Sept. 11.” Some of Waltz’s research projects include best practices for state-based systems of Ebola monitoring, incident management for health care coalitions and the role of the hospital and city emergency managers in crisis preparedness. She enjoys the support her work
FACTS Tawny Waltz Assistant Research Scientist College of Public Health B.A., International Affairs and Political Science, UGA 2010 M.P.A., Public Administration, UGA, 2012 At UGA: Four years
receives from the state of Georgia as she gets to contribute to nationally recognized efforts. “A lot of the states don’t have the support that Georgia has built in terms of emergency management, especially in the health care field,” Waltz said. “We’re really seen as one of the leaders for what we do.” Though Waltz enjoys the opportunity to balance different projects, she maintains the best part of her job is her team at the Institute for Disaster Management. “I work with a great team of people,” Waltz said. “What I love most about my job is that we all come from different backgrounds, and we each have a different perspective to add. “I never know what I’m going to walk in and get assigned for the day, or what projects are going to come our way, but we tackle whatever we’re given,” she added. “If we don’t know it, we learn it.”
RETIREES August
Twenty-six UGA employees retired Aug. 1. Retirees, their job classification, department and length of employment are: Ted W. Adams, skilled trades worker, College of Veterinary MedicineDean’s Office, 28 years, 6 months; Mary H. Andrews, senior graphics designer, Marketing & Communications, 10 years; Judy P. Ansley, administrative assistant II, small animal medicine/surgery, 11 years; E. Michael Bamber, professor, J.M.Tull School of Accounting, 26 years, 1 month; Linda S. Bamber, professor, J.M. Tull School of Accounting, 26 years, 1 month; Janet S. Bittner, project director, Carl Vinson Institute of Government, 18 years, 7 months; Kathleen M.T. Cason, research professional III, J.W. Fanning Institute for Leadership Development, 16 years, 11 months; Ronald Clay, research professional III, Complex Carbohydrate Research Center, 5 years, 1 month; George A.
Dellinger, maintenance worker, Recreational Sports, 28 years, 7 months; Deborah A. Dove, administrative associate II, libraries-general operations, 24 years, 6 months; Floyd Hayes Downer, senior police officer III, UGA Police Services, 20 years, 6 months; Ruth H. Furukawa, associate research scientist, cellular biology, 29 years, 6 months; Lynda K. Garvin, human resources specialist II, Facilities Management Division-Administration and Human Resources Department, 29 years, 9 months; Edward L. Harris, academic advisor III, College of Arts and SciencesDean’s Office, 32 years, 10 months; Jeremy Kilpatrick, Regents Professor, mathematics and science education, 41 years, 1 month; Allan Lee Kulikoff, professor, history, 15 years, 1 month; Rickie Lumpkin, utility worker I, Georgia Center for Continuing Education: Auxiliary Operations-Food Services, 16 years, 9 months; Christel Moore,
procurement specialist, Skidaway Institute of Oceanography, 29 years; Trent Moore, research professional III, Skidaway Institute of Oceanography, 17 years, 1 month; Caroline Richardson, public service assistant, Cooperative Extension-Northeast District, 30 years, 8 months; Michelle Rodriquez-Feo, administrative specialist I, School of Law, 30 years, 8 months; Chandler Rosenberger, nurse practitioner, University Health Center, 21 years, 3 months; Mary Alice Smith, professor, environmental health sciences, 22 years, 7 months; Loretta Stovall, building services worker II, Facilities Management Division-Building Services-North Campus, 17 years; Lamont R. Sudduth, greenhouse supervisor, horticulture research, Georgia Station (Griffin campus), 28 years, 11 months; and Clarice Flynt Thompson, accountant, College of Education-Dean’s Office, 22 years. Source: Human Resources
UGA ENTREPRENEURSHIP PROGRAM
columns.uga.edu Sept. 6, 2016
‘Make things happen’
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Founded in Terry College of Business, university’s certificate program in entrepreneurship begins campus-wide expansion By Aaron Hale
aahale@uga.edu
Some children dream of becoming doctors, others of becoming world-renowned scientists or movie stars. Robert Enck was the kind of kid who thought about new ideas to start a business. In eighth grade, Enck wanted to start a company that sold sunglasses with interchangeable stems. Customers could mix and match colors and designs for a new look each day. Enck was disappointed when he found a website that sold exactly what he envisioned, but he didn’t give up. A UGA senior finance major, Enck is chasing a new concept for a startup: a digital platform to boost ticket sales for half-empty concert venues. If the native of Dalton has his way, eleez (which stands for Enhancing Live Event Experiences) could revolutionize the way people buy tickets for events. He’s acquiring skills, gaining experience and even finding some financing to make that dream a reality through UGA’s Entrepreneurship Program, which has its roots in the Terry College of Business but is in the midst of a campus-wide expansion. Starting this fall, UGA began offering a campus-wide certificate program in entrepreneurship. The program is providing inclass and experiential learning opportunities aimed at teaching students how to launch and grow a business through tenacity, smart risk-taking and effective team building. The certificate will be open to all students, regardless of major, and will prepare them for a shifting job market while adding an academic component to an already thriving environment of entrepreneurship and innovation. “Our Entrepreneurship Certificate Program is part of a broader effort to ensure that our students are positioned for success after graduation,” said President Jere W. Morehead. “It also underscores the role the University of Georgia plays in making our state and nation more economically competitive and dynamic.” The certificate’s curriculum is focused on building startup companies, with an emphasis on innovation. Students will take three core courses focused on launching, financing and managing startups, plus two elective courses in fields ranging from agriculture to journalism and psychology. The elective courses (such as agribusiness marketing,
Dorothy Kozlowski
Robert Enck, right, speaks with one of the judges at the 2015 Thinc. Entrepreneurial Showcase.
digital and social communications strategies, retail entrepreneurship and sociology of leadership) help students tailor what they’re learning about entrepreneurship back to the fields where they can apply it. “It’s about starting small and going big,” says Bob Pinckney, director of UGA’s Entrepreneurship Program and a UGA graduate. As Pinckney, the former CEO of sport protection equipment company EvoShield, sees it, there are two driving forces shaping entrepreneurship in the economy. “Technology is the big change. The internet allows business ideas to be extremely scalable with companies like Uber, Facebook or Dropbox. These are companies in the U.S. that start in a small environment, but they can go global very quickly,” Pinckney said. “The other thing is that the traditional career path of joining up with an IBM and staying there 30 years and retiring is disappearing.” Pinckney predicts that people increasingly are going to start businesses, work as freelancers or become consultants at some point in their lives. “The nature of business in this country is evolving to where we all probably need to be thinking entrepreneurially in our career,” he said. As the program’s director, Pinckney brings an insider’s experiences to the classroom. The Terry College and Harvard
WEEKLY READER
UGA Press publishes guide to wildflowers
Field Guide to the Wildflowers of Georgia and Surrounding States By Linda G. Chafin Hugh and Carol Nourse, Chief Photographers University of Georgia Press Paper: $32.95
Field Guide to the Wildflowers of Georgia and Surrounding States is the first field guide devoted exclusively to Georgia’s wildflowers, while also including a large number of plants found in neighboring states. Organized in a clear and logical way, this guide by Linda G. Chafin, a conservation botanist at the State Botanical Garden of Georgia, is both scientific and accessible to those who aren’t professional botanists. It includes nontechnical species descriptions and comparisons with similar plants, information on the habitats and natural communities that support Georgia’s wildflowers, and suggestions for the best places and times to see wildflowers. The guide includes descriptions of the wildflowers found in forests, woodlands and wetlands as well as those growing along roadsides that are often dismissed as “weeds” but may first attract the attention of budding naturalists.
Dorothy Kozlowski
Sidney Stroup, who graduated in May, took courses with Pinckney so she could start “thinking entrepreneurally.”
Business School graduate has helped found several consulting, software and telecommunications companies. Experience lies at the foundation of this program. The entrepreneurship courses revolve around examining case studies of startup businesses and addressing real-world
problems. Special guest speakers, alumni and friends of the university regularly visit to share hard-won lessons about entrepreneurship. While the program is housed in the business school, it is open to all students, regardless of major. Students in art, science, international affairs, engineering and biology all have the opportunity to explore what it’s like to start a business. Junior Sarah Manning, from Rome, wants to start a speech pathology practice. In addition to majoring in communication sciences, she plans to enhance her degree with a certificate in entrepreneurship. The launch of the certificate program is happening amid a growing culture of entrepreneurship in Athens. UGA’s Thinc. initiative, launched in 2013 to provide inspiration and advice to aspiring entrepreneurs, offers noncredit pop-up classes, such as coding for students who aren’t computer science majors. And tech incubator Four Athens is nurturing an off-campus entrepreneurship community. Outside the classroom, the Entrepreneurship Program guides students through experiences to help turn their ideas into profitable businesses. UGA’s Next Top Entrepreneur is a national competition hosted in Athens in which students pitch their existing business or idea for a $10,000 prize. The Collegiate Next Great Consumer Brands program invites student teams from all over the country to present consumer/ retail brand ideas or businesses, with the winner receiving a $25,000 award. Both programs are supported by private funds. In UGA’s Idea Accelerator Program, an eight-week “business boot camp,” UGA faculty and Athens-area entrepreneurs help students hone their ideas as they compete for a $5,000 prize to invest in their business. The idea is to give students the chance to launch a startup idea before they graduate and must choose between pursuing their dreams and paying rent. Last fall, Enck took his digital ticket sales idea through the accelerator program and won the top prize. He’s using the money to develop an app and website for his idea and to begin marketing to music venues. “It was an amazing experience,” Enck said. “I learned so much about how you start a business. True learning experiences happen by getting out there and trying to make things happen.”
CYBERSIGHTS
ABOUT COLUMNS Columns is available to the campus community by subscription for an annual fee of $20 (second-class delivery) or $40 (firstclass delivery). Faculty and staff members with a disability may call 706-542-8017 for assistance in obtaining this publication in an alternate format. Columns staff can be reached at 706-542-8017 or columns@uga.edu
Editor Juliett Dinkins
CTRU launches website listing resources
http://ctru.uga.edu
The Clinical and Translational Research Unit has a new website. A relatively new department at the university, CTRU is located on the Health Sciences Campus and is an initiative of the AU/UGA Medical Partnership and the UGA Office for the Vice President for Research. The site itself provides information, event dates and social media
feeds for the CTRU. It also contains resources for interested researchers, including a description the CTRU facilities, rates and a list of current studies. Because the CTRU uses volunteers for its studies, the website allows those interested to read about ongoing studies and sign up for alerts about volunteer recruitment.
Art Director Jackie Baxter Roberts Photo Editor Dorothy Kozlowski Senior Writer Aaron Hale Communications Coordinator Krista Richmond The University of Georgia is committed to principles of equal opportunity and affirmative action. The University of Georgia is a unit of the University System of Georgia.
8 Sept. 6, 2016 columns.uga.edu
CENTER from page 1
IDENTITY from page 1 “This is an evolution of our prior logo, and it visually represents the University of Georgia’s rich history, current success and aspirations for the future,” said Karri Hobson-Pape, vice president for marketing and communications. “By using a refreshed and coordinated visual look, we will build greater recognition of the university’s positive impact throughout the state, nation and world.” The updated logo and the overarching visual identity system were developed with input from UGA students, faculty, staff and alumni. The previous academic logo was designed in 1989, long before digital and social media became dominant forms of communication. That logo was challenging to use in the digital realm, where bold and flexible graphics thrive. In addition to the university’s trademarked academic logo, the university’s various schools, colleges, departments and units have used a variety of other logos on their websites and printed materials. Moving forward, all academic entities will adopt the new unifying visual identity system. “A unified look and message enables us to present a comprehensive picture of a university whose component parts are working together and accomplishing great things,” said Kelly Kerner, vice president for development and alumni relations. “When our alumni can understand the impact their university is having in the state of Georgia, they are more likely to invest in the success of our students.” The updated logo consists of a bolder Arch contained in a shield, which helps the logo stand out in a variety of backgrounds, coupled with custom typography for the university’s wordmark. Shields are used in many leading college and university logos, including a number of institutions represented by the Association of Public & Land-grant Universities. “As the university prepares to launch the public phase of its comprehensive capital campaign, it is important to use a clear and consistent visual identity to convey the profound impact of our teaching, research and service missions,” said UGA President Jere W. Morehead. Later this month, the Division of
Marketing & Communications will launch a brand toolkit website, which will include information about the new visual identity system. Under that system, schools, colleges and units will work to define their logo needs, and UGA Marketing & Communications staff will provide the updated logo files. Emphasis is being made to ensure that existing print materials with the 1989 logo are not wasted; new materials are to be ordered only once the old materials have been used.
Community input
Last spring, 25 public listening sessions for faculty, staff and students were held to determine the community’s functional needs for a logo as well as preferences for a new visual identity system. In addition, focus groups and interviews were conducted with alumni in Georgia and elsewhere. More than 300 students, staff and faculty participated in those input sessions, and the overwhelming consensus of participants was that the university needed to update the logo and implement a consistent visual identity system across the institution. Participants in the sessions also strongly preferred that the Arch, the university’s enduring academic symbol, continue to be used in the refreshed logo. “We reviewed the logos and visual identity systems of 60 universities to learn best practices for visual identity systems,” said Hobson-Pape. “Most top universities have been updating their institutional logos over the past two decades, and we spent time reviewing that work.” The updated design received favorable reviews when shared with alumni leaders in Athens and Atlanta in July and informally with students who were on campus. The new academic logo expresses the university’s striking and ambitious spirit, said Chris Garvin, director of the UGA Lamar Dodd School of Art, who provided input into the process. “This new mark carries on the tradition of the old 1785 circular mark but modernizes it and adds a gravitas,” Garvin said. “The shield gives it power and the kind of heraldry the best universities play on. I call it the ‘Power Arch’ because it holds its own next to the Power G.”
Bulletin Board Phone directory verification
All full and partial benefits-eligible faculty and staff have until Sept. 9 to review their business/home address and telephone information before the annual faculty/staff telephone directory is printed. A special page on the Self-Service website is available for directory information verification. To begin the process, visit the Human Resources home page at http://www.hr.uga.edu. Under the “HR News” heading, select “Faculty/staff directory verification” and follow the instructions. Email questions about the process to Dan Baker in Human Resources at dbaker@uga.edu
Libraries survey UGA undergraduates, graduate students, faculty and staff will be surveyed using LibQUAL+, a web-based tool offered by the Association of Research Libraries, to gauge satisfaction with the libraries’ services, collections and facilities. The UGA Libraries has conducted the survey periodically since 2004. This year’s survey will run Sept. 19-30. Those who complete the survey will have the chance to win one of 10 $25 Walmart gift certificates. For more information, contact Diana
Hartle by email at dhartle@uga.edu or phone at 706-524-6399.
Athena class rolls
UGA faculty, instructors and teaching assistants can now download their class rolls from Athena. Enterprise Information Technology Services and the Office of the Registrar, which manage Banner, have been working for the last several months to make this critical improvement for faculty and instructors. To download a class roll once logged into Athena, faculty select the “Faculty Services” menu and then “Print or Extract Class Roll.” Downloaded class rolls will be emailed from regsupp@uga.edu as either a PDF or .CSV attachment to instructors’ UGAMail email addresses. Class rolls will display data as of the night before. Faculty are advised to not forward the class rolls to another email address for security reasons. Also included in the class roll download is the student’s preferred name. This is the first time preferred names have been included on class rolls. For questions, contact the Registrar’s Office at 706-542-4040 or regsupp@uga.edu. Bulletin Board is limited to information that may pertain to a majority of faculty and staff members.
degree and reduce time to graduation,” said Judith Iakovou, director of UGA Academic Advising Services. “Many times students feel pressured to declare a major before they arrive for classes, and when they change majors, they end up losing course credits that don’t count toward their new majors.” Litashia Carter, an advisor for students with unspecified majors, said the center is an invaluable resource for undergraduates trying to navigate the vast landscape of majors. “The Exploratory Center has been great for students who don’t yet know what they want to do,” Carter said. “They’ve told our advisors that even the name ‘Exploratory’ makes them feel like they’ve come to the right place to find the major that’s best for them.” “This center sounds great,” said Beatriz Lima-Silva, a fourth-year student majoring in public relations. “I wish we’d had this when I was thinking about applying to Grady. It would have made my transition so much smoother.” The center already is proving to be popular, assisting nearly 600 students within the first week of opening. Located in the middle of campus and with easy access for students, the center signals the completion of a major component of UGA’s initiative to enhance advising.
ENGINEERING
“The Exploratory Center will help our students earn their degrees in a more timely manner, and it exemplifies the University of Georgia’s commitment to student success,” said Pamela Whitten, senior vice president for academic affairs and provost. Since 2014, the university has hired 35 additional advisors to give students more individual attention in the advising process. More than 50 new faculty members also were hired, and more than 300 course sections were added in critical areas in 2015-16 to reduce class sizes and increase the amount of personalized instruction students receive from their professors. Incoming students this year also are the first to benefit fully from UGA’s experiential learning initiative, which requires all undergraduate students to have at least one hands-on learning experience outside of the traditional classroom setting prior to graduation. “The Exploratory Center is one more step in the university’s ongoing efforts to enhance our world-class learning environment,” said President Jere W. Morehead. “By providing students with unrivaled hands-on learning opportunities and a high level of personalized support, we help position them for success at UGA and well beyond graduation.”
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support and other factors. For UGA’s civil engineering program to be eligible for ABET accreditation, the college had to first graduate at least one class of civil engineering students. The college’s first class of civil engineers graduated in 2014, and the accreditation process began as soon as the program was eligible during the 201516 academic year. The accreditation of the civil engineering program is retroactive to October 2014, meaning all previous graduates have earned degrees from an accredited engineering institution. Many employers, including the federal government, require a diploma from an ABET-accredited program for employment in certain technical fields. Industry licensing and certification groups also use ABET standards to screen applicants. This accreditation can open doors to government-sponsored funding in the form of student loans, grants and scholarships. As part of the evaluation, the commission used detailed criteria to analyze student performance and outcomes, curriculum requirements and program educational objectives, faculty competency and facilities. In its final report, ABET listed an emphasis on written and oral communications skills and the interdisciplinary nature of academic programs as institutional strengths of the college. “Few, if any, courses offered in the college are only required by one program,” the report noted. “This creates a unique, multidisciplinary learning environment for students, giving them a broader
context for learning and problem-solving that includes their chosen field of engineering integrated with other engineering disciplines.” Although engineering has been taught at UGA since 1868, the College of Engineering was established in 2012 when the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia approved the merger of UGA’s Faculty of Engineering with the department of biological and agricultural engineering to create the College of Engineering. Enrollment in the college has quickly grown to more than 1,800 undergraduates and more than 100 graduate students. “Enrollment is booming in our College of Engineering, and for good reason,” said Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost Pamela Whitten. “The faculty provide outstanding learning opportunities, and its alumni are in high demand across Georgia and beyond.” The college offers eight undergraduate and seven graduate degree programs. Programs in mechanical engineering and electrical and electronics engineering are expected to produce their first graduates this year, making those programs eligible for ABET accreditation. ABET is a nonprofit, nongovernmental accrediting agency for programs in applied science, computing, engineering and engineering technology. ABET accreditation provides assurance that a college or university program meets the quality standards of the profession for which that program prepares graduates.
PROGRAM from page 1 rate for people with disabilities nationally is about 75 percent, and we’re trying to help students build skills and gain experiences that are marketable.” Laws envisions a five-semester model with a small cohort of five students enrolling in the program in spring 2017. Because students won’t enter the program through the regular admissions process, they will receive a certificate of completion rather than a degree. Five students from throughout Georgia participated July 15-17 in the inaugural Destination Dawgs Summer Leadership Institute, a prerequisite for the Destination Dawgs program. Implemented by UGA’s J.W. Fanning Institute for Leadership Development, a public service and outreach unit, the summer program helped those students learn what it’s like to be a college student. They lived in residence halls and experienced three days of typical campus activities, including eating in the dining halls and riding on UGA buses. They were able to chat with and learn from UGA students and participate
in sessions with peer mentors. The emphasis on developing and expanding post-secondary education opportunities in the state can be traced back to the founding of the Georgia Inclusive Postecondary Education Consortium in 2011, which seeks to create opportunities for students who historically have not had access to postsecondary educational opportunities. The consortium is partly funded by the Georgia Council on Developmental Disabilities. Destination Dawgs will receive startup funding for five years from the U.S. Department of Education in the form of a Transition and Postsecondary Programs for Students with Intellectual Disabilities grant awarded to Georgia State University in partnership with UGA and eight other colleges. The current grant will allow for a part-time program coordinator, but additional funds will be necessary to support the program, and the students, in the future. “These types of programs can be really expensive for families, and we don’t want it to be a program that’s only available to those who can afford it,” Laws said.