In brief
1. What are some of the highlights of the past year and this year so far? First, it is notable that we continue to make great progress as a university. UGA was ranked No. 16 in the most recent U.S. News & World Report list of best public national universities, the highest ranking in UGA’s history. Without question, Honors David S. Williams, students play a key role Associate Provost & in helping elevate the Director of the university’s academic Honors Program reputation. We are of course proud of all Honors students and their many accomplishments. But one of the main highlights of this past year was the success of Honors students in nationally competitive major scholarship competitions. Several Honors students received prestigious awards, including Shawn Foster, UGA’s first Beinecke Scholarship recipient. This fall, we welcomed 587 new students to the Honors Program, our largest class ever of incoming first-year students. As a group, they had an average high school GPA of 4.12, an average SAT of 1490, and an average ACT of 33.26. To help bolster our level of service to them, we have hired an additional academic advisor and we are also expanding Honors course offerings. Finally, we were able to support our first student from the new Director’s Circle Fund. Haidi Al-Shabrawey went to South Africa through UGA’s Maymester Stellenbosch program. 2. What does spring semester hold? Each spring, we welcome students from around the nation and internationally to be considered for our top academic scholarships—the Foundation Fellowship, the Ramsey Honors Scholarship, and the CURO Honors Scholarship. It is such a genuine pleasure to be able to meet these students and their families, and to see firsthand the inspiring potential of the next generation. Spring also features the annual CURO Symposium, which last year had 552 student participants. We expect to have 600 this year. 3. If you could share one number or fact with us, what would it be? Certainly, the year 1960 stands out since it was when the UGA Honors Program was founded. This past summer, we had the largest number of parents ever signing up to be a part of our Parent Society through our new 1960 Club. Each year, the Parent Society supports a number of individual Honors students as well as Honors student organizations and programming.
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UGA HONORS PROGRAM MAGAZINE FALL 2017
Alumni
Scientist of the year Cori Bargmann was named 2017 Scientist of the Year by R&D Magazine. The same week in mid-October, the neuroscientist was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Medicine, considered one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine. Cori, an Honors Program and Foundation Fellow alumna, graduated in 1981. She studies the relationship between genes, neural circuits, and behavior. She is president of science for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the philanthropy funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan; is the Torsten W. Wiesel Professor and head of the Lulu and Anthony Wang Laboratory of Neural Circuits and Behavior at Rockefeller University; and is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.
Sustainability grant
Green roof efforts Grace Peoples led a team that installed a new green roof demonstration at the Boyd Graduate Studies Research Center on South Campus. As a second-year Honors student majoring in international affairs and minoring in Japanese language and literature, she received a campus grant from UGA’s Office of Sustainability to enhance the green roof at Boyd, which was originally planted in 2003 as a vegetated roof research site. Under the direction of Todd Rasmussen, professor in the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources, Grace and her team of volunteers installed several flats of plants on the roof, visible from the building’s lobby.
A CURO summer
CURO Fellows This past summer, Honors student Ridge Maxson, right, and 29 other undergraduates worked as CURO Summer Fellows. Their research varied from lyricism in the poetry of the Internet to superbug gene prevalence in freshwater streams. Ridge, an exercise and sport science major and music minor, studied tissue engineering with Cheryl Gomillion, an assistant professor in the College of Engineering. He worked on the fabrication and optimization of novel nitric oxide releasing antibacterial scaffolds for bone tissue engineering, which included 4-D printing of tiny tube structures on which to grow bone tissue.
Stephanie Schupska
The Director’s Corner