News from the Chronicles - June 2025

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UGA's Kurup on the PATH to stop malaria

UGA faculty member But Samarchith “Sam” Kurup is determined to strengthen  immune defenses against malaria. Now, thanks to a prestigious Investigators in Pathogenesis of Infectious Disease (PATH) award from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, his lab is one step closer. Burroughs Wellcome recently announced its 2025 cohort of eight innovative scientists. Kurup is the first University of Georgia faculty member to receive this highly competitive…

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The Spirit of Socialism by Joseph Kellner

A new book by Joseph Kellner, assistant professor in the department of history, tells the complicated life story of Soviet Communism.  The Spirit of Socialism, published this week by Cornell University Press, presents the powerful story of Soviet collapse in all its rich complexity: The Spirit of Socialism is a cultural history of the Soviet collapse. It examines the millions of Soviet people who, during the cascading crises of the collapse…

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Prashant Doshi appointed Institute for Artificial Intelligence director

A distinguished scholar and prominent researcher with more than two decades of experience in the field of artificial intelligence, Prashant Doshi has been appointed the inaugural executive director of the Institute for Artificial Intelligence (IAI) at the University of Georgia following a national search: The Institute for Artificial Intelligence is an interdepartmental research and instructional unit jointly supported by the Office of the…

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UGA's Song receives Webb Telescope support to observe low-mass stars

Inseok Song, associate professor of astronomy in the University of Georgia Franklin College of Arts and Sciences department of physics and astronomy, has received a grant from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Song's JWST program, "JWST Mid-IR Observations of Warm Debris Disks around Nearby M-dwarfs", will observe 19 M-type stars, the lowest mass stars that are the most common in the Universe.  "M-dwarf stars are the most common type…

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Enhancing Academic Excellence with real-world projects

Spring 2025 Capstones included computing, history, Statistics, and criminal justice A wide array of capstone opportunities across Franklin College – ranging from data-driven projects in statistics and data science to history students curating a Special Collections exhibition – produced outstanding work and provided many opportunities for student learning and career readiness this spring.  As part of the Academic Innovation Initiative of the…

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UGA Franklin grad receives AAAS Mass Media Fellowship

Alex Music, a 2025 master's degree alumna in geography in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, is a recipient of an AAAS Mass Media Science & Engineering Fellowship. The 10-week summer program places science, engineering, and mathematics students at media organizations nationwide to use their academic training to research, write, and report on pressing issues, sharpening their abilities to communicate complex scientific issues to the…

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New study documents declining health of coastal marshes

Scientists from Colorado State University, Georgia Southern, the University of Georgia and the University of Texas at Austin developed a model to provide an early warning and opportunity to protect an ecosystem that serves as the first line of defense against coastal flooding. By using satellite observations, the model identified vulnerable marshes along Georgia’s coast by locating declining root production – a harbinger of marsh failure. The…

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Hodgson School of Music alumnus lives his opera dream

When Tenor Clay Hilley (BMUS '04) took on the role of Siegfried at the Bayreuth Festival for the premiere of “Götterdämmerung” on August 2022 in a last-minute cast-change, he took on more than a role in the most prestigious event in the world for Wagner opera. The call signaled Hilley's ascent as one the opera world's most in-demand tenors. Georgia Magazine has more in this recent alumni feature: From his base in Berlin, he has traveled the…

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Computing faculty member receives UGA's first Google Research Scholar Award

Ninghao Liu, assistant professor in the UGA School of Computing, is UGA’s first Google Research Scholar Award recipient.Liu's proposal, "Enhancing Medical Knowledge in Multimodal Foundation Models through Self-Synthesized Data," was awarded $60,000 by the Google Research Scholar program after review by several teams of Google engineers and researchers. "The project explores a new framework to enhance medical understanding in multi-modality AI…

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Plates, spinning, fixed crater origins on Vesta

Vesta, one of the largest bodies in the asteroid belt, has long occupied human imagination – from Roman mythology to 20th century science fiction.  The protoplanet's Divalia Fossae, massive surface troughs comparable in size to the Grand Canyon, encircle two-thirds of Vesta's equator. Rather than erosion, these deep basins were the result of large meteorite impacts that changed the asteroid’s gravitational field which, in turn, affected…

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