Tags: Society

'Location, location, location' turns out not to be so decisive when it comes to dating, according to new research from the department of psychology. What resonates more, researchers found out through a clever experiment, is of course the human connection: The researchers randomly paired up 200 strangers in two different first date environments. One room was adorned with comfortable furniture, decorations and nice lighting. The other space was…

The University of Georgia's Franklin College of Arts and Sciences and Office of the Provost will host a lecture by Gary May, Chancellor of the University of California, Davis (UC Davis), on Friday, September 12 at 11 a.m. in the UGA Chapel as part of the Fall 2025 Provost’s Seminar Series. The lecture is free and open to the public.  May’s lecture, “A Retrospective and Prospective Look at the Value of Higher Education,” will explore and…

It's that time – crowded buses and sidewalks, nervous energy and general wonderment of students back on campus for the fall of 2025. Welcome to the Class of 2029 – the next in a distinguished line of high-achieving, ambitious, creative freshmen entering UGA and the Franklin College with big dreams: This year, every measure of the incoming class’s academic profile increased. These first-year students arrive with an average of 11 Advanced…

The University of Georgia Innovation Fellows Program, a university-wide initiative to provide the UGA community with improved, peer-delivered access to information, training, and assistance related to innovation and entrepreneurship, announced its first cohort of Faculty Innovation Fellows. The program recruited faculty members from select colleges to act as peer-liaisons and ambassadors between researchers and innovation programs…

University of Georgia Ph.D. student Troy Smith is among thirty students selected for the Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship (DOE CSGF) program, which emphasizes the use of computing and mathematics. The DOE CSGF ranks at the top of the most competitive fellowship programs offered by the NSF and DOD. The 2025-2026 incoming fellows will attend 21 U.S. universities as they learn to apply high-performance computing (HPC)…

The Franklin College of Arts and Sciences is excited to announce the 2026 Franklin College Alumni Awards! These awards honor a group of distinguished alumni who exemplify the characteristics of the Franklin Spark that unite us across the arts and sciences. These traits are undeniably ambitious, exceptionally curious, wildly creative, incredibly innovative, and tomorrow’s leaders. When the arts and sciences come together, innovative multi-…

The story of how the steel industry in the United States was caught flat-footed by foreign competition as well as a nascent environmental movement embraced by their labor union represents a fascinating turn in the historical arc of American industrial development. It was also sufficiently captivating to power Louise Milone to get her doctorate degree after age 75. “The real history of the 1950s is how US steel and the other major companies…

Born and raised in Cuba, Antonio E. Puente (MS, PhD ’78 – more on that shortly), grew up in a privileged environment that changed in a moment and gave way to scarcity. “All of a sudden, I was in a place where there was no food, no understanding of the language, and very limited resources,” Puente said of his family’s move from Havana to Miami at the beginning of Cuba’s Revolution. “We were in a 1BR apartment with my aunt, uncle, their family,…

Neil Lyall, associate dean for physical and mathematical sciences and professor of mathematics in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, is one of four accomplished University of Georgia faculty members named as Fellows of the 2025-2026 Southeastern Conference Academic Leadership Development Program: The program, which launched in 2007, seeks to prepare campus leaders for executive careers in higher education. Fellows are selected through a…

Jordan and Scott Arogeti, founders of SupportNow, help turn difficult moments into opportunities for creating a space where communities can rally to support those in need. “Everyone wants to take action when they hear news, and SupportNow was built to be the platform where people can take those actions,” says chief operating officer Scott Arogeti AB ’06: Through the platform, friends and family can donate money for groceries or medical bills,…

Oxford American features UGA art faculty member Marni Shindelman, whose work investigates the impacts of ambient LED lighting on our views of the night sky – and our perceptions of the light sources. Associate Professor in the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia where she heads the photography area, Shindelman brings a keen eye to the effects of a networked world, connecting the invisible to actual sites, anchoring the…

A new research study led by UGA anthropology alumna Katherine Napora (Ph.D. '21) reveals how dramatic shifts in climate can have long-lasting effects on even the toughest, most iconic trees – and offers a glimpse into the powerful forces that shape our natural world. Researchers from Florida Atlantic University and the UGA Museum of Natural History studied bald cypress trees from a buried subfossil deposit at the mouth of the Altamaha River near…

Museum studies is one of the most popular humanities fields, situating visual art within the cultural and historical contexts in which it emerges. Franklin College of Arts and Sciences assistant professor Tracey Johnson takes the disciplines one step further, showing how art as an educational tool influences culture and history.  "The popular front and cultural front periods of the 1930's influenced the pedagogy of Harlem Renaissance-…

UGA goes Beyond the Arch to feature alumna Beth Shapiro (BS ’99, MS ’99), MacArthur Fellow, author, and chief science officer of the “de-extinction” startup Colossal Biosciences, where she works the front lines of possibility and ethics in utilizing gene editing to re-introduce an extinct wolf species:   For her part, Shapiro addressed these questions in her 2015 book How to Clone a Mammoth, a sort of how-to manual that also…

UGA and the Franklin College welcome back alumna Sierra Carter (PhD, '16, clinical psychology), who will join the Department of Psychology faculty and become the next associate director of Center for Family Research in August. Carter is co-author of a new study that suggests growing up with negative events and in dangerous communities in early adolescence can alter an entire lifetime, particularly for Black men and women. “Things that happen to…

One of the elevated dangers of global climate change is discoveries outside the boundaries of expected changes – whether temperature, sea level and other predicted results of higher atmospheric carbon concentrations. UGA scientists now have added plants to net contributors to rising global temperatures. The scientists detail the findings in a study published in the Nature journal Climate and Atmospheric Science documenting the impact of…

The University of Georgia Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences and the College of Engineering in partnership with the Rowen Foundation has launched a two-year Hydrometeorology and Land Cover Change Observational Study (HALOS) that will begin this summer.  HALOS will generate critical baseline data to monitor how large-scale development impacts local weather, geography and watershed…

Roberto Perdisci, Patty and D.R. Grimes Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Director of the UGA Institute of Cybersecurity and Privacy, was selected as a recipient of an Amazon Research Award.   Amazon Research Awards (ARA) provide unrestricted funds and AWS Promotional Credits to academic researchers investigating various research topics in multiple disciplines. This cycle, ARA announced 73 award recipients who represent 46…

Romance Languages graduate student and WUGA staffer Emma Auer reports from the department's study abroad program in Argentina, designed for career-shaping experiences among the people and culture in one of the most diverse cities in the Americas. Auer's report on Athens News Matters: Nearing midnight on a Tuesday, 20 or so University of Georgia fans stumbled towards the stadium doors. They’ve just spent two hours on their feet cheering and…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…