by Erin Holaday Ziegler

Two University of Kentucky professors and acclaimed authors were awarded honorary degrees this past weekend.

Gurney Norman, UK English professor



Gurney Norman, Kentucky Poet Laureate in 2009-10 and director of UK's Creative Writing Program, was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Berea College on Sunday, May 8. The acclaimed Appalachian author addressed 240 candidates for graduation during Berea's 139th commencement.



Born in Grundy, Va., and raised in southwestern Virginia and eastern Kentucky, Norman graduated from UK in 1959 with degrees in literature and creative writing. There,

by Erin Holaday Ziegler

A child’s ability to focus on a videogames is not necessarily the type of focus parents should look for when determining attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.



In fact, increased focus on a screen as opposed to other activities is actually a characteristic of ADHD, according to pediatrician Perri Klass.



"Is a child’s fascination with the screen a cause or an effect of attention problems — or both? It’s a complicated question that researchers are still struggling to tease out," Klass wrote in a recent New York Times story.



Klass references University of Kentucky psychology professors Elizabeth Lorch

by Whitney Hale

Seven students and recent graduates from the University of Kentucky and two 2010 alumnae were selected as recipients of Fulbright U.S. Student Program scholarships. The UK recipients are among 1,500 U.S. citizens who will travel abroad for the 2011-2012 academic year through the Fulbright U.S. Student Program. In addition, one of UK's nine winners, alumna Jordan Covvey, received the prestigious three-year Fulbright-Strathclyde Research Award.



"I am excited the Fulbright Program has chosen to honor nine of UK's students, our largest class of Fulbright Scholars to date," says Lisa Broome-Price, director of the UK Office of External Scholarships. "We

A&S Ambassador - Cameron Hamilton

https://www.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/hamilton.mp3

Cameron Hamilton serves as a K Crew Coordinator for UK's K Week for incoming students, as well as serving as an A&S Ambassador. Hamilton discusses new initiatives that  the K Crew Coordinators are working on, as well as the personal and professional benefits of being a K Crew Coordinator and A&S Ambassador.

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There’s more than 4,300 miles separating Morehead, KY and Berlin, Germany. For Ben Williams, it was a gap that would be bridged thanks, in part, to his experiences at the University of Kentucky.

Hailing from Morehead, Williams graduated from Rowan County Senior High. From there, he went to the University of Kentucky, followed by a graduate degree from the Elliott School of International Affairs at The George Washington University. His parents still live in Morehead, where his mother works in the Fuzzy Duck Coffee Shop and his father as a professor at Morehead State. His two sisters live in Lexington.

Inspiration

When studying at UK, he was inspired by two professors: Theodore Fiedler and Jeff

Anyone who has ever had doubts about majoring in English – with questions about job prospects or a well-defined career path – should talk to Andrew Crown-Weber.

He was in the same boat when he came to UK, unsure as to where an English degree would lead him – the answer has been, just about anywhere and everywhere.

The Danville native always knew he enjoyed language. Growing up in a house that emphasized reading books over watching cable television, his connection with words has been firmly entrenched. Add in his wide-eyed enthusiasm for knowledge and his varied academic interests, and Crown-Weber found an A&S education to be the perfect launch pad for travel, learning and adventure.

Early on he landed in Jonathan Allison’s class on James Joyce and William Butler Yeats, which led to an opportunity

University of Kentucky alum James Booth has found a perfect combination in statistics and genetics.

A Blackpool, England native, Booth studied at the University of Leeds before coming to the United States to study in the Bluegrass. He earned his undergraduate degree in mathematics and his master’s degree in statistics at Leeds before looking at Ph.D. programs.

“I decided to go to the United States for my graduate program and I really only looked at three universities,” Booth said. Those three were Florida State University, Cornell University and UK.

UK professor Joe Gani was well-known among math and statistics faculty at Leeds and Booth ultimately headed to Kentucky in January 1982.

Booth landed in New York before heading south. “It was the first time I came to America and

In the time away from her anthropological research, Susan Stonich engages in a familiar and common hobby – “I’m a weaver.”

“The creative part of my life is weaving and textile design, I’m very interested in that,” she said.

But the nature of weaving, interlacing different threads to create a larger, coherent fabric, is integral to understanding Stonich’s career as an anthropological researcher and political ecologist. “I really do research that tends to integrate all those previously diverse fields.”

At the core of both Stonich’s research and pedagogical approach is a belief in the value and necessity of interdisciplinary perspectives. “We have to do a better job from the undergraduate level to the graduate level to train our students to be truly interdisciplinary,” she explained. “Because of the kinds of problems that I look at in my work, an

University of Kentucky graduate, Col. James “Jim” Crider is currently serving as the G3 for the 3rd Infantry Division/Task Force Marne in Northern Iraq. In this, his third tour in Iraq, Col. Crider is planning, resourcing and synchronizing stability operations there. On September 1, 2010 he began primarily training, advising and assisting the Iraqi Security Forces. But his job includes dealing with other issues as well including regional relationships between the Arabs and the Kurds, securing the boarder, providing provincial reconstruction, and protecting American forces.



Currently nearing the end of his third tour, Col. Crider explains that each of his tours has been different. His first tour was with the 1st Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division during the initial invasion.

“I was able to witness much of the initial jubilation amongst the Iraqi

The soldiers of the 3rd Brigade Combat Team (BCT) from the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) who are scheduled to deploy to Afghanistan by early March will have a University of Kentucky alum among those leading their mission.

Lieutenant Colonel James Becker, a battalion commander based at Fort Campbell, Ky., will have about 800 soldiers assigned to him as they make their way overseas for a year-long deployment. Becker’s unit will be in charge of ensuring all logistics and medical support is provided for brigade combat team soldiers located in Regional Command-East in Afghanistan.

Among their responsibilities will be organizing maintenance of equipment which includes radio systems, mine-resistant vehicles, and weapons, as well as medical facilities, and all the supply and transport operations for fuel, food and water in the area, according to Becker.

Rebecca Greene knew one thing when she came to college from Elliott County in eastern Kentucky. She was going to leave her tiny hometown of Sandy Hook and become an astrophysicist. No doubt about it.

Both her parents were teachers, and she was reading at a very young age. Greene seemed far enough ahead of the other kids that she was “outcast and ostracized” from the start. “So, I was turned against my hometown in certain ways,” Greene said. “I thought I needed to get out of there – that it was suffocating and oppressive.”

After landing a Singletary Scholarship to UK, she signed up as a double major – in physics and linguistics. The linguistics part of the equation came from a paper she did in high school on the “science of language.” That idea – ‘the science of language’ – swirled in her

Growing up in Los Angeles and studying as an undergraduate at Brigham Young University, Michael Dorff hadn’t heard a lot about Kentucky, let alone the University of Kentucky.

But while he was getting his masters in mathematics at the University of New Hampshire and trying to look for a doctoral program, one of his professors mentioned UK.

“She told me about a professor at UK, Ted Suffridge,” Dorff said. “He’s the reason I applied.”

Dorff, now an associate professor in Brigham Young University’s math department, said he wasn’t disappointed.

“The faculty at UK had high expectations that I would work hard and professors like Ted Suffridge were always looking for ways to help me and the other students,” Dorff said. “People there were very friendly, very nice. I have these fond

Physics & Astronomy alum Dr. Anjan K. Gupta came to the University of Kentucky after earning bachelors and masters degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology in 1995 in Kanpur, India.

Anjan is from a small city called Etawah in Uttar Pradesh, the most populated state in India.

“I wanted to go to the United States because I knew there would be many opportunities for research as a graduate student,” Anjan said. “I applied many places but I was interested in UK because they had a good condensed matter experimental department. I knew that’s what I wanted to pursue.”

Anjan said he found good teachers and mentors among the faculty in the physics and astronomy department, particularly Dr. Joseph Brill and Dr.

The recent presidential election not only captivated the nation, but also opened up a whole new dialogue on politics.The sense of excitement surrounding the election mobilized the younger generations, who in turn supported their candidate by using social networking and video sharing sites and in some cases hitting the campaign trail.

This increase in participation was also noted by UK political science alum Paul Brewer. Currently an associate professor and chair of the Department of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, Brewer shared the election enthusiasm of his students.

“Teaching students about politics is just plain fun, especially with lively events such as the 2008 presidential election taking place,” Brewer said. “My students were

Not many people get to spend their careers involved with something they’ve loved since they were 10 years old.

University of Kentucky alum Zeljko Ivezic is one of those lucky few. The Croatia native became fascinated with what he could see in the sky and beyond as a child and now Ivezic is a leading astronomer at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Having had a hand in creating the very first digital map of the sky, Ivezic continues to follow his passion, working on several projects including one that could help to identify dangerous asteroids that might strike our planet.

Ivezic, 44, earned undergraduate degrees in physics and mechanical engineering from Croatia’s University of Zagreb in 1991.

“But I knew I wanted to go to school in the U.S. for my graduate studies,” Ivezic said. “I always knew that’s what I wanted.”

He applied to UK somewhat

Graduate Student

Cracking the Code of Masculinity

by Andrew Battista

photos by Mark Cornelison

Betsy Dahms has known since her childhood that masculinity can mean a variety of things. Growing up with eight brothers and one sister, Dahms developed an acute awareness that a person’s masculinity can never be reduced to a single form or expression. It is this aspect of her family upbringing that has most significantly influenced Dahms’ budding scholarly and pedagogical career.

“My father died when I was young, so I didn’t grow up with a father-figure in my life,” said Dahms.“In my house I was able to see how my brothers were treated versus how my sister and I were treated, and I often thought to myself, ‘wow, that’s different.’”

This disparate treatment did not end when Dahms left her

Janet Neisewander spends a lot of her time with rodents and cocaine.

As strange as that may sound, the research the Arizona State University professor is doing with those two things may someday help people struggling with addiction.

Neisewander, who earned her Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Kentucky in 1988, became interested in how the brain is connected to behavior early on in her academic career.

As a freshman at Rockford College in Rockford, Ill. Neisewander became passionate about the human brain.

“I was fascinated by the way the brain is involved in behavior and how brain dysfunctions result in dysfunctional behavior,” she said.

As she was finishing her bachelor’s degree in biology and psychology, Neisewander looked for graduate programs that would allow her to continue her studies.

“I wanted a good graduate training program

Growing up in Athens, Greece, Panayotis “Taki” Petrou knew he wanted to study in the United States when he was older.

Three of his uncles lived in America and his older sister had already left Greece for school in Chicago.

“I was finishing high school and thinking about college, and it had always been my dream to go to the U.S.,” Petrou said.

As far as choosing the University of Kentucky as his American destination, Petrou took a pretty simple approach. “Kentucky had similar latitude as Greece so I figured that the weather would be similar,” he said, laughing.

In researching UK, Petrou also found a school with reasonable tuition in an area of the country with an affordable cost of living, he said.

“I also liked that it was a big school,” he said. “It had a lot to offer.”

While Petrou felt comfortable with his choice in schools, he didn’t

One-on-one teaching assistance is hard to come by in math and science courses, where many students struggle to understand balancing equations, solving for variables, and applying formulas. To address the problem, Benny G. Johnson, Sr., and Dale Holder joined forces, merging chemistry, computer programming and teaching philosophy to create Quantum Tutors, the first artificial intelligence tutoring program for the sciences.

“We thought it would be beneficial to explore developing software that closely approached what real people — good teachers or tutors — do when they work with students, rather than making students complete long lists of questions like a standardized test,” said Johnson, a University of Kentucky alumnus and president and CEO of Quantum Simulations, Inc.  

In the past,

1) How long does it take to get to work on average for Lexington residents as compared to the rest of Kentucky?

2) How densely populated in Lexington compared to the rest of the state?

3) What is the percentage of female-owned businesses in Kentucky compared to the rest of the country?

These are the types of questions that the U.S. Census Bureau is able to provide when they work with the information they compile every 10 years. The first population census was taken in 1790 under the general direction of Thomas Jefferson, who was then Secretary of State.

Today, a University of Kentucky alumnus is the new director of the U.S. Census Bureau. Steven Murdock, who holds a masters and a doctorate in sociologyfrom UK, is currently the Texas state demographer and will head the 2010 census.