Tag: Desktop News February 2018


UA Opera Director Named President of National Opera Association

Dr. Paul Houghtaling

From the February 2018 Desktop News | Dr. Paul Houghtaling, director of the School of Music’s opera program, was recently named the 2018 president of the National Opera Association, or NOA. The association, which was founded in 1955, supports opera educators and their students through workshops, panels, performance opportunities, collaborations, and competitions. “As educators, we are in the trenches, training the next generation of opera professionals,” Houghtaling said. “It takes a village, and we are the foundation builders.” As president, previously serving […]

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UA Professor Receives Book Award

From the February 2018 Desktop News | Dr. Lucy Curzon, an associate professor in the Department of Art and Art History, has received a national award for her book, Mass-Observation and Visual Culture: Depicting Everyday Lives in Britain. Curzon’s book won the Historians of British Art Book Prize for best book published in 2016, receiving the top prize in the category for single-authored books with a subject after 1800. The winning publication was chosen from a selection of over 100 books submitted […]

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Doctoral Student Wins National Travel Grant

From the February 2018 Desktop News | Every year the American Chemical Society Division of Polymer Chemistry selects two students from across the country as recipients for a travel grant to attend and present research at The National Meeting of the American Chemical Society. One of the two students selected for the 2018 conference is UA’s very own, Louis “Chip” Reisman. “I was honestly really surprised when I won the award,” Reisman said. “I felt like I had a strong application, but […]

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UA Political Science PhD Student Wins 1 of 23 National Fellowships

Cameryn Blackmore

From the February 2018 Desktop News | For some time, Cameryn Blackmore has held foremost in her mind a career goal of helping people in her community. Now that the American Political Science Association has named Blackmore a 2017-18 APSA Minority Fellowship Program Fellow for the spring cycle, she has the connections to network nationally and reach her goal. “I feel accomplished, but more so that I’m on the right track because the American Political Science Association is the top association in […]

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New Mothers, Affluent Areas Drive ‘Anti-Vaccine’ Sentiment on Twitter

From the February 2018 Desktop News | The anti-vaccination crowd is thriving on Twitter, where the negative sentiment clusters geographically across the United States, according to a recent study by an autism researcher at The University of Alabama. Dr. Theodore S. Tomeny, UA assistant professor of psychology, and colleagues used a machine-learning algorithm to examine nearly a half-million tweets over a five-year span that included mentions of “autism” and “vaccines.” Tomeny and co-author Chris Vargo, assistant professor of communication at the University […]

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Solving Galactic Mysteries a Few Minutes at a Time

William Keel

  From the February 2018 Desktop News | A project led by an astronomer at The University of Alabama will use 12-25 minute gaps in the regular imaging schedule of the Hubble Space Telescope to get a better look at oddities found in the sky. Dr. William C. Keel, a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, led an effort to use Hubble to investigate unusual objects found by volunteer astronomers in a crowd-sourced astronomy project, Galaxy Zoo, and its companion Radio Galaxy […]

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