Celebrating Excellence – Page 2 – College of Arts & Sciences

Musician Recognized Internationally

April 27, 2016

From the 2016 Celebrating Excellence | When Cynthia Simpson was 10 years old, she had no intention of becoming a professional musician—and certainly not a professional French horn player. She was in fifth grade at the time, and her father was the band director at her school. He needed horn players, so she played horn. She couldn’t have guessed that 15 years later, as a graduate student at The University of Alabama, she would be ranked the second best French […]

Communicating Over Coffee: Coffee Shop Restores Confidence after Brain Injury

April 27, 2016

From the 2016 Celebrating Excellence | Prior to her stroke, Nancy Taylor, a client at the Speech and Hearing Center at The University of Alabama, loved learning. She was social and vibrant, and then one day—the day she had her stroke—she lost her ability to talk. “I feel like I’ve had to do life over,” Taylor said. “People treated me like I was handicapped, but I’m just trying to find my words.” Taylor has aphasia, an acquired language disorder, and […]

A Leader’s Legacy: Bringing Life to Renaissance Literature

April 27, 2016

From the 2016 Celebrating Excellence |Four hundred years ago, at the age of 52, William Shakespeare died. He left behind a legacy of nearly 200 plays and sonnets, which students, scholars, actors, and directors have been reading, studying, and adapting ever since. In anticipation of the anniversary of his death on April 23, Dr. Sharon O’Dair, a professor of Shakespeare in the Department of English and director of UA’s Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies, wondered why, after 400 years, […]

Protecting the Coosa: New College graduate leads environmental nonprofit

April 27, 2016

From the 2016 Celebrating Excellence | Growing up, Justinn Overton, a native of Birmingham, spent many of her Saturdays barely awake and fishing on Logan Martin Lake in the Coosa River system with her parents. “I have a distinct memory of feeling the wind on my face in this little john boat we had at the time and learning how to bait my own hook,” she said. Today, Overton, a 2010 New College graduate, is the executive director of Coosa […]

Beer in Your Bones: Geologist Reconstructs Past Civilizations Using Chemistry

April 26, 2016

From the 2016 Celebrating Excellence | Dr. Fred Andrus says he would never do this to you, but if he pulled one of your teeth, took it to his lab, and dissolved it, he could tell you about where you lived as a child. How? By analyzing isotopes, or variations of chemical elements. “Isotopes are used to detect everything from steroid use to the paths that medicines and nutrients take in your body,” said Andrus, a professor in the Department […]

Biology and Classics Graduate Finds Home in Oil Industry

May 27, 2014

From the 2014 Celebrating Excellence | What do Colombia, Gabon and Brazil all have in common? For one thing, Lauren Wilder, a UA graduate with a bachelor’s degree in biology and classics, helped negotiate exploration rights for oil and gas in all three places. Wilder’s first trip abroad as a land negotiator with Hess Corporation was to Lima, Peru. She traveled with two other Hess employees, “experienced professionals” she calls them, who had been to Peru dozens of times. “I […]

From UA to Antarctica to the White House

May 27, 2014

From the 2014 Celebrating Excellence | Dr. Samantha Hansen spent Thanksgiving 2013 – and several weeks on either side of it – shoveling snow in Antarctica, and she’s likely to spend the next two Thanksgivings doing the same. But shoveling snow in more than 30-degrees-below freezing temperatures is the beginning of her labors. She now has more than 200 gigabytes of data that she will painstakingly anaylze over the next year to try to map a massive subsurface mountain range […]

Professors Share Their Philosophies and Practices

May 27, 2014

From the 2014 Celebrating Excellence | Between teaching classes, conducting researching, sharing their work off-campus and working with students outside the classroom, professors often don’t have time to consider the impact they’re making. For Sarah M. Barry, associate professor of dance, receiving the University’s highest honor for excellence in teaching did just that – it forced her to slow down and made her realize that she is, in fact, doing what she set out to do. “I was so honored […]

Triple Major Finds His Passion in Microfinance

May 27, 2014

From the 2014 Celebrating Excellence | There’s nothing quite like being a student while also running your own business. As the chief financial officer for Forza, an entirely student-run nonprofit that gives small loans to small businesses, junior Zac Adams wears a lot of hats. He manages a team that maintains Forza’s accounting books, underwrites loans, works with lawyers, and raises the funds that make the loans possible. Tonight, like so many nights last summer, Adams will sequester himself in […]

Cuba Initiative Enters Second Decade With Research in Medicine

May 27, 2014

From the 2014 Celebrating Excellence | Why do some third-world countries have lower infant mortality rates than developed countries? What can Cubans tell us about Ernest Hemingway? What are some similarities and differences between the emergence of urban agriculture in the U.S. South and Cuba? How do rivers transport bacteria? These are just some of the questions University of Alabama researchers have tackled – and are tackling – alongside Cuban researchers as the Alabama-Cuba Initiative enters its second decade. The […]