Collegian – Page 7 – College of Arts & Sciences

Police and the Polls: Student Receives First-Ever Pre-Doctoral Fellowship at Brown University

October 20, 2016

Brandon Davis, a doctoral student in the Department of Political Science, recently received a paid pre-doctoral fellowship from Brown University to study how negative experiences with the criminal justice system keep people from voting—and hinder political involvement in general. While research has shown how incarceration negatively impacts political participation, Davis looks more closely at how second-tier experiences with the police—like getting pulled over, being verbally or physically harassed, or having a family member go to jail—also impact political involvement. Davis […]

Racing in Rio

October 20, 2016

When recent graduate and first-time Olympian Alex Amankwah moved to the United State as an eight-year-old, he said that he expected to see futuristic marvels like flying cars and hoverboards. He had grown up in a poor part of Ghana, and his mother brought him to Los Angeles, California, so he and his family could have a better life. But in L.A., Amankwah didn’t find the high-tech fantasy he’d dreamed of. Instead, he found a poor neighborhood full of gangs […]

The Power of Music

November 4, 2015

It’s not uncommon for babies in the neonatal intensive care unit, or NICU, at DCH Regional Medical Center to weigh less than three pounds, or little more than a bottle of water. With infants less than 28 weeks of age, their lungs aren’t fully developed, and the very thing keeping them alive—breathing machines that force oxygen into their lungs—can also cause significant damage over time to their lung tissue and vision. Lowering supplemental oxygen levels even slightly can have tremendous […]

Two Roads Converged

November 4, 2015

Dr. Eric Weisbard knows first-hand that the 1990s were a great decade to be writing about popular music. After all, he worked as a rock critic for New York City’s Spin magazine and The Village Voice in the years following the rock band Nirvana’s surge in popularity, which paved the way for hundreds of alternative bands nationwide to receive unprecedented, widespread recognition for their music. At the time, people lived and died over questions of musical authenticity across all genres, […]

Blount Undergraduate Initiative Celebrates 15 Years

October 30, 2014

It’s a weighty question. What was the most important thing you did while you were in college? For a small group of students in UA’s College of Arts and Sciences, the answer is often instantaneous and simple: The Blount Undergraduate Initiative. Although the four-year liberal arts program comprises a mere 20 percent of each participating student’s course of study, giving each student a minor in the liberal arts, Director Joe Hornsby said he hears the same message from graduating seniors […]

Student explores Louisiana salt trade with archeological dig

October 30, 2014

You’d think that spending the summer at the site of Louisiana’s oldest French settlement would be nothing short of grand. But Paul Eubanks, a doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology, tells a different story. Eubanks’s six-week stay in Natchitoches involved daily ventures into the swamps of northwestern Louisiana and ample amounts of digging as he conducted research for his dissertation, which will focus on the history of salt production in the area. Though he describes Natchitoches as a town […]

Professor-Surgeon team headed to third phase clinical trials

October 30, 2014

Carol Duffy is proof that changing your mind is not only acceptable, but that doing so can often lead to something momentous. Duffy, an associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, is headed somewhere that very few faculty members have the chance to go – to a third phase clinical trial for a drug combination that has shown promising results to treat not only one, but several painful and debilitating illnesses. How have researchers not found this far-reaching treatment […]

Steppenwolf keyboardist brings recording studio to UA

October 30, 2014

Michael Wilk’s fondest memory as the keyboardist with John Kay and Steppenwolf is not selling 25 million records, nor is it touring with such equally legendary performers as Lynyrd Skynyrd, Willie Nelson, or Deep Purple, all of which he has done. Rather, his fondest memory involves a large crowd and about 100,000 Styrofoam cups. It was September 19, 1987, at Memorial Stadium in Lincoln, Nebraska. Some 125,000 people filled the stands and covered the field as musical acts such as […]

Researchers Collaborate with Head Start

October 30, 2014

Can what you teach preschool students have lasting effects on them and on their family’s health and well-being? That’s what a group of University of Alabama researchers, in collaboration with Community Service Programs of West Alabama, hopes to determine. With a $2.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families, the researchers have the potential to impact national policy on early childhood education. Their study will involve implementing a new curriculum and […]

Broad Education for a Broad World

October 30, 2014

It’s hard to be an Alabama graduate living in Texas, though you wouldn’t know it by visiting Jim Noe’s office on the 23rd floor of a high-rise in downtown Houston. Noe, a sociology and criminal justice alumnus turned oil tycoon, knows all about navigating unfamiliar territory, and he approaches life in Texas much like he approaches business trips abroad – find common ground, then break the ice. In Texas, common ground comes in the form of college football, a topic […]