At the first SEC Campus Water Matters Challenge, a team of UA students took home the gold. Dr. Sagy Cohen, an assistant professor in the Department of Geography, said the main criteria for the competition was water sustainability. The students were also supposed to take climate change effects into consideration and make sure the project was linked to current or planned developments at the university. To adhere to these criteria, Cohen said the students worked with associate vice president […]
Tag: Collegian Fall 2017
Forged by Faculty
Do you have a favorite professor? Political science alumni often name professor Barbara Chotiner, who joined the UA faculty in 1978 and retired in 2014. Decades after they were taught by her, alumni still attest to her influence on their lives and careers. As you know, faculty are the backbone of our enterprise. They are the innovators producing leading-edge research and scholarship; the creatives pushing themselves and their students to think and dream bigger; the leaders empowering students to be […]
The Online Medicine Man
From the time he was six years old, UA alumnus George Lundberg knew he wanted to be a doctor. “I was a sickly child,” Lundberg recalled of his upbringing in Silverhill, Alabama. “I had ordinary childhood illnesses—a lot of sore throats and a lot of bronchitis—and there was a kindly old family doctor, a general practitioner in our part of Alabama who used to do house calls. He was very kind, and I used to feel better after his visits, […]
Coping Power
Being pushed against a locker, tripped in the hallway, or blamed by a teacher for something you didn’t do would be enough to make anyone angry. But according to Dr. John Lochman’s Coping Power program, feeling anger isn’t necessarily the problem—acting out because of anger is. “In the past, psychology clinicians often saw aggressive conduct problems as willfulness or defiance,” said Dr. Nicole Powell, an associate research scientist in the Department of Psychology who does research with the Coping Power […]
True Grit
The circumstances of Caroline James’s childhood made a college education look like a fantasy. Until she was placed in foster care as a 10‑year‑old, her home was filled with drug addiction, schizophrenia, and physical and emotional abuse. She recalls being burnt with irons, punched in the face by her father, and told almost daily that she was ugly, a disappointment, talentless, and stupid. In grade school, she didn’t apply herself and often received bad grades because she thought that by […]
Where Art and Science Meet
Though Dr. Juan Lopez-Bautista, a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, completed his graduate and doctoral degrees in biology more than 15 years ago, he is far from done with his formal education. Back in the classroom as a master’s student once more, Lopez-Bautista is now studying abstract painting in UA’s Department of Art and Art History. “I have been painting most of my life,” Lopez-Bautista said. “In the beginning, I painted still lifes, pretty flowers, and landscapes, but […]
Infant Size in the Peruvian Highlands
Despite the failed crops, drought, and climate change of recent years, infants in the Andean highlands of Peru weigh more and are taller than ever. “It’s counterintuitive,” said Dr. Kathryn Oths, a professor of anthropology who has been studying the villagers of Chugurpampa for the last 30 years. “But we think we’ve found what’s going on.” Oths’ explanation for the apparent paradox, which will be published in the American Journal of Human Biology, surprisingly has little to do with nutrition. […]
Doing It All
Recent graduate Maria Gerasikova—a Russia native who was professionally waterskiing by age 15—said her first exposure to the summer sport was at an indoor pool in the middle of winter. “In Russia, athletes ski on a cable in the swimming pool during the winter so they can keep training even in cold weather,” Gerasikova said. “I saw them training for the first time when I was 12 or 13 years old. I was a swimmer at the time, and when […]