<p>&nbsp;<br />
Two A&amp;S&nbsp;Faculty have received awards for their ongoing research.&nbsp; <a href="http://www.as.uky.edu/academics/departments_programs/Anthropology/Anthr… Hutson</a> and <a href="http://www.as.uky.edu/academics/departments_programs/GenderWomenStudies… Alcalde</a> have both been awarded <a href="http://www.research.uky.edu/vpresearch/guide/summerfellowships.html"

<p>&nbsp;<br />
Making international connections is an essential aspect of our work as a University in the changing political climate. &nbsp;Department of Anthropology Assistant Professor <a href="http://www.as.uky.edu/academics/departments_programs/Anthropology/Anthr…; target="_blank">Diane King</a> has just returned from a seminar in the United Kingdom where she spoke at a seminar on genocide in Iraq.</p>
<p>Diane has been carrying out ethnographic research in the Kurdistan Region since 1995. She is editor of the book &quot;<a href="http://

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

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 Northern

by Kami L. Rice

If there had been no burglary at the Watergate office complex in 1972, Richard “Rick” Waterman, professor of political science at UK, might never have entered the field of political science. “I was fascinated by the whole Watergate investigation,” he said. “That really got me interested in politics.”

At the time, Waterman was an undergraduate at Rhode Island College with a major in history, but with the intrigue of Watergate, he added a minor in political science. “It was like a soap opera, like a drama,” said Waterman. “Every day new revelations would come out. Richard Nixon was like a Shakespearean character.”

The fascinating drama of it all caused him to pay more attention to the

Graduate Student

by Jessica Fisher
photos by Shaun Ring

Third wave feminists have lived in an era with women in space, have seen three women as Secretary of State and one almost obtain the democratic nomination for President; accomplishments second wave feminists never saw while they were growing up.

However, like many movements that have made great strides, these accomplishments are examples of token arguments. The common misconception of such success is often that the hard work is over. For Hannah Alsgaard, a University of Kentucky undergraduate student in Gender and Women Studies (GWS), this could not be further from the truth. At 21, her work encompassing women’s rights and gender and sexuality issues has in fact just begun.

In May 2009, after only three years, Alsgaard, the focused and ambitious student she is, finished

Ph.D. Student

By Sarah Vos
photos by Mark Cornelison

On a recent Monday afternoon, Miranda Lange filled four small dishes, each containing a small rectangle of paper, with a buffer solution and set them on a rocking platform to gently wash an antibody away. The papers, really a membrane of mesh-like nitrocellulose, were covered with proteins extracted from the brains of transgenic mice, some of which have the mouse-equivalent of Alzheimer disease.

When the experiment is finished, Lange, using sophisticated proteomics methods, should be able to identify which of the brain proteins have suffered the most from oxidization. And in the case of the Alzheimer’s brain, oxidation is bad. 

Lange, a fourth year graduate student at the University of Kentucky, has worked mainly on projects involving Alzheimer’s. In a previous project, she

Ph.D. Student

By Brian Connors Manke

Don’t be fooled by her last name. The most important color to chemistry graduate student, Lisa Blue, is definitely green. 

When Blue was starting college at Missouri State as a pre-med student, she stayed for a summer session to get a chemistry course out of the way. Get it done and over with – like ripping off a Band-Aid. 

Simple enough – but then came the unexpected. For the first time in college she was thoroughly challenged. She had to truly work at chemistry, and for a student with the drive and inquisitiveness that Blue possesses that was enough to get her hooked. 

A master’s at Missouri State followed, as did a stint working at the Blackmon Water Treatment Plant in Springfield, Mo. – a job that impressed upon her the issue of clean water. “I was fascinated with this interaction between

Ph.D. Student

by Saraya Brewer
photos by Richie Wireman

Gothic-and fantastic-themed films and literature have, in recent years, increasingly gained credibility with the masses, particularly with the popularity of “The Lord of the Rings,” “Harry Potter” and – perhaps on a smaller scale – Mexican director Guillermo del Toro’s “Pan's Labyrinth.” With the massive artistic and literary (not to mention financial) successes of these films and novels, the genres have also been gaining widespread notoriety in the academic world, despite having been traditionally cast aside as being a genre that is not intellectual, significant or of good taste.

University of Kentucky Hispanic Studies Ph.D. candidate Nadina Olmedo hopes that representations of the genre as cliche, sensational or not-intellectualized are obsolete. With her dissertation, Olmedo

by Robin Roenker

Oluwaseye “Mary” Awoniyi has always known she wanted to be a soldier and a lawyer. Since the age of 12, she’s had her sights set on joining the prestigious ranks of the Army’s elite JAG Corps.

With scholarship support from UK’s Army ROTC program, Awoniyi, 22, is about to begin her second year of law school at UK, forging a direct path toward her dream.

“I’m doing exactly what I want to do. I’m exactly where I want to be,” said Awoniyi, a native of Nigeria who moved with her family to the United States when she was six.

Awoniyi is the first-ever law school Army ROTC cadet at UK. She joked that she’s the program’s “test run.”

Sometimes, there are challenges to being a trailblazer: her law school finals don’t always coincide with the finals of the rest of the

by Robin Roenker
photos by Mark Cornelison

The transistor is perhaps the most prolific and highly successful example of electronic material in action. It’s the fundamental building block of today’s electronic devices—from cell phones to iPods to personal computers.

Some have called the transistor the greatest invention of the 20th century. Its development and perfection over the last 60 years has largely been a result of the research and development work of condensed matter physicists—scientists who study the fundamental properties of solids and liquids. Their work to create and study new electronic and magnetic materials has yielded “the largest number of practical applications” of any subfield of physics, according to physics professor Gang Cao, who joined UK’s Department of Physics and Astronomy in 2002.

Cao also points out that it is widely

Jason Cummins is - the 1993 alum returns to head the UK Army ROTC program.

by Rebekah Tilley
photos by Shaun Ring

Jason Cummins’ employer gave him a three-year, full-tuition college scholarship, sent him to flight school, paid him to attend one of the most prestigious MBA programs in the country, and asked him to teach economics at West Point. In May, the UK Class of 1993 alum returned to take up the leadership of the UK Army ROTC program; the same program from which he himself graduated 16 years ago.

Cummins’ office walls in Barker Hall display a scrapbook of his Army career: the tail rotor blade from an Apache helicopter, the flag of the 101st Airborne, his MBA diploma from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, a cavalry sabre, and unit pictures from Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition, Cummins also

Ph.D. Student

by Brianna Bodine

“Few people think about how expensive it is to incarcerate someone,” Department of Sociology Ph.D. student Matthew DeMichele asserted.

“However, with many states facing budget shortfalls, policy makers and the public are beginning to think seriously about the financial strain high incarceration rates place on our economy and other social programs.”

To incarcerate one person in Kentucky costs approximately $25,000 per year, compared to $45,000 in California and $13,000 in Louisiana, and the 2005 national average is $23,876. With more than 2.3 million adults currently in jails and prisons, the financial burden on state governments alone exceeds $50 billion, according to the Pew Center on the States. This expenditure

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

by Rebekah Tilley
photos by Lee Thomas

With the election of President Barack Obama, who ran on a campaign platform promising to develop and deploy five coal-fired plants with clean carbon capture – clean coal technology has taken center stage. And in the Appalachian region, the “land where coal is king,” the potential impact goes well beyond the “simple” questions of a greener earth. 

“Central Appalachia is deeply invested in coal and it’s deeply polarized over questions of jobs versus environment. How to sort out those questions cause real problems, especially in those areas of Appalachia that will have to live with the consequences,” said Dwight Billings, UK Professor of Sociology. “Coal has figured so centrally in the life of this particular part of Kentucky and West Virginia – in terms of

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

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 

by Robin Roenker
photos by Lee Thomas

Sometimes what a speaker means to emphasize and what a listener hears are two very different things. Subtle cues—like a rise in pitch—can be missed. That’s especially true when either the speaker or listener is using a language other than his or her native one.

Those language miscues are what most intrigue new UK professor Mingzhen Bao.

In just her first semester at UK on a joint appointment with the Linguistics Program and the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, where she teaches Chinese, Bao is poised to begin cutting-edge research on production and perceptions of speech prosody in Chinese.

By next semester, Bao will have her new phonetics lab at UK up and running, ready to perform experiments to analyze how American