By Jay Blanton

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Aug. 5, 2020) — University of Kentucky President Eli Capilouto and faculty leaders in the African American and Africana Studies (AAAS) program on Wednesday announced the establishment of the proposed Commonwealth Institute for Black Studies — a multidisciplinary program that will highlight UK’s growing research around issues of race and racism.

Capilouto and AAAS faculty on Thursday announced an initial $250,000 investment as seed money to leverage additional investment to help the institute move forward with a critical series of initiatives. The creation of a new institute, ultimately, must receive approval from UK’s University Senate.

The interdisciplinary institute will establish research clusters across the campus and promote UK’s growing research and scholarship on topics

By Jenny Wells-Hosley

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Aug. 4, 2020) — It’s not every day members of an international team of scientists find themselves perplexed over unexpected data results. And it’s even less likely the team will turn to a student to help make sense of the findings. But this was what happened with University of Kentucky student Maryam Dehghanian.

Dehghanian, a doctoral candidate in the UK Department of Physics and Astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences, has spent the last three years helping a team of NASA and European Space Agency (ESA) astronomers understand observations they made while studying a supermassive black hole at the center of NGC 5548, a nearby galaxy. The observations were made as part of NASA’s Space

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Aug. 3, 2020) — This summer, the United States has seen nationwide demonstrations and protests in light of, among other things, the killing of George Floyd during an arrest in Minneapolis May 25. Local protests, including ones in response to the death of former University of Kentucky student Breonna Taylor during a "no-knock" warrant raid in Louisville on March 13, quickly spread across the country, and The New York Times cited polls that estimated, as of July 3, between 15 and 26 million people had participated at some point in the demonstrations, making them the largest in U.S. history.

On this week’s episode of "Behind the

By Richard LeComte

Phillip Skipwith is plumbing the depths of the evolutionary processes that create species – and his subjects have scales.

“I want to understand how you go from having a ancestral lizard skull to having a derived snake skull,” he said. “That’s a big change.”

Big changes are in store for Skipwith himself this summer as he begins work as an assistant professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Kentucky’s College of Arts & Sciences, where snakes and lizards – and evolutionary dynamics as seen through comparing the inner tissues of snakes lizards – will be his thing.

“I’m just an animal fanatic,” said Skipwith, who’s coming from a postdoctoral position at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. “What will be coming out of my lab will be mostly herpetology and molecular

By Lindsey Piercy 

LEXINGTON, Ky. (July 23 2020) — It’s a 25,000-piece puzzle that researchers have longed to solve. That’s because the 25,000 fragments represent the Dead Sea Scrolls, and inside are ancient secrets — mysteries that have been locked away for 2,000 years.

For more than two decades, Brent Seales has doggedly labored to help solve the puzzle.

Seales, professor and chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Kentucky, is considered the foremost expert in the digital restoration of damaged and unreadable manuscripts. To this day, his quest to uncover the wisdom of the ancients is ever evolving.

Now, Seales and his

By Richard LeComte

LEXINGTON, KY (July 20, 2020) – Three current faculty members and one incoming assistant professor of the University of Kentucky’s Psychology Department have delved into studies addressing the effects the COVID-19 virus pandemic has had on Americans. The projects range from exploring the virus’s effects on spike proteins on the brain to how middle- and high-schoolers are changing their consumption of media after schools went online.

These incipient efforts will bear fruit for helping the United States cope with the disaster and demonstrate the relevance of research in UK’s College of Arts & Sciences. The faculty members are Pooja Sidney, Christia Brown and Mark Prendergast; the incoming faculty member, Matthew Kim, is coming from the University of Washington.

Pooja

By Lindsey Piercy

LEXINGTON, Ky. (July 17, 2020) — From the Great Depression to the Civil Rights Movement — each generation has been shaped by the national and international events that take place during their formative years.

Will the same be said for the COVID-19 pandemic?

Anthony Bardo, an assistant professor with a dual appointment in Health, Society and Populations and the Department of Sociology in the UK College of Arts and Sciences, believes it’s important to consider how perspectives will change. As a medical sociologist and health demographer, his research is driven by the desire to understand what contributes to quality

By J. Susan Griffith, M.D.

My dad, Charles Herschel Holmes Griffith, was a devoted son, Marine, husband, father of two, grandfather of four, chemist and teacher. He gave his full devotion to the things he loved most – his family and education. Dad always said teaching Chemistry at UK was his “dream job” and from 1964-1991 he loved every minute of working with students and supervising TA’s in his General Chemistry labs. At his funeral in 2013, the Chair of the department told me that my dad undoubtedly had more direct contact with UK college students than anyone else in the history of UK’s Chemistry department.

As I was putting together Dad’s biography in 2011, I found this in a letter he wrote - “I was born in Huntington, IN into a family of educators.” Both of his parents were college graduates, each with a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree. His mom was an English teacher

By Whitney Hale

LEXINGTON, Ky. (July 1, 2020) — For the first time in its 42-year history, the Kentucky Women Writers Conference will take place online to ensure the health of its participants and presenters amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The conference will go forward as scheduled Sept. 17-20 with headliner and celebrated poet Evie Shockley. All readings, discussions and workshops will be presented virtually. Several prominent Black writers will be featured as part of the event. 

“Our organization has a long and proud history of lifting up the voices of Black women, from our first conference in 1979 with Maya Angelou, Alice Walker and Toni Cade Bambara, to the establishment of The Sonia Sanchez Series in