When her lifelong goal of becoming a zoologist began to fall apart early in her college career at Sogang University in Seoul, South Korea, Seung-yeon Yi felt academically directionless. “I basically failed. I tried really hard but I couldn’t get good grades and I thought I had to take a break and just look at myself and just try to find my purpose.” During that period of searching, Yi persuaded her family to allow her to travel to the United States, where she planned on doing service work with the Christian organization Youth With A Mission (YWAM) learning English and traveling to different countries. 

“Since I was a little kid, studying language and English was my thing. I used to carry around my notepad and study English,” Yi explained, “I liked English and learning language but I didn’t think of it as something

When Sam Powers travels, he buys a one-way ticket. He prefers it that way - as he searches for “Goat man” in Guatemala or participates in Buenos Aires’s annual pillow fight or motorbikes through Vietnam’s Ha Long Bay, he wants the people he meets, not a return ticket, to determine his schedule.

In the past year, Powers has purchased quite a few one-way tickets, tickets that have taken him to 15 countries outside of the United States and introduced him to four new languages, including Khmer, Vietnamese, Thai, and Icelandic.

Powers documented his year long journey through his website. Filled with videos, daily travel commentaries, and stunning photography, this website is so recognized internationally, it won 

Strangely enough, Jennifer Cramer was a math major at the University of Kentucky when she first became infatuated with the art of language. Following this infatuation, which was ignited in her undergraduate French classes, she quickly shifted her major to French, but once she was there, found there was still something missing in her academic focus.

“Someone suggested I take a linguistics class,” recalls Cramer, who is now in her second semester as a lecturer in the University of Kentucky’s Linguistics Program. “I took the intro class and just fell in love.”

Like many undergraduate students, Cramer entered her first linguistics class rather blindly, without a full understanding of what the program entailed. The scientific study of human language – what did that even mean? As she soon discovered, linguistics

by Jenny Wells

Burt Davis, longtime associate director for the University of Kentucky Center for Applied Energy Research's Clean Fuels and Chemicals Group, has been awarded a $1.5 million grant from NASA – and has been named to the 2011 American Chemical Society’s (ACS) Fellows Program.

The NASA grant, "Relating FTS catalyst properties to performance," is a three-year proposal that is part of the Subsonic Fixed Wing program. Davis is the principal investigator and point of contact and researcher Gary Jacobs is a co-investigator.

The ACS Fellows Program was created by the ACS Board of Directors in December 2008 "to recognize members of ACS for outstanding achievements in and contributions to science, the

by Erin Holady Ziegler

When rising University of Kentucky senior Joseph Mann arrived in Cape Town, South Africa in mid-May, he was ready to make a difference and ready for a challenge. Little did he know that his travel abroad experience would change the course of his life.

"You just need to come here," Mann laughed. "That's what I've told my friends and family. In the face of such adversity, there's hope. South Africans know that they have a bright future. Despite issues with service availability and government incapacity, they have faith."

Mann, a psychology and gender and women's studies major at UK, has a keen interest in human

Physics & Astronomy alum Dr. Anjan K. Gupta came to the University of Kentucky after earning bachelors and masters degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology in 1995 in Kanpur, India.

Anjan is from a small city called Etawah in Uttar Pradesh, the most populated state in India.

“I wanted to go to the United States because I knew there would be many opportunities for research as a graduate student,” Anjan said. “I applied many places but I was interested in UK because they had a good condensed matter experimental department. I knew that’s what I wanted to pursue.”

Anjan said he found good teachers and mentors among the faculty in the physics and astronomy department, particularly Dr. Joseph Brill and Dr.

A University of Kentucky biology professor known for his creativity in the classroom has recently been awarded for his storytelling.

UK biology professor James Krupa was named the 2011 winner of the Four-Year College & University Section Biology Teaching Award from the National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT). 

The award honors a four-year college or university faculty member who demonstrates creativity and innovation in teaching. Krupa's lesson on the ivory-billed woodpecker was considered by the awards committee to be particularly useful in covering evolution with non-biology majors. 

"This award from fellow biology educators is a testament to the

University of Kentucky alumna Nicole Lally says her interest in sociology was sparked at an early age.

When she was seven years old, Lally’s family moved from Cleveland to Elizabethtown. The change in environment was shocking, Lally said.

“On the street we lived on in Cleveland, there was so much diversity,” she said. “Elizabethtown just didn’t have those same demographics and even though I was a kid, I noticed. Some of my new friends at school would make comments about other groups of people and it just didn’t make any sense to me.”

In a high school English class, Lally was assigned an argument paper and began researching gay rights.

“I was immediately interested in anything to do with human rights,” she said. “All of the papers I was using for my research were written by sociologists and I just knew that’s what I wanted to study then.”

UK

During the height of the women’s movement in the late 1970s, a time when psychologists, sociologists, and others were finally beginning to talk about the problem of violence against women, Professor of Sociology Claire Renzetti was making her way through the academic jungle, earning her bachelor’s and subsequent degrees in sociology from the University of Delaware. Coming of age academically in this epoch shaped her academic interests and led to a career of studying the problem of violence against women, one she sees as everyone’s issue, not just a “women’s issue.”

Renzetti had always been interested in understanding why people do what they do, but it took a few changes in her undergrad major before she finally arrived in the field she’s remained in, the criminology sub-field of sociology, where she focuses on the environmental factors affecting people’s actions

Theoretical physicist Michael Eides was recently elected a Fellow in the Institute of Physics. Eides, a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Kentucky was previously earned Fellowship from the American Physical Society for his outstanding contribution in the development of the theory of high order corrections in QED bound states; for improvement of the accuracy of theoretical predictions for muonium hyperfine splitting and hydrogen Lamb shift by one-two orders of magnitude.

by Robin Roenker

photos by Mark Cornelison

As a theoretical physicist, Keh-Fei Liu’s computational simulations in the field of quantum chromodynamics can simultaneously shed light on the innermost workings of the smallest particles in our universe, as well as help better understand how the universe itself came into being.

Quantum chromodynamics (QCD) is the study of the strong force between quarks and gluons, which combine to form hadrons, such as protons, neutrons, and pions.

For the past 15 years, Liu has led an international team of QCD collaborators—including faculty at George Washington University, the University of Virginia, the University of Washington, India’s TIFAR Institute, and the Chinese Institute of High Energy Physics—in working to answer a key question about the structure of the proton

By Keith Hautala

There's just no telling where an education from the University of Kentucky can take you.

For U.S. Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Smith, the journey that began at UK has taken him around the world and deep below the ocean's surface, as captain of the USS Kentucky, a nuclear submarine.

"Having been born in Kentucky and growing up there, I can’t imagine any pride greater than serving as commander of the ship that bears my home state's name," says Smith, whose parents and sister still live in Kentucky.

Born in Covington and raised in Independence, Smith graduated from Simon Kenton High School and attended Xavier University for a year before transferring to UK. After graduating in 1995 with a bachelor's degree in physics, Smith was commissioned in the Navy and went to officer candidate school in Pensacola, Fla., where he began nuclear power

Graduate Student Spotlight By Saraya Brewer

Photos by Mark Cornelison



Amy Anderson’s academic history has taken a sharp turn since her early undergrad pre-medical path. “We had to kill things in our lab class and that was the end of that,” she laughed. “I always liked to write – I went straight back to the English Department.”



Though she has studied English for close to a decade now, Anderson is quick to admit that her “academic ADD” still stands: “I can’t focus on a time period. I’m interested in anything you put in front of me.” 



Her broad and varied interests make Anderson the perfect candidate for the brand new division of the University of Kentucky English department: Writing, Rhetoric and Digital Media. Anderson says she was excited about rhetoric, which is essentially the

story by Guy Spriggs

English professor and writer-in-residence Erik Reece has expressed his views on the coal industry and energy policy in Kentucky in such works as his 2006 book “Lost Mountain.” He also believes the University of Kentucky has an opportunity to effect positive change and become a more energy-responsible institution.

Reece understands the influence of coal in Kentucky, but feels that the effects coal has on Kentucky’s environment and local economies are largely overlooked.  “It’s a very cheap source of energy because there’s so much of it, but the problem is that people aren’t factoring in the true cost of coal,” Reece said.  “We’re not paying for the externalities in terms of all the dirty

Q&A with New Professor Adam Banks - by Guy Spriggs

You joined UK’s Division of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Media in 2010. What motivated your decision to come to Lexington and join the faculty at UK?



First, I saw the formation of this division as something unique and something that could create some really different approaches to not only the teaching of writing, but to scholarly work as well. Second, in our conversations, both my department chair Roxanne Mountford and Dean Kornbluh showed that they really understood and valued my work and wanted to build from that. I was excited by the work that we’re doing to reinvent composition instruction by fully bringing together print literacy with oral production and digital

“I didn’t want to rush into the next step after undergrad so I took some time off,” Payne said. “Then, I sort of came to the point where I wanted a plan for the rest of my life.”

Knowing that she wanted to continue to study chemistry but also wanting to foster her other life passions, Payne picked UK and started her graduate work in 2000.

“I was an avid rock climber and I knew I could be close to the Red River Gorge,” she said. “I also rode horses as a kid and had been to Lexington several times, so I had some familiarity with the area.”

At UK, Payne quickly found a mentor in faculty member John Anthony.

“I wanted to do synthetic organic chemistry but I was not interested in the biological applications of the field, which seem dominant” she said. “With Dr. Anthony, I found out

Car assembly lines use thousands of parts to build just one automobile, with each individual piece specifically engineered to perform one function. Could you instead build a car out of LEGO blocks, creating a complex machine out of a far more limited set of parts? This would require that each 'block' be very versatile: able to function in many different roles. However once in place, each block should adopt and retain only the role intended. This is the same strategy as that employed by life to maximize biochemical efficiency while also exploiting a dizzying array of chemical reactions. Nature's protein catalysis (called enzymes) accelerate reaction rates by up to 10,000,000,000,000,000,000-fold, yet do so using only 20 different amino acid building blocks and a dozen vitamin cofactors as additives. In studying enzyme catalysis, University of Kentucky graduate student

Dr. William D. Ehmann, Emeritus Professor of Chemistry, has been elected to the Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame. Bill received a B.S. degree (1952) with honors and an M.S. degree (1954), both in chemistry, from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He went on to receive a Ph.D. degree in radiochemistry in 1957 from Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and carried out postdoctoral work (1957-58) at Argonne National Laboratory under a National Research Council/National Science Foundation Fellowship. He joined the Department of Chemistry at UK in 1958 and was a Fulbright Research Scholar (1964-65) at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the Australian National University in Canberra. In addition, he has held visiting faculty appointments at Arizona State University and

by Kathy Johnson

Three University of Kentucky professors have been named Southeastern Conference Academic Consortium (SECAC) 2011-2012 Academic Leadership Development Program (ALDP) Fellows.  They are Anna Bosch of the College of Arts and Sciences and Martha Peterson and Diane Snow, both of the College of Medicine.

The three will participate in this year-long leadership program consisting of both on-campus and off-campus activities including workshops that will bring them together with other ALDP Fellows from SEC schools. Workshops can focus on a variety of topics such as budgeting and finance, diversity, communication, strategic planning, fund raising, media relations, trends in higher education, and leadership