By Sarah Geegan

Several University of Kentucky faculty members have been selected as recipients of prestigious Fulbright program scholarships.

Sponsored by the United States Department of State, and the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, the Fulbright Program is the flagship international educational exchange program, which provides funding for professionals, teachers, students and scholars to undertake graduate study, advanced research, university teaching, and teaching in elementary and secondary schools. Operating in more than 155 countries worldwide, the program is designed to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries.

Recipients of Fulbright grants are selected on the basis of academic or professional achievement, as well

By Whitney Hale

Four students from the University of Kentucky have been selected as recipients of Fulbright U.S. Student Program scholarships. The UK recipients are among 1,900 U.S. citizens who will travel abroad for the 2013-2014 academic year through the prestigious program. In addition, one of UK's four winners, medical student Juliana Odetunde, received one of only five prestigious Fulbright-Fogarty awards, which promote the expansion of research in public health and clinical research in resource-limited settings.

The Fulbright Program is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government and is designed to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries. The primary source of funding

By Kendra Sanders

Six UK students won the Kentucky Chapter of the American Planning Association’s Student Paper Award.

The paper was the final project in their GEO 485G course, Urban Planning and Sustainability, taught by Lynn Phillips. Studetns were asked to collaborate and develop a professional, consultant-quality small area plan, and they chose to do an intense, in-depth study of the Georgetown Triangle and the various implications that will result when BCTC opens its Newtown Pike campus in that area.

One of the group members and recent UK graduate, Wesley Jetton, explained that this extensive, five-month project involved the collection of a significant amount of data, including accessing property values, collecting

By President Eli Capilouto

Last year, I had the opportunity to travel to China with a delegation from the University of Kentucky to advance several partnerships growing between UK's colleges and departments and universities and industries in a country growing in economic importance.

One such partnership is between UK's Center for Applied Energy Research and the world's largest power company. During a meeting with industry representatives, we shared our exciting work in the development of clean coal technology and discussed partnerships, the exchange of students, and faculty collaboration as part of the US-China Clean Energy Research Center.

As we met, they described several multi-billion dollar research and development investments in their country’s energy sector. In comparison, the proposed

By Sarah Geegan

By Gail Hairston

Internationally regarded sustainability scholar and activist Vandana Shiva returns to the University of Kentucky Thursday to share her expertise with the campus and community.

Her publications and work in sustainable agriculture, development, feminist theory, alternative globalization and bioengineering as well as her creation of Navdanya, a participatory research initiative to provide direction and support to environmental activism in India, have inspired colleagues to deem her one of the brightest minds working in the interdisciplinary field of sustainability today.

Shiva will present her lecture at 8 p.m. Feb. 28, in Memorial Hall. This event is

The James S. Brown Award is given to honor the memory of Professor James S. Brown, a sociologist on the faculty of the University of Kentucky from 1946 to 1982, whose pioneering studies of society, demography, and migration in Appalachia (including his ethnography of “Beech Creek”) helped to establish the field of Appalachian Studies at U.K. and beyond.

The Award supports graduate student research on the Appalachian region. To be eligible, students must be actively enrolled in a master’s or doctoral degree program at U.K. The Award must be used to meet costs of doing research relevant to social life in Appalachia including travel, lodging, copying, interviewing, ethnography, data collection, archival research, transcribing, and other legitimate research expenses. Except under special circumstances, awards will not exceed $1,500. The award does not cover registration or travel

By Sarah Geegan

A notorious feud between the Hatfields of West Virginia and the McCoys of Kentucky is once again making national news, but this time it is hitting a little closer to home.

A discovery of artifacts associated with patriarch Randall McCoy’s home and site of an infamous 1888 attack were confirmed by Kim McBride, a historic archaeologist with the Kentucky Archaeological Survey, a joint partnership with the University of Kentucky Department of Anthropology and the Kentucky Heritage Council/State Historic Preservation Office.

McBride’s work is central to the story of the site, and what the artifacts and their context of recovery can contribute to our understanding

We are also very pleased to announce Dr. Karl Raitz has been named the Provost’s Distinguished Service Professor. This award is highly competitive and is selected from nominations submitted by the Deans of UK's colleges. Recipients are honored for their consistently high level of achievement in their contributions to their disciplines and the university. The appointment is for three years, and brings a research fund for each of the three years.

Professor Daehyun Kim has won the Association of American Geographers J. Warren Nystrom Award for 2012. 

Dr. Nystrom, a distinguished scholar and educator, was Director of the AAG from 1966 to 1979. He established the award to recognize the best academic paper based upon a recent dissertation in geography. Daehyun completed his PhD at Texas A & M University and his research foci include biogeography, coastal and forest ecology, and soil-landform modeling. More specifically he is pursuing issues of bio-geophysical complexity in which he models the relationships between vegetation and soils as they relate in complex and dynamic ways to climate, hydrology, and landforms. His dissertation addressed the Spatial and Temporal Dynamics of Salt Marsh Vegetation Across Scales, wherein his field-based research became the basis for conceptual and simulation models that

It is with great sadness we report that Professor Emeritus Richard Ulack passed away on March 22nd, 2011. 

Professor Dick Ulack started teaching at the University of Kentucky in 1974 after earning his PhD at Pennsylvania State University. While he was on the faculty at UK he taught thousands of undergraduate and graduate students in courses such as: Lands and People of the Non Western World; Cities of the World; World Regional Geography; Third World Development; Geography of Southeast Asia; and Tourism Geography. His research strengths were in the broad area of development, with emphasis on tourism development in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific. He won two Fulbright awards: one took him to the Philippines for a year and another took him to Fiji for six months. He was well known in geography for his published research on migration and tourism development, among other

During America's colonial period, the trans-Appalachian west, though largely terra incognita to people living on the eastern seaboard and occupied by significant numbers of native peoples, lay open to initial forays by hunters, explorers, surveyors, and settlers. The earliest overland travel routes to traverse western Virginia lands, country that eventually became the Commonwealth of Kentucky, were established between the 1750s and 1780.

We are very pleased to announce that our very own, Dr. Paul Karan, received the University Research Professor Award for the 2010-2011 academic year. This is the University's highest honor and is a very well deserved recognition for Professor Karan's outstanding work as a Geographer. For more information please visit here.

Congratulations to Stan Brunn for the beautiful Atlas of the 2008 Elections that has just been published with Rowman and Littlefield.