Pigs help scientists understand human brain
Imaging analysis shows swine models even more effective for neurological research
Study identifies factors associated with farmer suicide
Until now, no suicide study has specifically looked at Georgia farmers
UGA researcher leverages artificial intelligence and social media to clean up recycling
Katherine Shayne has developed a system to educate consumers on what can or cannot by recycled in their area and how to do it properly.
Americans buy food knowing some will be wasted, UGA study shows
One-third of the food supply in the U.S. goes unconsumed
IHE graduate receives national dissertation award
Noble Jones‘ research gives insight into how selective college admissions decisions are made
Mallory Harris named UGA’s first Knight-Hennessy Scholar
Knight-Hennessy Scholars program funds graduate studies ranging from medicine to law to doctoral programs as well as joint- and dual-degrees.
PIPs project highlighted by U.S. Department of Education
By Kathryn Kao
The University of Georgia’s Preparation of Interdisciplinary Providers, or PIPs, project in the College of Education was recently featured in the U.S. Department of Education’s Early Learning newsletter, which highlighted the project’s role in helping infants, toddlers and children with complex needs and their families.
The $1.1 million personnel preparation grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs, promotes collaboration among service professionals across multiple disciplines to deliver critical services to young children with high-intensity needs.
“This project aims to provide our speech-language-pathology students and early childhood educators with collaborative team skills and to also give them content around the two different disciplines,” said Rebecca Lieberman-Betz, associate professor and principal investigator of the project. “Being able to team up with a number of different providers in a way that supports children and families is important in providing optimal services.”
Over the course of a five-year period, the PIPs project will prepare 24 graduate-level speech-language pathologists and early childhood special educators to serve young children with disabilities and their families in interdisciplinary and collaborative contexts.
The first cohort of students is currently engaged in coursework and applied experiences with project faculty who are experts in early intervention, early childhood special education, communication disorders, assistive technology and augmentative and alternative communication.
By involving experts in the instruction of various modes of communication, the grant enables students to gain an extra layer of knowledge and applied experience using a variety of communication systems, while also developing content knowledge on team-based problem solving and critical thinking.
“We’re targeting scholars who want to go out and work with this population, who have a desire to work with infants, toddlers and preschoolers with complex needs and their families, and to be a part of an educational team that provides those services,” said Lieberman-Betz. “Students in this program are going to get advanced knowledge in really specific ways, so they can hit the ground running as graduates.”
UGA recognizes 11 new CURO Honors Scholars
By Stephanie Schupska
The University of Georgia awarded 11 undergraduates from the incoming class of 2018-2019 with its CURO Honors Scholarship, the university’s top undergraduate research scholarship.
UGA’s Center for Undergraduate Research Opportunities promotes faculty-mentored research opportunities for UGA’s undergraduates. Working closely with UGA faculty members, CURO Honors Scholars are able to conduct research in any field of study at the university.
CURO Honors Scholars receive $3,000 in annual funding renewable for up to four years; mentoring and community support; and special seminars, workshops, events and activities.
In addition to the CURO Honors Scholarship, the Center for Undergraduate Research Opportunities offers a variety of research opportunities to all UGA undergraduate students without regard to major, discipline, GPA or Honors status. These offerings include the CURO Research Assistantship and the CURO Summer Fellowship as well as CURO research courses. All CURO students have the opportunity to present their research findings at the annual CURO Symposium.
Since the inception of CURO in the late 1990s, every UGA recipient of a nationally competitive major scholarship—such as the Rhodes, Marshall, Truman, Udall and Goldwater—has participated in CURO in some fashion.
The 11 new CURO Honors Scholars, listed below with their high school, hometown and majors, bring the current number on campus to 36.
- Ayah Abdelwahab; Georgia Cyber Academy; Bogart; international affairs.
- Mennah Abdelwahab; Georgia Cyber Academy; Bogart; international affairs and journalism.
- HaeYeun “Rachel” Byun; Duluth High School; Lawrenceville; biochemistry and molecular biology.
- Amber Combs; Chamblee Charter High School; Atlanta; film studies and computer science.
- Anthony Elengickal; Alpharetta High School; Alpharetta; biochemistry and molecular biology.
- Mary Kitchens; North Springs Charter High School; Atlanta; economics and international business.
- Megh Mehta; Oconee County High School; Bishop; genetics.
- Bianca Patel; Northview High School; Duluth; economics and psychology.
- Sydney Phillips; Chapel Hill High School; Douglasville; public relations and political science.
- Vanessa Sachs; Centennial High School; Roswell; biology and psychology.
- Olivia Silva; Woodward Academy; Peachtree City; cognitive science and music.
The CURO Honors Scholars are enrolled in the UGA Honors Program, which welcomed 745 new students this fall. Overall, these new Honors students had an average high school GPA of 4.11, an average SAT of 1510 and an average ACT of 33.7.
Freshman first aid
College of Public Health professor calls for training nontraditional first responders
Sweet science
UGA and GW researchers will build tools to support the next big data frontier: glycoscience
Sequencing the rice genome
Results will help plant breeders incorporate resilience traits from wild rice species into cultivated varieties
UGA and USAID launch new partnership to fight hunger with peanuts
$14 million grant will help researchers develop new varieties and focus on pre- and postharvest management
Bad habits
By Lauren Baggett
Illustration by Larry Choskey and Allen Sutton
Potato chips, frozen pizza, fast-food burgers—these staples of the American diet are saturated with sodium. No surprise, then, that 90 percent of Americans eat more than the recommended amount of sodium per day, a habit that can lead to high blood pressure and heart disease.
The need to reduce sodium consumption is clear, but research from UGA has shown that one popular approach—nutrition labeling—doesn’t work.
“We don’t know which interventions are most effective to reduce sodium intake in the U.S. population,” says Donglan “Stacy” Zhang, assistant professor of health policy and management at the College of Public Health and lead author of a paper published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. “The Nutrition Labeling and Education Act is the only policy in the U.S. focusing on informing consumers about sodium content on most packaged foods.”
Nutrition labels are designed to help consumers make the best food choices for their health, which is why calories, fats and other major nutrients like protein, fiber, and vitamins and minerals are prominently featured.
Zhang and her collaborators examined the link between regularly reading nutrition labels and consumption of high-sodium foods. Using two consumer behavior datasets from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, the researchers compared how frequently participants used nutrition labels and their daily sodium intake.
They found only a small effect. Frequent nutrition label users consumed 92 milligrams less sodium per day than infrequent nutrition label users, a reduction of about 3 percent. Indeed, label readers were still eating around 3,300 milligrams of sodium—well over the Food and Drug Administration’s recommended upper limit of 2,300 milligrams per day.
“That’s a very small reduction,” Zhang says. “Without health promotion, without any other additional education intervention, nutrition labeling has little impact on sodium consumption.”
Better label design can help, according to Zhang. The current label can present challenges to some consumers with limited education or poor command of English. Visual or color-coded designs, like the traffic light model used on food packaging in the U.K., can overcome low literacy.
“We need more research in this area, how to better design the label and how to best get this information to consumers to guide their decision-making,” she says.
Zhang also found that the effect varied widely across age, gender and socioeconomic groups. Specifically, low-income consumers were less likely to use nutrition labels.
“We suspect that low-income people are more concerned about other variables such as food prices or convenience,” she says.
Interventions that increase nutritious food choices for these consumers, she says, may prove to be more successful than labeling in spurring them to reduce sodium intake.
This story appeared in the spring 2018 issue of Research Magazine. The original press release is available at https://news.uga.edu/nutritional-labeling-for-sodium/.
Turning tea into a Southern commercial crop
Photography by Amy Ware
Sweet tea may be the “house wine” of the American South, but very few of the tea leaves used in the thousands of gallons of tea Southerners drink every year are grown nearby.
Despite Southern experiments in tea farming dating back to Colonial times, this temperamental cousin of the camellia has never caught on as a cash crop. However, with growing interest in craft teas and innovations in breeding and harvesting technologies at hand, it may be time for the South to start supplying its families’ pitchers with locally grown tea.
“Tea has been grown here, but for some reason—the cost of processing, the cost of cultivation, the cost of labor—it’s never become a large-scale crop,” said Donglin Zhang, a professor of horticulture at UGA’s College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. Zhang is working to bring large-scale production of tea—Camellia sinensis (L.) Kuntze—to the U.S.
Today, tea harvesting has been mechanized, and the demand for tea has grown. U.S. sales grew from $1.8 billion in 1990 to $10.8 billion in 2014, according to the Tea Association of the USA. That market trend, combined with consumers’ growing preference for locally sourced products, may mean that it’s finally tea time in the South.
Right now, there’s only one large-scale commercial tea farm in the continental U.S.—the Charleston Tea Plantation outside of Charleston, South Carolina—though there are artisan growers and smaller farms in more than a dozen states. The Great Mississippi Tea Company opened recently in Brookhaven, Mississippi, and Zhang expects that more farms will be established in the near future.
“Consumption has gone up, prices have gone up and mechanical harvesting techniques have improved,” Zhang said. “This is why I think it could work here.”
Zhang has extensive experience as an ornamental plant breeder and was first drawn to tea and Camellia species as ornamental plants. His breeding program focuses on producing plants that serve two purposes: food and beauty.
“People today have smaller yards, and I think there is interest in plants that have multiple purposes,” he said.
He has traveled to China to collect varieties of persimmon, jujube and waxberry to use as parent plants for ornamentals that could thrive in the Georgia environment.
With delicate foliage, variegated leaves, bright blooms in the form of camellia flowers and the prospect of a homegrown cuppa, tea plants are also part of his ornamental breeding program.
Then he thought, “If tea plants could be successfully grown in a yard, why couldn’t they grow on farms?”
Many of the tea plants grown for beverage production are notoriously cold-sensitive and don’t tolerate the rapid temperature changes common in Georgia. Zhang is working to breed more cold-tolerant plants that also produce a distinctly delicious Southern tea.
Today, Zhang has a selection of nine tea cultivars growing at the Durham Horticulture Farm outside UGA’s Athens campus. During a recent trip to China, Zhang and plant breeders from other Southeastern land-grant universities identified several dozen varieties out of the 4,000 currently being grown there commercially that they believe will flourish in Georgia and throughout the South. Zhang hopes to add those varieties to his breeding program in the future.
This story appeared in the fall 2017 issue of Research Magazine. The original press release is available at http://www.caes.uga.edu/news/story.html?storyid=6094&story=Hometown-Tea.
UGA joins initiative to advance biotech manufacturing in the U.S.
Government-backed consortium of manufacturers and universities designed to advance biopharmaceutical manufacturing
Tightrope robots
A robot invented by researchers in UGA’s College of Engineering could change the way power lines are inspected—providing a safer and more cost-effective alternative.
AARC / ECLIPSE conference to be held on 28 June at Pendennis Castle
‘Land’s End:Pendennis Castle Imagination, Culture, and Society at Coastal Edges’ will examine the interactions between culture, heritage, oceans, and wellbeing in liminal places where land meets sea, developing the themes of the inaugural AARC collection of essays Coastal Works, ed. Allen, Groom, and Smith (OUP, 2016).
A day of readings and performances to celebrate publication of “Archipelago” 10, Saturday 14 November 2015
In association with Somerville College, Oxford, and the Atlantic Archipelagos Research Consortium, Clutag Press will hold a day of talks and an evening of readings and musical performances to mark their seamark tenth issue on Saturday 14 November 2015 at Somerville. Archipelago 10 will be published that day. The day’s proceedings will conclude with a showing of Robert Flaherty’s ‘Man of Aran’ movie introduced by Tim Robinson. Speakers will include Norman Ackroyd and Robert Macfarlane. Full program details are available here.
