Category: Collegian

Articles from the Collegian, the College’s magazine for alumni and donors


Teaching in Prisons

A teacher in the Prison Arts program helps a student participate in the class.

Alexa Tullett is used to large, full lecture halls on the first day of her “Introduction to Psychology” classes. Dozens of students fill the seats and flip through paper syllabi, where lectures, readings, and assignments take up most of the text on the pages. However, her first day of her “Science of the Brain” class last fall looked quite different— she traded a lecture hall for a prison. Tullett, an associate professor of psychology, was the first Arts and Sciences’ […]

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Religious Studies Awarded $350,000 Grant from the Luce Foundation

From the July 2019 Desktop News | UA’s department of religious studies was recently awarded a $350,000 grant by the Luce Foundation to fund an interdisciplinary conference surrounding the teaching, research, and public scholarship of religion in America. The conference, known as American Examples, aims to redefine the study of American religion and apply it to other fields of study, such as global conflict, social movements, and the study of religion in other areas of the world. Non-tenure track faculty, […]

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Breaking the Ice: Taking a Non-traditional Approach to Academia

Victoria Fitzgerald on the ITGC's research facility in Antarctica (Credit: Victoria Fitzgerald).

From the June 2019 Desktop News | When Victoria Fitzgerald arrived at UA to begin her PhD in January, she thought she would spend most of her time studying the Jurassic Period eolian rock formations of Alabama, extending her master’s program research. She thought most of her time would be spent in the Center for Sedimentary Basin Studies in Tuscaloosa or at the state geological survey, able to drive home to her family in no time. She never thought she […]

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Koushik Kassanagotu

Koushik Kassanagotu

As the conversation on healthcare continues to heat up on national and local scales, innovative minds like Koushik Kasanagottu are dedicated to entering the primary care field and changing the narrative of healthcare infrastructure and availability in the United States. Kasanagottu’s medical career is dedicated to focusing on rural areas with inadequate healthcare providers, and finding innovative solutions to instill preventative healthcare and eradicate common preventable diseases such as diabetes and hypertension. “The number one cause of death in the […]

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Water Matters

  At the first SEC Campus Water Matters Challenge, a team of UA students took home the gold. Dr. Sagy Cohen, an assistant professor in the Department of Geography, said the main criteria for the competition was water sustainability. The students were also supposed to take climate change effects into consideration and make sure the project was linked to current or planned developments at the university. To adhere to these criteria, Cohen said the students worked with associate vice president […]

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Forged by Faculty

Do you have a favorite professor? Political science alumni often name professor Barbara Chotiner, who joined the UA faculty in 1978 and retired in 2014. Decades after they were taught by her, alumni still attest to her influence on their lives and careers. As you know, faculty are the backbone of our enterprise. They are the innovators producing leading-edge research and scholarship; the creatives pushing themselves and their students to think and dream bigger; the leaders empowering students to be […]

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