When Shannon Hincker started her undergraduate work at the University of Kentucky in 2004, she was a mathematics major.

After two years, she switched to the College of Arts & Sciences’ mathematical economics program.

With its combination of math, statistics and economics, the program was a good fit for Hincker and prepared her well for a job doing actuarial work for Mercer.

“I loved math,” Hincker said. “I still love math. However, I knew early on that I didn’t want to go into teaching so I was very interested in getting a background that was strong in math and strong in the business field, too. That way, I just figured I’d have a lot more choices when I was finished.”

Robert Molzon, who is in the math

On the evening news, it is not uncommon to see polls charting public opinion on a variety of topics. The number of polls tends to spike around presidential elections, especially with topics surrounding approval ratings, national issues, and the economy. The degree of voter anger, angst, or contentment prominently posted in the polls is often a barometer of the larger political climate. And as you can imagine, those polls and resulting nightly news conversations can spark heated, informative, and oddly entertaining debates on the state of national politics.

But what trends can be found in poll numbers gathered in an increasingly media-saturated world? How do these poll numbers and nightly news conversations, for example, impact the way voters respond in presidential elections and how do voters react to pressing issues such as the economy?

UK political science doctoral

by Erin Holaday Ziegler

A University of Kentucky biology professor has been chosen as one of 22 Pew Scholars in the Biomedical Sciences for her innovative and groundbreaking retinal research with zebrafish.

Biologist Ann Morris will explore the mechanisms that drive the development and regeneration of retinal photoreceptors over the next four years without restriction.

"The Pew award is meant to give support to early stage investigations that show promise, and I am proud to represent UK in this endeavor," said Morris, whose Pew award is a first for UK in biomedical sciences. "Pew Foundation

Topical studies alum Susan Tomasky was drawn to the University of Kentucky because of its honors program but she also became deeply rooted in the College of Arts & Sciences political science department.

Tomasky began her studies at UK in 1970 after she moved from her hometown of Morgantown, W. Va.

She is currently the president of American Electric Power Transmission, which develops and builds transmission lines for new energy resources, including wind.

“I was really interested in the idea that the honors program was organized around introducing students to history, politics and art in small classes, inside a large

As a broad section of our world is experiencing economic and political upheaval, its peoples are migrating in search of security, stability and a shot at the good life. At the University of Kentucky, scholars are studying this massive immigration and its effects on various countries and cultures, and in the process have become part of an interdisciplinary migration of their own. The effects of this dual political and academic migration will be highlighted at the March 10-11 conference “Immigration Policy in an Anti-Immigrant Era” organized by the UK Quantitative Initiative for Policy and Social Research (QIPSR).

QIPSR is based in the College of Arts and Sciences, but was launched this year to benefit quantitative social scientists across UK by bringing world class scholars to campus, organizing workshops on grant writing and statistical methods, and creating opportunities

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