Club Mud Exhibition returns for annual Spring Sale
Georgia Southern University’s annual Club Mud Spring Exhibition and Sale will celebrate its 24th year May 1 through May 3. More than 40 undergraduate and graduate art students will exhibit their work in ceramics, porcelain, stoneware, jewelry, small metals, prints and handmade books.
‘Every year Club Mud changes,” says Jane Pleak, professor of ceramics. ‘We have different students working on different projects and research.”
Consistent from year to year is the opportunity for student artists to show their work, network with the public and earn money. Club Mud, says Pleak, gives art students the opportunity to ‘see what it’s like to become a professional artist.”
Students exhibit and sell artwork they have created over the semester in a variety of courses, from Ceramics, Sculpture and Jewelry Making.
‘The local community really enjoys [Club Mud],” continues Pleak, ‘They like to support and encourage young artists and, over the years, see the student work evolve and get better.”
This year, Club Mud takes place from 10 a.m. until 9 p.m. Thursday and Friday, May 1 and May 2, and from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday, May 3. Located in and around the Ceramics and Sculpture Studio on 236 Forest Drive, admission is free of charge. The prices of student work will vary.
Georgia Southern University, a Carnegie Doctoral/Research University, offers more than 120 degree programs serving nearly 17,000 students. Through eight colleges, the University offers bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degree programs built on more than a century of academic achievement. The University, one of Georgia’s largest, is a top choice of Georgia’s HOPE scholars and is recognized for its student-centered approach to education.
Visit: www.georgiasouthern.edu.
Last updated: 2/2/2018
Electrical Engineering Technology students build robot for regional competition
A group of senior Electrical Engineering Technology students from Georgia Southern University designed and built a robot that was judged among the best entries at a regional robotics competition.
The Georgia Southern students placed 12th out of 50 teams at the ‘Return to the Moon Robotic Competition” held in conjunction with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering (IEEE) Region 3 Conference in Huntsville, Ala.
Christopher Donaghue, Lory Gunter, Brendan McGee, Marcus Middleton and Chad Segal conceived and constructed the robot, which navigated and retrieved samples from an imaginary lunar surface.
‘This was our first year in the competition, so our team did very well,” said Fernando Rios-Gutierrez, an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering Technology at Georgia Southern. ‘In fact, three of our students got job interviews from two companies that were represented at the conference, and they were offered all-expense paid visits to the companies’ headquarters in California.”
The project began as part of a senior design course taught by Rios-Gutierrez during the Fall 2007 semester. McGee served as the team leader while Donaghue (electronic design), Gunter (program design), Middleton (field design) and Segal (mechanical design) each took charge of a particular phase of the process. They were assisted by other students in the Electrical Engineering Technology program.
Built according to strict guidelines set forth by the IEEE, the robot measured 10 inches long, 10 inches wide and 10 inches high. It was designed to navigate smooth, sandy and pebbled surfaces, and then collect lunar samples represented by two-inch cubes of different colors.
‘In the fall, the students built the testing field and the mechanical base, which
included the chassis, motors and wheel suspension,” Rios-Gutierrez said. ‘They also designed the electronic interfaces, such as the ultrasonic and infrared sensors that detected obstacles and the moon samples.”
As the project continued into the Spring 2008 semester, the students wrote the computer programs, made improvements to the mechanical and electronic systems, and put the robot through a series of tests.
At the Region 3 Conference in early April, the Georgia Southern students were joined by students from colleges and universities in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, parts of Indiana, and Jamaica.
‘Our students benefitted from this project in many ways,” Rios-Gutierrez said. ‘First, they actually use the theoretical knowledge they get from the engineering program in the implementation of a real complex system.
‘In addition, they get the experience of working in a team environment and under a specific time frame and design specification. They also get the confidence of realizing that what they learn at Georgia Southern is on par with more well-known institutions.
‘Finally, the students get the opportunity to network with people from electrical engineering companies that are looking for good prospects to hire.”
Georgia Southern University, a Carnegie Doctoral/Research University, offers more than 120 degree programs serving nearly 17,000 students. Through eight colleges, the University offers bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degree programs built on more than a century of academic achievement. The University, one of Georgia’s largest, is a top choice of Georgia’s HOPE scholars and is recognized for its student-centered approach to education. Visit: www.georgiasouthern.edu .
Last updated: 2/2/2018
Legal seminar for business people will focus on background and reference checks
Business managers and human resource personnel are invited to attend a seminar in Brunswick entitled ‘Best Practices in Running Background and Reference Checks.”
The seminar will be held on Tuesday, May 13, from 6 p.m. until 7:30 p.m. at Coastal Georgia Community College.
Part of the Legal Awareness in the Workplace (LAW) series sponsored by Georgia Southern University, the seminar will be taught by Jennifer Dickinson, an attorney from the employment law firm of Hunter, Maclean, Exley and Dunn, P.C.
Dickinson will discuss the Equal Employment Opportunity anti-discrimination law and how if affects a company’s pre-hire and post-employment background checks and investigations. The Fair Credit Reporting Act will also be reviewed.
The LAW series will continue with ‘Georgia Employment Law” in Savannah on June 24, ‘Effective Recruiting, Screening and Background Investigations” in Savannah on July 22, ‘Internal Investigations and Documentation, Discipline and Discharge” in Brunswick on Aug. 12, and ‘Hostile Work Environment: A Case Review” in Savannah on Sept. 23.
The fee for each seminar is $69 per person. The fee will be reduced to $59 for anyone who signs up for three or more seminars, and for groups of three or more people from the same firm.
Each seminar provides 1.5 recertification credit hours for individuals with (Senior) Professional in Human Resources (PHR/SPHR) certification.
Advance registration for any of the seminars may be made by calling Georgia
Southern University’s Continuing Education Center at (912) 681-5551.
For more information on any of the seminars, visit
http://ceps.georgiasouthern.edu/conted/lawseminar.html or contact J. Marie Lutz, SPHR, at seminars@georgiasouthern.edu or (912) 871-1763.
Georgia Southern University, a Carnegie Doctoral/Research University, offers more than 120 degree programs serving nearly 17,000 students. Through eight colleges, the University offers bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degree programs built on more than a century of academic achievement. The University, one of Georgia’s largest, is a top choice of Georgia’s HOPE scholars and is recognized for its student-centered approach to education. Visit: www.georgiasouthern.edu
Last updated: 2/2/2018
IRS partners with Georgia Southern University for Adrian Project
Students in former FBI agent Don Berecz’s white-collar crime class at Georgia Southern University recently had a real hands-on opportunity to learn how a criminal investigation operates when they took part in the Adrian Project, an IRS education program that reaches out to colleges and universities across the nation. From combing accounting records, to searching through trash, to handing down a grand jury indictment, this class learned by experience just what it takes to catch a crook.
‘We are an ideal location for the IRS to conduct this program,” said Berecz, director of Georgia Southern University’s Center for Forensic Studies in Accounting and Business. ‘Georgia Southern University is one of only a few colleges and universities nationwide offering a series of courses leading to a certificate, diploma, minor, or a major degree in forensic accounting. The IRS was pleased with the quality of our students and how informed they already are about tracking financial crimes.”
‘We got to use everything we’ve learned so far,” said Brianna Bishop, a senior accounting major from Savannah. ‘From the first briefing through the grand jury, it was exciting to be able to do the work ourselves.”
The Adrian Project’s five-hour exercise began with a briefing on the project and introductions for the four experienced IRS Special Agents who came from Savannah to role-play and coach the undergraduates as the investigations took place. Students were divided into four squads of ‘honorary” special agents, each with a student team leader and an agent who coached them in the fine points of investigation: dealing with a confidential informant; gathering evidence from many sources, including the suspect’s trash; working with other law enforcement agencies; and surveillance. They looked the part, too, as they donned IRS raid jackets, used handcuffs, and uncovered cocaine and weapons the special non-functioning, red-handled simulation weapons used by the IRS for training.
Led by their IRS coaches, the groups went through four crime scenarios. One squad searched through trash and found a flyer for an anti-tax rally, another investigated a casino that kept two sets of books. Another squad looked at a fraudulent tax preparer, and the fourth squad arrested a drug dealer, who then ‘rolled over” on his supplier, who turned out to be grossly under-reporting his income.
At this point, Berecz and his class took the Adrian Project one step beyond the standard IRS program. Two days after their investigations, class members responded to their grand jury summons and met at the Bulloch County Courthouse, where they were duly sworn in and charged as a grand jury by the Honorable John Robert Turner of the Ogeechee Judicial Circuit. The evidence found by the fourth squad was turned over to the grand jury, which handed down an indictment.
Joshua Blanchard, a junior accounting major from Brunswick, applauded the IRS agents for allowing the students to ask and answer their own questions. ‘The agents that came to participate were great,” said Blanchard, who served as a squad leader for the group that investigated the fraudulent tax preparer.
‘We enjoy conducting the Adrian Project because it gives us a chance to work interactively with students,” said Supervisory Special Agent Lisa Holtz. ‘They learn about a forensic career opportunity that they wouldn’t otherwise. At Georgia Southern the project operated very well, and some of the students expressed an interest in learning more about working in the IRS Criminal Investigation Division.”
‘The Adrian Project brings white-collar crime right to the students and makes it real,” said Berecz. ‘They conduct the actual activities of law enforcement agents. The hands-on experience is almost always eye-opening for the students who take part, and in many cases, the Adrian Project helps them make important life-altering decisions about how they will continue their education.”
Last updated: 2/2/2018
Georgia Southern University scientist helps with development of conservation map
Georgia Southern University scientist Michelle Zjhra is part of an international team of researchers that has developed a remarkable new road map for finding and protecting the best remaining holdouts for thousands of rare species that live only in Madagascar.
Led by conservation biologists at the University of California at Berkeley, the research team developed a conservation plan that includes lemurs and species of ants, butterflies, frogs, geckos and plants.
An island nation in the Indian Ocean, Madagascar is considered one of the most significant biodiversity hot spots in the world. More than 2,300 species that are found only in Madagascar were included in the research team’s analysis, which was published in the April 11 issue of Science.
A diverse group of 22 researchers from museums, zoos, herbaria, universities, non-governmental organizations and industry contributed to the study. They were assisted by an additional 62 non-authored collaborators who were part of much larger research teams that collected the data used in the study.
Zjhra is an associate professor in the Department of Biology at Georgia Southern. Her research interest focuses on patterns and processes of plant diversity and spans molecular genetics, floral development, floral odor chemistry, plant-animal interactions, and pollination syndrome evolution.
Zjhra’s work has taken her from the old growth swamps and rivers of Georgia and South Carolina, to the tropical rain forests of Madagascar, to the mountainous rain forests of Vietnam.
For the Madagascar research team, centralizing and analyzing the sheer quantity of the data to develop a map of conservation priorities provided an unprecedented challenge. First, a massive team of researchers collected highly detailed data to learn the exact locations of thousands of animal and plant species across Madagascar.
Using software specially designed for this project in collaboration with a computer science researcher at AT&T, the researchers then estimated the range for each species.
Finally, separate optimization software, customized for this project by researchers at Finland’s Helsinki University, was used to identify which regions are most vital for saving the greatest number of species.
Species that have experienced a proportionally larger loss of habitat due to deforestation were given top priority in the resulting conservation plan because they are at the greatest risk of extinction.
According to some estimates, about half of the world’s plant species and three-quarters of vertebrate species are concentrated in biodiversity hot spots that make up only 2.3 percent of the Earth’s land surface.
A developing country off the southeast coast of Africa, Madagascar is one of the most treasured regions of biodiversity on the planet. An estimated 80 percent of the animals on the island do not occur naturally anywhere else on Earth.
All species of lemur and half of the world’s chameleons are endemic to Madagascar. They are joined by whole families of plants, insects, birds, mammals, reptiles and frogs that are found only on the island.
In 2003, Madagascar’s government announced an ambitious goal of tripling its existing protected area network from about 5 million acres to 15 million acres, or about 10 percent of the country’s total land surface.
The conservation mapping project was supported by the MacArthur Foundation with a joint grant to UC-Berkeley and the Wildlife Conservation Society. Based in New York, the Wildlife Conservation Society has a staff in Madagascar that is working with government officials to incorporate the results of the study into the country’s conservation policy.
The research team included scientists from the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the California Academy of Sciences, the Center for Applied Conservation International in Virginia, the Center for Conservation and Research at the Henry Doorly Zoo in Nebraska, the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, the Missouri Botanical Garden, the Museum of Zoology at the University of Michigan, the Natural History Museum in England, the REBIOMA Wildlife Conservation Society in Madagascar, the Royal Botanical Gardens in England, the State University of New York, the University of York in England, and the Zoological Institute of the University of Braunschweig in Germany.
Georgia Southern University, a Carnegie Doctoral/Research University, offers more than 120 degree programs serving nearly 17,000 students. Through eight colleges, the University offers bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degree programs built on more than a century of academic achievement. The University, one of Georgia’s largest, is a top choice of Georgia’s HOPE scholars and is recognized for its student-centered approach to education. Visit: www.georgiasouthern.edu .
Last updated: 2/2/2018
Auditions for Erk Russell play set for May 3-4
The producers of the play that celebrates the enduring impact of legendary Georgia Southern University football coach Erk Russell are ready to cast the play with local men and women.
Auditions for ‘A Life Done Right: The Living Legacy of Erk Russell” will be held in two sessions in the Multi-Purpose Room of the Averitt Center for the Arts in downtown Statesboro.
The first session is scheduled for Saturday, May 3, from 2 p.m. until 6 p.m., and the second session is scheduled for Sunday, May 4, from 2 p.m. until 5 p.m.
According to director Rebecca Kennerly, as many as 25 actors are needed for the play, which will be unveiled with eight public performances in late August and early September.
‘All body types, ethnic groups and ages over 18 are welcome to audition,” said Kennerly, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Arts at Georgia Southern. ‘We will be looking for people to portray a variety of characters, including football players and cheerleaders, college students, teachers and administrators, community businessmen and women, and waitress and cooks.”
Based largely on oral histories that are being collected from people who were acquaintances of the late coach, ‘A Life Done Right: The Living Legacy of Erk Russell” is a collaboration between the Averitt Center and the Department of Communication Arts.
Averitt Center executive director Tim Chapman developed the concept for the play and recruited Kennerly to facilitate the oral histories portion of the project, for which she received a Faculty Service Grant from Georgia Southern. Scott Garner, the former sports editor of the Statesboro Herald, is writing the script.
Much of script is based on interviews with Russell’s family members, friends, fans and former players. Many of those people will be portrayed in the play, a multi-media production that will include videotaped interviews and archived footage as well as actors on stage.
The list of people to be portrayed includes All-America quarterback Tracy Ham; former Georgia Southern president Dale Lick and vice president Perk Robbins, along with faculty members Jane Page and Del Presley; Snooky’s restaurant owner and Russell confidant Bruce Yawn; and former Eagle cheerleader Sandra Prince.
The auditions will be ‘cold,” which means the actors will have little time to prepare for their readings.
‘Each person will be given a section of the script and asked to choose two or three short parts for different characters they would like to read for,” Kennerly said. ‘We plan on bringing in groups of three to five people at a time. Each person will audition solo, and then they may be asked to work together as an ensemble.
‘We will take into consideration each person’s preference for parts, but we will ask for readings of other characters as well if we think they may be a better fit.”
Rehearsals for ‘A Life Done Right: The Living Legacy of Erk Russell” will begin in early July. The play will be performed in the Averitt Center’s Emma Kelly Theatre on Aug. 22-24 and Aug. 27-28. The production will move to the Black Box Theater in the new Center for Art and Theatre on the Georgia Southern campus for performances on Sept. 5-7.
For more information, contact Kennerly at rkennerly@georgiasouthern.edu or (912) 478-7325, or Chapman at exec@averittcenterforthearts.org or (912) 212-2787.
Georgia Southern University, a Carnegie Doctoral/Research University, offers more than 120 degree programs serving nearly 17,000 students. Through eight colleges, the University offers bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degree programs built on more than a century of academic achievement. The University, one of Georgia’s largest, is a top choice of Georgia’s HOPE scholars and is recognized for its student-centered approach to education. Visit: www.georgiasouthern.edu .
Last updated: 2/2/2018
Georgia Southern University football coach headlines Greater Albany Eagle Club meeting
Georgia Southern University Eagles offensive coordinator Rance Gillespie of the football coaching staff will be the featured speaker at the Greater Albany Eagle Club on Tuesday, May 6. The event will be held at Loco’s Deli and Pub, 547 N. Westover Blvd.
All Georgia Southern University fans in the greater Albany area are invited to attend. Gillespie will offer his outlook on the 2008 signing class, spring practice and the 2008 season.
The event will feature appetizers and tea for $7 per person. For more information, contact the Office of Alumni Relations at 912-478-ALUM (2586).
Georgia Southern University, a Carnegie Doctoral/Research University, offers more than 120 degree programs serving nearly 17,000 students. Through eight colleges, the University offers bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degree programs built on more than a century of academic achievement. The University, one of Georgia’s largest, is a top choice of Georgia’s HOPE scholars and is recognized for its student-centered approach to education.
Last updated: 2/2/2018
ROTC commanding general in Statesboro and Savannah on April 25
Georgia Southern University will welcome the commanding general of the national ROTC program on Friday, April 25.
Maj. Gen. W. Montague Winfield will meet with Georgia Southern ROTC cadets on the University campus in Statesboro on the morning of April 25. Later in the day, Maj. Gen. Winfield will travel to Savannah and meet with cadets at Armstrong Atlantic State University and Savannah State University.
The ROTC cadets at Armstrong Atlantic and Savannah State are part of Eagle Battalion, which is based at Georgia Southern.
On the evening of April 25, Maj. Gen. Winfield will be the featured speaker at ‘Dining Out,” the annual Eagle Battalion dinner that will be held at Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah.
If you are interested in covering any part of Maj. Gen. Winfield’s visit, please contact Lt. Col. George Fredrick, the commander of Eagle Battalion, at (912) 681-0042. – See more at:
Last updated: 2/2/2018
