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

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.

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 study of persuasion, from the first class she

Q&A with New Professor Adam Banks - by Guy Spriggs

You joined UK’s Division of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Media in 2010. What motivated your decision to come to Lexington and join the faculty at UK?

First, I saw the formation of this division as something unique and something that could create some really different approaches to not only the teaching of writing, but to scholarly work as well. Second, in our conversations, both my department chair Roxanne Mountford and Dean Kornbluh showed that they really understood and valued my work and wanted to build from that. I was excited by the work that we’re doing to reinvent composition instruction by fully bringing together print literacy with oral production and digital production

Car assembly lines use thousands of parts to build just one automobile, with each individual piece specifically engineered to perform one function. Could you instead build a car out of LEGO blocks, creating a complex machine out of a far more limited set of parts? This would require that each 'block' be very versatile: able to function in many different roles. However once in place, each block should adopt and retain only the role intended. This is the same strategy as that employed by life to maximize biochemical efficiency while also exploiting a dizzying array of chemical reactions. Nature's protein catalysis (called enzymes) accelerate reaction rates by up to 10,000,000,000,000,000,000-fold, yet do so using only 20 different amino acid building blocks and a dozen vitamin cofactors as additives. In studying enzyme catalysis, University of Kentucky graduate student Dongtao Cui and

by Kathy Johnson

Three University of Kentucky professors have been named Southeastern Conference Academic Consortium (SECAC) 2011-2012 Academic Leadership Development Program (ALDP) Fellows.  They are Anna Bosch of the College of Arts and Sciences and Martha Peterson and Diane Snow, both of the College of Medicine.

The three will participate in this year-long leadership program consisting of both on-campus and off-campus activities including workshops that will bring them together with other ALDP Fellows from SEC schools. Workshops can focus on a variety of topics such as budgeting and finance, diversity, communication, strategic planning, fund raising, media relations, trends in higher education, and leadership strategies.  A

At age seven, Peyton Fouts,’06, wanted to change the world. And he’s been working toward that goal since.

At that young age, he saw a girl on TV carrying one brother and dragging another (who was dead) by the hand in the sand. “She had been orphaned by AIDS and my heart broke. I knew I wanted to change their circumstances and I just kept seeing people around the world who needed help.”

Fouts, a Lexington, Ky., native, grew up in a family of six children. The son of a teacher (mother) and lawyer (father), he has an older sister and four younger brothers.

When Fouts graduated high school from Lexington Christian Academy in 2003, he enrolled at the University of Kentucky, earning two degrees in just three years at age 19.

While at the University of Kentucky, Fouts decided to plow through his coursework to graduate early. “I was at UK for three years

A few years ago when reality television became 'the next big thing,' a lot of time was devoted to figuring out its appeal. Was it the stunts? The crazy situations? The relationships? Lisa Zunshine, who holds the Bush-Holbrook Professorship in the UK Department of English, theorizes that it is really about feeding a deeply seated evolutionary need.