Summertime is prime time at theme parks—a vacation to one of these magical destinations might well be in your plans. These UT alumni who work with Disney, Dollywood, and Sea World Orlando would love to welcome you.
Objects from long ago and far away promise a tantalizing museum experience this summer at UT Knoxville. The Frank H. McClung Museum is offering “Ancient Bronzes of the Asian Grasslands,” an exhibit from the Arthur M. Sackler Foundation, through August 3.
The majority of students can succeed at math and science. “They just need to be taught how,” says Dr. Saundra McGuire, a UT alumna and recent winner of the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring.
McGuire is director of the Center for Academic Success at Louisiana State University. She says the earlier students learn how to learn, the better.
Ann Draughon’s career has included many firsts, but she says the most important thing she has done is prepare women and minorities for careers in food microbiology.
When cats purr and dogs invite more, more, more tummy scratching, their human friends assume the animals are enjoying themselves. But we have no ultimate proof that animals feel pleasure. Research scientist Jonathan Balcombe (Knoxville ’91), who has spent years studying animal behavior, posits in his book Pleasurable Kingdom that humans aren’t the only animals capable of feeling pleasure.
Like many youngsters who grew up in the 1950s, Michael Lofaro enjoyed watching Fess Parker portray frontiersman Davy Crockett on television. Eventually his interest in Crockett and Daniel Boone led him to a career teaching and researching early American literature and folklore. Lofaro keeps an autographed photo of Parker wearing the famous coonskin cap on a bookcase in his office at UT Knoxville.
The 2008 Lady Vols brought home an unprecedented eighth NCAA women’s basketball crown. Tennessee Alumnus tips its hat to all the championship teams in Pat Summitt’s storied reign
What if your computer weren’t really a computer? What if the “hard drive” where you store the vital pieces of your life—like work applications, e-mail, and financial and medical information—wasn’t located in a single piece of equipment, but was available everywhere, all the time, as part of a computing “cloud”?
A glimpse of East Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains shrouded in low-slung clouds is an archetypical image and one that prompted the Cherokee Indians to term the region “the place of blue smoke.” But while the daydreamers among us are inclined to study the cloud formations drifting overhead, the region’s scientists—UT researchers among them—are more interested in what’s happening on, and under, the ground. The cloud formations above and the moving water below are, in fact, closely linked.
Pandemonium broke out at Hoi Tu Thien orphanage, and a sea of frenzied, giggling children took control. In the thick of it was Dan White, a 2004 UT Knoxville philosophy graduate living in Can Tho, Vietnam. He grinned as he surveyed the familiar scene before him on that humid April evening.
Tearing through the halls of Gatlinburg’s Mountain View Hotel, 10-year-old Ford Little relished the freedom afforded him by the UT Alumni Association.
In the 8 days before Dave Roberts came to work for the UT alumni office in 1966, he resigned his job in Nashville, got married, enjoyed a [brief] honeymoon, and moved to Knoxville. As he recalls the frenetic onset of his 42-year career, he dismisses any prescience that UT would occupy nearly all his working life.
My bleary eyes gazed through a plate-glass mirage as the runway of Las Vegas’s airport drew a literal line in the sand. Sometimes the line between life-changing dreams and nightmares runs thin as the queen of hearts.
Jan Simek steps in as interim Knoxville Chancellor, forensic science on display, and UT Extension’s efforts to put Tennessee’s winemaking industry on the map—these and other stories in this edition of UTopics.
This could possibly be the saddest story you ever read, but it isn’t. Far from it. It’s a story of courage, faith, and friendship that gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “a host of Volunteers.” It begins in 1971. Walter Chadwick, hero of the 1967 Tennessee–Alabama football game who wobbled the game-winning touchdown pass left-handed to tight end Ken DeLong, had just started a promising high-school coaching career in Smyrna, Georgia, near his hometown of Decatur.
