UTC Chancellor Notes 50-Year Milestone With UT System

Featured Photo: UTC Chancellor Steve Angle speaks to a crowd during his annual State of the University address.

The 50th anniversary of UT Chattanooga’s affiliation with the statewide UT System was among the highlights UTC Chancellor Steve Angle cited at his annual State of the University address in September. Before a standing-room only crowd inside the recently renovated UTC Guerry Center—originally a University Center named for the university’s seventh president, Alexander Guerry—Angle contrasted some key statistics between 1969 and 2019, including enrollment increasing from 1,300 to more than 11,600, University of Chattanooga Foundation assets soaring from $3 million to more than $200 million, and UC Foundation scholarship endowment funds now totaling more than $31 million and providing 1,492 scholarships.

Distinguished guests included Zan Guerry and Alexis Guerry Bogo, grandson and great-granddaughter of Alexander Guerry; interim UT President Randy Boyd; Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke; Tennessee Sen. Patsy Hazlewood and Rep. Yusuf Hakeem; and former UTC chancellors Roger Brown, Fred Obear and Bill Stacy.

 

UTC, Wolf Trap Partner

Young preschool children in costume with educators and musicians
UTC-Wolf Trap integrates the arts into early childhood classrooms in 17 counties.

An unprecedented collaboration between Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts and UTC’s Southeast Center for Education in the Arts (SCEA) brings arts-based teaching and learning programs to early childhood classrooms in Chattanooga and a 17-county service area.

UTC-Wolf Trap marks the Virginia-based institute’s first higher-education partnership, its newest affiliate and expands its network to 21 organizations across the U.S. and Singapore.

UTC-Wolf Trap will implement the institute’s model for early childhood arts integration, which pairs learning experiences for the youngest students with effective professional development for early childhood educators. Children in greater Chattanooga schools, child care centers and other learning environments will engage in arts-based lessons that span the curriculum, including science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM, while the community’s educators will receive customized, hands-on training in arts-based techniques they can apply to their current and future classrooms.

 

UTC Professor Appointed 2019-2020 NSF Program Director

Li Yang
Li Yang

Li Yang, Guerry professor of computer science and engineering and assistant dean of the UTC College of Engineering and Computer Science, has been named a program director at the National Science Foundation (NSF) for the 2019-2020 academic year.

Yang is the first UTC faculty member to receive such an NSF appointment. She is directing the NSF’s CyberCorps and Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace programs to advance and bolster U.S. cybersecurity education and workforce development. As a program director, Yang will oversee the vetting of proposals for NSF-funded research.

Yang’s cybersecurity expertise has attracted about $4 million in research funding to date. Under her leadership, UTC has secured external funding to promote innovation in applied research and to foster diversity, inclusion and excellence in computing and cybersecurity. She will spend two years at NSF, then return to UTC.