Summer 2020

Alumna finds her home at Pfizer Learning about small chemical reactions in her high school chemistry class changed the trajectory of Ariana Vargas’ (’18) life. Hearing her high school teacher explain what caused the reaction piqued Vargas’ curiosity about different and more complex chemical interactions, and her love for chemistry was born. “Even though it…

Top Honor Goes to Four Graduate Students For the first time ever, the Averitt Award has four winners in a single academic year. The award is the highest honor bestowed upon students in Georgia Southern University’s Jack N. Averitt College of Graduate Studies. In most years, there are just two recipients. One is for Excellence in…

Waters College of Health Professions Plant-based meat alternatives have existed commercially for years. Within the U.S. market, textured soy protein was incorporated into meatloaves in institutions in the early 1970s when the price of beef soared with rising transportation costs. These products weren’t necessarily popular though, due to major textural differences compared to their meat-based…

College of Behavioral and Social Sciences Parenting is hard work, rewarding, and a topic everyone seems to have an opinion about. I have taught Parent Education and Guidance to undergraduate Child and Family Development students at Georgia Southern for 20 years. I teach students how to use evidence-based, not opinion-based knowledge to educate parents. All…

Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health Every fall, my twins excitedly walk into our local health clinic to be vaccinated against influenza. Yes, you read it correctly… they are thrilled to receive the flu vaccine. Ever since they were little I spoke of how immunizations transformed them into modern-day superheroes. While they may not have…

College of Education Helping children develop as readers requires more than giving rewards for completing books, encouraging competition to see who can read the most books or asking them to read a number of texts in an allotted amount of time. In order to encourage a child’s intrinsic motivation to read and support them on…

Parker College of Business Bitcoin is the first and most popular digital currency based on a protocol outlined in a white paper (2008, bitcoin.org/bitcoin. pdf) under the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto. Is bitcoin a viable currency or asset? The views on the matter are not unanimous but highly controversial. Some describe bitcoin as “noxious poison”…

College of Arts and Humanities Ours is certainly not the first period that has asked if young people are losing their religion. Nor is it likely to be the last. But recent findings from the Pew Research Center could lend some support to those persuaded that the loss of religion marks the lives of many…

College of Science and Mathematics In 1979, as an undergraduate biology major, I participated in a class trip to learn about the amazing natural history of the Florida Keys. While there we snorkeled on an astonishingly beautiful reef built by huge expanses of branching elkhorn and staghorn coral. The complex structure provided by the coral…