UA notebook

Finalists for dean set campus talks

FAYETTEVILLE -- Four finalists for dean of the agriculture college at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, will give public talks beginning Wednesday.

Lona Robertson, interim dean since June 2016, will speak at 3:45 p.m. Wednesday. Deacue Fields III, chairman of an agricultural economics department at Auburn University, will talk at 3 p.m. Oct. 30.

Michael Woods, head of an agricultural economics department at Oklahoma State University, will speak at 3 p.m. Nov. 1. Mickey Latour, dean of an agricultural sciences college at Southern Illinois University, will speak at 3 p.m. Nov. 6.

Each of the talks will take place at Agnes Blew Auditorium in UA's Human Environmental Sciences Building. The previous dean of agriculture, Michael Vayda, left UA last year to become provost at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

UA's Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences has an enrollment of about 2,200 students.

Professor honored for scholarly book

FAYETTEVILLE -- A University of Arkansas, Fayetteville professor is among two scholars to receive the National Communication Association's annual award for outstanding scholarly books.

Lisa Corrigan has been honored with the organization's Diamond Anniversary Book Award for her book Prison Power: How Prison Influenced the Movement for Black Liberation.

Corrigan is director of UA's Gender Studies Program and an associate professor in the university's communication department. She joined UA's faculty in 2007.

Her book is about imprisoned activists in the Black Power movement and "how prison has shaped racial demands for equality from the civil rights era to the War on Terror," Corrigan said in a statement released by the university.

The association also honored Mary Triece, a professor at Ohio's University of Akron, for her book Urban Renewal and Resistance: Race, Space, and the City in the Late Twentieth to the Early Twenty-First Century.

$1M grant to help disability training

FAYETTEVILLE -- A $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education will help University of Arkansas, Fayetteville faculty train graduate students to help high school students with disabilities.

The five-year grant will involve collaboration with school districts, according to UA, and will help train students in special education and communication disorder academic programs.

"This award is in recognition of the significant need to prepare professionals in these disciplines to work together as they transition students with disabilities through high school to adult life," Suzanne Kucharczyk, an assistant professor of special education and one of the primary investigators of the grant project, said in a statement released by UA.

Kucharczyk said in a phone interview that graduate students will be working with students in Northwest Arkansas high schools as part of an effort to establish best practices. She said information will be shared with the Arkansas Department of Education and the affiliated transition services program that works throughout the state to help students with disabilities.

In 2016-17, the most recent year with data available for state school districts, there were 56,926 students receiving special education services, or about 11.9 percent of the total student population, according to online state data.

Instructor to lead offshore oil study

FAYETTEVILLE -- Greg Parnell, an industrial engineering professor at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, will serve as chairman for a national committee studying the safety of offshore oil and gas operations.

The committee -- which includes scholars and leaders affiliated with Duke University, Canada's National Energy Board, and the nonprofit land conservation group The Wilderness Society, among others -- seeks to offer recommendations about safety inspections and remote monitoring to the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement in the U.S. Department of Interior.

The bureau requested the study, with the effort being undertaken by the Transportation Research Board, a nonprofit organization that is part of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine.

Parnell joined the UA faculty in 2013.

Metro on 10/15/2017

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