As a freshman, Honors College student Carina Groves intended to be a music major. Then she took an Honors course on human trafficking that awakened a deeper drive to take a stand. That’s what the Honors College experience is all about: academic rigor, community leadership and finding your purpose.
On December 9, 2010, Mary Poulton was officially inducted as a Distinguished Professor, one of the highest honors a UA professor can achieve. But if you ask the head of the UA Department of Mining and Geological Engineering and director of the new Lowell Institute for Mineral Resources what inspired her to this life of achievement, she’ll tell you, straight up: it all started with a simple box of rocks.
There’s a lot more to studying pharmacy than counting pills in a lab. The VIPER Institute, founded by Associate Professor Leslie Boyer, M.D., gives students the chance to go out in the field and study venomous critters like the bark scorpion. From Morocco to Mexico, they are participating in exciting, ground-breaking research on anti-venoms that will save lives.
A visit to the UA’s Biosphere 2 facility offers a one-of-a-kind educational experience. Still, how could that experience be made more relevant to life outside the glass? The College of Education’s Earth Education Research and Evaluation Team has helped B2 zero in on the answers.
For some people valley fever is so mild they never know they had it. Others end up in wheelchairs. Some die. At least 150,000 infections occur each year – two thirds of them in the “valley fever corridor” spanning from Tucson to Phoenix. You get valley fever by breathing in spores that can lodge in the lungs. Today there is no cure – but UA researchers may be close. And that could make us all breathe easier.