The Honors College was featured recently in Chattanooga Magazine, which calls us the city’s “Educational Gemstone.” Read more about it here!

Rising Senior and Brock Scholar Heather Murray is one of only 48 American students chosen to participate in this year’s Humanity in Action (HIA) fellowship programs in the United States and Europe. Read more about it here!

This semester, twelve Honors College students spent their spring break in the Bahamas snorkeling, hiking, and studying Tropical Island Ecology and Geology as part of an honors science course. Read more about it here!

32 Brock Scholars and Innovations Scholars from UTC’s Honors College presented their academic research and gave talks on best practices in honors education at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the Southern Regional Honors Council in Orlando, Florida, March 31–April 2. The conference theme was “The Magic of Honors,” and the more than 700 attendees got to enjoy an evening at Universal Studios theme park, featuring the Wizarding World of Harry Potter.

SRHC is the largest and arguably most active regional branch of the National Collegiate Honors Council. Students made a total of 18 oral presentations and eight poster presentations on diverse subjects in the humanities, natural sciences, fine arts, social sciences, health and nutrition, education, mathematics. They also led three panel presentations on honors practices, including the launch of a new national undergraduate research journal called UReCA!: A Web Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity.

Student Participants and Their Presentations:

• Cooper Thome – “Heterogeneous Catalysis in Microreactors”
• Emily McAndrew, Zeke Starr – “Wide Shot of History: The Place of Documentary Film in Out-of-the-Classroom Learning”
• Hayley Little – “Math Standards in Tennessee: The Development and Implementation of Common Core”
• Semaja Reed – “Slavery’s Destruction of Identity as Seen through Toni Morrison’s Beloved”
• Vincent Rollins – “The Science and Philosophy Behind Frankenstein’s Attempt at Creating Life”
• Caroline Crawford – “More than a Wheelchair in the Background: A Study of Portrayals of Disabilities in Children’s Picture Books”
• Josiah Motok – “Shakespeare in China: From Translation to Today”
• Natalie Hurst – “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: The Accuracy of the Portrayal in Redeployment”
• Rachel Davis – “Selfies: Revolutionary or Narcissistic?”
• Andrea Kur – “Falsely Immiscible: On the Co-evolution of Art and Science”
• Lindsey Layman – “Cross-Ideological Exposure and Millennials on Twitter”
• Heather Murray – “Helping Hands: A Study in Foster Parent Satisfaction”
• Luke Black – “New Zealand: Threat to Endemic Species”
• Patrick Zdunek – “Synthesis, Characterization, and Reactivity of Ru(II)-phosphite and the Ru(II)-NHC Complexes”
• Gennifer Delille – “Cholesterol and Phospholipid Mixtures”
• Natalie Burdine – Novel C-Co Composites as Anode Materials for High-Energy Lithium-ion Batteries”
• Nigel Heard – “The Phenology and Compatibility of Hazelnut (Corylus avellana) Cultivation in Tennessee”
• Melanie Martin – “When Does the Game End? Stress and the College Athlete”
• Opeletia Helton – “Culture and Health: You Can Have Both”
• Melissa Miller – “The Zeros of the Riemann Zeta-Function”
• Mae Stuart – “The Spirit of the Masses: How the French Experience in Indochina Shaped the Algerian War”
• Kimberly Guo – “The Internationalization of History and Memory: American Public Opinions on Nanjing Massacre”
• Liana Rodrigues – “Factors Influencing Food Preferences: A Study of Children in Low-Income Neighborhoods”
• Henley Schimpf (with Dean Linda Frost, and Philip Frana, Tai Houser, & Stacy Rice) – “Transferring from Two-Year to Four-Year Honors: Community College Articulation Agreements in Florida, Tennessee, and Virginia”
• Rachel Emond, Andi Kur, Zeke Starr, Jason Weber (with Associate Dean Greg O’Dea) – “How to Make or Break an Innovation Lab”
• Rebekah Assid, Alea Coble, Joshua Freeman (with Professor Russell Helms) – “UReCA! An Undergraduate Web Journal of Research and Creative Activity”
• Ariel Seiber – “The Three Theban Plays and the Downfall of a King Through Incest”
• Eliott Geary – “In the Shadow of the Banyan and Animal Farm: Marxist Ideals and Actions in Discord”
• Emily McAndrew – How American Society May Make the Social Contract Theory Obsolete: An Exploration through Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club”

The grren|light Innovation Lab participants

The Honors College has been growing over the last two years, expanding to encompass new communities and tackle local, real- world issues. Spearheading this growth has been the Innovation Labs, student driven learning classrooms centered around a particular problem or real world objective.

On Wednesday, November 18th this important new program bore its first tangible fruits.

The green|light  Innovation Lab, in concert with their community partner green|spaces, received official green|light certification for the University Campus, marking UTC as the first educational institution to receive this distinction.

green|light is a third party corporate sustainability certification for Chattanooga area businesses awarded for meeting benchmark levels in sustainable practices. This model was adapted and implemented by the Innovation Scholars with the help of UTC’s sustainability coordinator Lisa Darger to fit a larger institution like the University. Over the last four and a half months, students met with University officials, reworked polices, and collected existing data to form a comprehensive sustainability plan for UTC, earning them praise from both their community partners and institutional leaders.

The hope is that this new focus on sustainability will not end here. The green|light Lab will continue its work in the Spring, increasing student education about sustainability, and designing a transferable model for other regional institutions to follow.

For the present, the green|light Innovation Lab has left a lasting impact on UTC’s campus and fundamentally changed the way its processes will work moving forward.