Periodicals Postage is PAID in Athens, Georgia
Marketing & Communications University of Georgia 286 Oconee Street Suite 200 North Athens, GA 30602-1999
University hosts meetings with civic, business leaders to discuss mutual priorities CAMPUS NEWS
3
Candlelight ceremony April 27 remembers UGA faculty, students, staff Vol. 44, No. 34
April 24, 2017
www.columns.uga.edu
UGA GUIDE
4&5
Archaeological collection from natural history museum comes to UGA By Elizabeth Elmore eelmore@uga.edu
Andrew Davis Tucker
Dr. Dale Green believes that better data can lead to better medical care and is working to expand UGA’s training and research opportunities in health and clinical informatics fields.
‘A better way’
Informatics faculty member works to improve delivery of clinical care By Rebecca Ayer alea@uga.edu
Dr. Dale E. Green can still recall the frustrations he experienced with patient records early on in his career as a physician. “It’s late at night in the emergency room, someone is critically ill, and yet you have a stack of paper charts and 10,000 pages of patient records to go through,” said Green, an associate professor for health policy and management in the College of Public Health. “Typically, the chart you actually needed to deliver the best care was the one that didn’t come with the big stack. There just had to be a better way.” Today, as one of eight new UGA faculty members recruited through the Presidential Informatics Hiring Initiative, Green is using the big
data tools of informatics to improve the delivery of clinical care. And, in his first faculty appointment, Green will expand UGA’s training and research opportunities in the health and clinical informatics fields. This spring, he introduced the university’s first undergraduate and graduate courses in health informatics and analytics. Topics covered in the class include the history and scope of biomedical informatics, policy and regulatory framework of health information technology, information technology architecture, public health informatics, electronic health records, data standards, privacy and security standards, population health data analytics, as well as a variety of special topics. “As health care reform has demanded better management of
medical information, the need for workers with health informatics skills has grown rapidly in Georgia and across the U.S.,” said Green. “I look forward to working with colleagues in the College of Public Health and across campus to build a worldclass health informatics education program at UGA that meets these workforce needs.” Although health informatics has been around in some form since the mid-1960s, it was the passage of the 2009 HITECH Act that led to the fast-track adoption of health information technology in hospitals and physicians’ offices. From 2008 to 2015, adoption of See INFORMATICS on page 8
PRESIDENTIAL INTERDISCIPLINARY HIRING INITIATIVE
The University of Georgia Laboratory of Archaeology has received an extensive archaeological collection that includes artifacts and other paleoenvironmental materials recovered by the American Museum of Natural History during a decade of excavation led by David Hurst Thomas on St. Catherines Island, Georgia. The St. Catherines Island Collection contains more than 109,000 cataloged artifacts, 2,650 radiocarbon samples and paleoenvironmental assemblages of animal bones, mollusk shells and
plant remains. The collection coming to UGA includes prehistoric ceramics, partially reconstructed ceramic vessels, prehistoric ceramic pipes, lithic projectile points (arrowheads), bone tools, shell beads, shell gorgets and shell ear plugs. The materials are accompanied by a comprehensive digital database that contains relevant field notes, photographs, catalogs, reports and publications that relate to the excavations conducted on the island from 2005 to 2015. The university also will receive any future artifacts excavated on the island. “This is one of the most
See COLLECTION on page 8
GRADY COLLEGE
Individual, institutional winners named for 76th Peabody Awards By Margaret Blanchard mblanch@uga.edu
The Peabody Awards Board of Jurors has selected Norman Lear to receive an Individual Award and the Independent Television Service an Institutional Award for their contributions to storytelling in television. These honors are reserved for individuals and institutions whose work and commitment to broadcast media define and transform the field. The Peabody Awards are based at the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia. Lear and ITVS will be celebrated May 20 at a gala event in New York City. The event will be taped for a television special to air June 2 at 9 p.m. EST and PST
on both PBS and FUSION networks. Rashida Jones, a previous Peabody Award winner for Parks and Recreation, will serve as Norman Lear host. Supporting sponsors of the 76th Annual Peabody Awards Ceremony include the Emerson Collective, an organization focused on education, immigration reform, the environment and other social justice initiatives, and The Coca-Cola Co. Lear changed the face of television—and the faces. He revolutionized and democratized a traditionally timid, overwhelmingly See PEABODY on page 8
SIGNATURE LECTURE
Breaking boundaries: Programs bring faculty Harvard professor discusses together for research endeavors, opportunities ethical challenges facing AI By James Hataway jhataway@uga.edu
Elisabeth “Lilian” Sattler came to the University of Georgia on a mission. After working for two years as a licensed pharmacist in her native Germany—filling prescriptions and counseling patients on the proper use of medications—she couldn’t escape the feeling that something was missing, that she could do more to help her patients live healthier, happier lives. But what her patients needed wasn’t a new wonder drug; they needed help learning how to eat.
“I noticed in my own practice that many of my patients had no real understanding of appropriate nutrition for their medical needs,” Sattler said. “Some of these people were already living with cardiovascular diseases like heart failure or hypertension, and although I knew from my training and research that nutritional guidance can have a profound impact on these conditions and pharmacists receive nutrition-related questions all the time, most pharmacists aren’t trained to counsel their patients about nutrition.” So, Sattler left her practice in Germany and came to UGA
in 2009 to pursue a doctoral degree in foods and nutrition, where she learned new ways to steer patients toward a healthier Lilian Sattler lifestyle. After graduation, Sattler was recruited by UGA as part of the Presidential Interdisciplinary Hiring Initiative. Launched in late 2013 by President Jere W. Morehead, this initiative has strengthened UGA’s See HIRING on page 7
By Leigh Beeson lbeeson@uga.edu
Believe it or not, one of the “most intelligent” machines out there is the one that cleans your house while you’re doing something else, said Barbara Grosz, Higgins Professor of Natural Sciences at Harvard University. Many people may not realize Roomba is an example of artificial intelligence, said Grosz, who gave the Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Lecture March 27. But the field is actually much broader than the average person might know, encompassing everything from the
voice-activated technology in a smartphone to trading algorithms guiding decisions on Wall Street to the recommendations you see when you turn on Netflix or visit Facebook. “There are now a range of kinds of applications, which you see in daily life,” said Grosz, an AI expert whose contributions include establishing the research field of computational modeling of discourse and developing collaborative multi-agent systems for human-computer communication. “Interpreting languages, learning, drawing inferences, making
See HARVARD on page 8