Notables Archives

Dr. Marc Gilley, associate professor of music and associate dean for the School of Liberal Arts, recently released a music album titled “Childhood” by Spondee. Spondee is a duo featuring Gilley on saxophone and his bandmate Louis Romanos on drums and electro-acoustic instruments.

Dr. Peter Sakaris, professor of biology, received the Distinguished Service Award and the Professional of the Year Award at the Georgia Chapter of the American Fisheries Society 2024 Annual Meeting.

Note: Photos appear in the order as mentioned below.

GGC faculty teams recently won $67,775 in Affordable Learning Grants (ALG) for the development of digital materials and related research that will save students about $190,000 annually. 

Dr. Umar Khokar, assistant professor of information technology (IT), and Dr. Binh Tran, associate professor of IT, recently won an ALG Textbook Transformation Grant to digitalize materials for a computer networking course. By providing no-cost textbooks for 300 students, the project will result in nearly $70,000 in savings to students and the college.

Georgia Gwinnett College has been selected by the Institute of International Education (IEE) and the U.S. Embassy Bangkok as one of 48 U.S. and Thai higher education institutions to participate in IEE's current International Academic Partnership Program, which is focused on Thailand. This group of institutions will work on developing and enhancing international higher education partnerships between the countries. Dr. Funwi Ayuninjam, director of Internationalization, and Dr. Boyko Gyurov, professor of mathematics, will join a U.S. delegation to Thailand to visit potential partners.

Dr. Kara Latopolski, dean of Students, has been named a primary practitioner for the Association for Student Conduct Administration's spring 2024 Student Conduct 101 core skills training modules.

Dr. Alvina Atkinson, professor of mathematics, is a 2024 Black History Month Honoree of the Network of Minorities in Mathematical Sciences' Mathematically Gifted & Black website. She has also been re-elected to serve a two-year term as the Southeast vice president of the American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges. In addition, she serves as the mathematics representative on the University System of Georgia Regent’s Council on General Education, and is a member of the board of directors of the National Association of Mathematicians.

A group of GGC students have been awarded a $1,500 grant by the prestigious NASA MINDS program. The group's project involves developing and testing a fleet of six small swarm rovers for land surveying and data collection tasks. The group's mentors are Dr. Sairam Tangirala, professor of physics, and Dr. Tae Song Lee, associate professor of physics. 

A team of GGC's Technology Ambassador Program (TAP) students took third place in the 2023 Consortium for Computing Sciences: Southeastern Conference's Student Research Poster Competition, recently held at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, South Carolina. Information technology majors Etienne Laccruche, '25, Tony Lam, '24, and Ammar Mehicevic, '24, won for their research poster, "Teaching Algorithms and Growing STEM with Sphero." Another team representing the TAPS registered student organization placed in the competition's top five. A total of five GGC TAP teams competed.

Elijah Philippe Noisin, '21, psychology, who is currently enrolled in the Regents Engineering Pathway, won the Best Student Paper Award with his work, “Identifying the Differences Between 3-Dimensional Shapes Using a Custom-built Smart Glove,” at the annual Georgia Undergraduate Research Conference, held recently at Valdosta State University. Noisin's mentors on this research project include Dr. Sairam Tangirala, professor of physics, and Dr. Tae Song Lee, associate professor of physics.

Dr. Michael Gagnon, professor of history, recently recorded the podcast, "The Case of George Corn Tassel," from the age of Cherokee removal from 1830s Georgia. The discussion is episode 183 of the Northeast Georgia History Center's "Then Again" podcast, and can be heard on Spotify and other podcast compilers.