September 2020

A Florida State University faculty member in the Department of Classics has been invited to present a series of lectures at Aarhus University’s Centre for Urban Network Evolutions in Denmark this fall. Assistant professor of classics Elizabeth Murphy’s series, “Socially Re-constructing the Late Roman City: Labor, Networks, Economy, and Narratives of Urban Decline,” is funded by a $22,500 award. Members of the archaeological research group Centre for Urban Network Evolutions, or UrbNet, will attend the lectures in Fall 2020.

Florida State University has named Marc Mangel the William R. and Lenore Mote Eminent Scholar in Marine Biology for 2020-2021.

Florida State University is one of 14 universities from around the globe that have collectively been awarded $12.5 million from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to launch a new Biology Integration Institute (BII), called EMERGE, which will focus on better understanding ecosystem and climate interactions — like the thawing of the Arctic permafrost — and how they can alter everything from the landscape to greenhouse gases. EMERGE, which stands for “EMergent Ecosystem Response to ChanGE,” is an ambitious five-year project that will pioneer a new “genes-to-ecosystems-to-genes” (G2E2G) framework for understanding the connections between small-scale microbes and large-scale ecosystem changes, and vice versa.

A Florida State University faculty member has become the first in the university’s history to receive the American Chemical Society’s Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award, one of the most prestigious awards in organic chemistry. Igor Alabugin, a professor at FSU’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry in the College of Arts and Sciences, was selected for the 2021 edition of the international award for excellence in organic chemistry. Alabugin has been with FSU since 2000 and specializes in organic synthesis and catalysis, computational chemistry, nanoscience and photochemistry.

Arvind Shantharam earned his doctorate in marine biology and biological oceanography from the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science, part of the College of Arts and Sciences, in May. Part of Shantharam’s research focused on the effects of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.