Claire Abernathy, professor of theatre and costume shop manager, is resuming her instructional responsibilities this week after completing her fall semester sabbatical in London. Abernathy spent five weeks taking courses focused on costume technology through the University of Arts London at the Central Saint Martin campus. She will be integrating the new ideas she picked up into her syllabi and classroom experiences. Details are in an online feature.

Congratulations to Dr. John Hollander, assistant professor of psychology, and his student co-author, psychology major Zoey Sanders, who won second place and $500 in the Cognitive Science Society’s 2024 Mind Challenge video contest. Using a specified theme in cognitive science, each applicant created a five-minute video for a general audience, especially high school and early college-age students. Their video is, “Why do our memories sometime fade or fail?”

Best wishes to Peggy Wright, instructor in political science, who retired last month. She led a 27-year teaching career, and was director of the Delta Studies Center. With A-State degrees in geography and public administration, Wright served as president of the Alumni Association among her numerous public service activities. She earned a master’s in public policy and community economic development and completed coursework for a doctorate at Southern New Hampshire.

Dr. Gregory C. Phillips, emeritus professor of plant science and biotechnology, reached several research milestones last year. Among the highlights, ResearchGate noted 3,065 career citations of his peer-reviewed original research and review articles, placing him in the top 5% of plant research scientists. ResearchGate also recorded over 321 citations for Phillips' review article, "Plant Tissue Culture Media and Practices: an Overview," published in 2019, covering significant observations made over his biotechnology career.

Dr. Richard Segall, professor of information systems and business analytics, is co-author of a research article with students Socihiro Takashashi of Japan and Prasanna Rajbhandari of Nepal. Titled “Big Data Visualization for Sigatoka Disease of Bananas and Pathogen-Host Interactions (PHI) of Other Plants,” the article is in International Journal of Applied Research in Bioinformatics. Their research was funded by Arkansas Biosciences Institute Summer Undergraduate Internship Program.