A UT professor and expert known for his work on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill recovery efforts has co-authored a report making a series of recommendations to federal agencies on how to safely clean up after spills.

Terry Hazen, the UT–Oak Ridge National Laboratory Governor’s Chair for Environmental Biotechnology, teamed up with other scientists to write a report on oil spill recovery safety published this month by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine.

“One of the biggest concerns in cleanup efforts is the effect the spill has on people’s health and livelihood,” Hazen said. “It’s not just that oil itself is harmful and potentially even flammable, but you have to be careful what kind of chemicals you expose crews to while trying to clean or contain the oil.”

The Strategic Research Initiatives (SRI) group in the Office of Research and Engagement plans to hire three Faculty Fellows for a one year appointment (possibly multi-year) beginning in the summer of 2019. The Faculty Fellows will provide leadership to the University’s research enterprise for the discovery of emerging research opportunities (prior to agency approval or publication of funding announcements) and for the identification or development of the University’s strategic research capabilities to capitalize on them.

We are seeking one Faculty Fellow from engineering, one from physical sciences, and one from social sciences.

For the first time, a team of scholars and archaeologists has recorded and interpreted Cherokee inscriptions in Manitou Cave, Alabama. These inscriptions reveal evidence of secluded ceremonial activities at a time of crisis for the Cherokee, who were displaced from their ancestral lands and sent westward on the Trail of Tears in the 1830s.

“These are the first Cherokee inscriptions ever found in a cave context, and the first from a cave to be translated,” said Jan Simek, president emeritus of the University of Tennessee System and Distinguished Professor of Science in the Universityof Tennessee, Knoxville’s Department of Anthropology. He is a co-author of the study “Talking Stones: Cherokee Syllabary in Manitou Cave, Alabama,” published recently in Antiquity.

Casey Ricketts discusses the portrayal of the human body in French art at the Undergraduate Research Symposium at the Student Union.

The Undergraduate Research Student Association (URSA) hosted the annual Undergraduate Research Symposium Friday, April 5. Nearly 50 undergraduate students, representing disciplines across campus, gave oral presentations about their research the general public, their professors, and their peers.

New research by a global team of scientists has resulted in significant strides in ornithological classification and identified possible causes of diversity among modern bird species.

The study, coauthored by researchers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, focuses on perching birds, or passerines. Comprised of over 6,000 species, this group—which constitutes over half of all known bird species—includes familiar birds such as robins, jays, bluebirds, finches, and sparrows.

The report also includes an analysis of the impact some events in Earth’s history could have had on passerines’ biodiversity.