The University of Utah Board of Trustees today announced that Kristen Ries, an infectious diseases treatment expert and professor emerita, will receive an honorary doctoral degree at the 2020 campuswide convocation.

The general commencement ceremony is set for Thursday, April 30, 2020, at the Jon M. Huntsman Center. The award is the highest honor given by the university.

“Our honorary degree recipient exemplified courage, compassion and service during her professional career,” said … Read more

For three years, anthropologist Alan Rogers has attempted to solve an evolutionary puzzle. His research untangles millions of years of human evolution by analyzing DNA strands from ancient human species known as hominins. Like many evolutionary geneticists, Rogers compares hominin genomes looking for genetic patterns such as mutations and shared genes. He develops statistical methods that infer the history of ancient human populations.

In 2017, Rogers led a study which found … Read more

John Warnock, a computer scientist and visionary co-founder of Adobe Systems Inc., will deliver the commencement address at the University of Utah’s campus-wide convocation, set for Thursday, April 30, 2020, at the Jon M. Huntsman Center.

Warnock, who received three degrees from the U, used his vision, passion and intellect to launch a business that revolutionized graphics, desktop publishing and web and electronic document technologies. Today, Adobe is one of the … Read more

A new University of Utah study on the impact of wood burning stoves and fireplaces along Utah’s Wasatch Front proves that 20-year-old restrictions have had a tremendous impact on the state’s air quality.

“This study is showing a reduction in the contributions of wood burning by a factor of four or five,” says University of Utah chemical engineering assistant professor Kerry E. Kelly, who heads the study. “Of the strategies people … Read more

Jimmy L. Turner has accepted the offer to serve as executive director of Red Butte Garden at the University of Utah, effective March 23, 2020. Turner replaces Gregory Lee who will retire from the Garden after 17 years of leadership.

“Jimmy joins the Red Butte Garden team with 30 years of experience as a leader in horticulture. He is an innovator, a skilled administrator and communicator, and the ideal person to … Read more

The Carnegie Foundation has selected the University of Utah as a recipient of the 2020 Carnegie Community Engagement Classification endorsement, a measure of commitment to community engagement.

The U is one of 119 colleges and universities in the U.S. to receive the endorsement from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 2020. In all, 359 institutions now hold the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification, an elective endorsement.

“This is wonderful validation … Read more

The University of Utah has nine Fulbright semifinalists this year, equaling last year’s record number. This year the U has seven undergraduate students and two doctoral students, including five English Teaching Assistant semifinalists, two Study Grant semifinalists and two Research Grant semifinalists.

Making it to the semifinalist round is a significant accomplishment in the Fulbright competition, and means that the applications have been forwarded by the Fulbright National Screening Committee to the Fulbright Commission … Read more

A remarkable new species of meat-eating dinosaur has been unveiled at the Natural History Museum of Utah. Paleontologists unearthed the first specimen in early 1990s in Dinosaur National Monument in northeastern Utah. The huge carnivore inhabited the flood plains of western North America during the Late Jurassic Period, between 157-152 million years ago, making it the geologically oldest species of Allosaurus, predating the more well-known state fossil of Utah, Allosaurus … Read more