The exhibit, presents more than 30 of Douglas’s paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures. It is on display until Oct. 1 in the museum’s second-floor Chellgren Gallery. Read this review by Forbes magazine .

UofL students, faculty and staff enjoy free general admission to the Speed Museum. Through a generous donation from Eleanor Bingham Miller, general admission for all members of the public will be free through Oct. 1, during the run of this exhibition.

Douglas�� was a prolific visual artist and longtime resident of Louisville’s West End, a former community organizer, and a teacher and mentor to generations of artists and thinkers. He earned a fine arts degree at UofL in 1963 and, after obtaining his master’s and Ph.D., returned to UofL as a PAS and art professor.

To discuss the relevance of his work in examining and reflecting the Black community in Louisville, two UofL professors will hold a at the Speed Museum at 6 p.m., Sept. 7. will feature , UofL associate professor of English, and , chair of PAS and director of the Anne Braden Institute for Social Justice Research.

In November, voters in the city of Louisville will elect a new mayor and Metro Council. University of Louisville social scientist Lauren Heberle and the Metropolitan Housing Coalition, Louisville’s affordable housing advocacy group, are ready.��

MHC’s 2022 , titled “Toward a Just Future in Uncertain Times,” was released in June. It is the latest annual MHC report written by Heberle, director of the University of Louisville Center for Environmental Policy & Management in the College of Arts & Sciences, along with graduate student researchers.��

Heberle has contributed to the report since 2006 and written it for more than a decade. Kelly Kinahan, a former UofL assistant professor in the Department of Urban and Public Affairs, was co-author since 2017. (Kinahan has since left the university.)��

The report, at 90 pages, is the longest and most comprehensive ever, designed to be the go-to document for newly elected Louisville leaders who need current information on housing. ��

The MHC report is normally published in November, but its schedule was thrown off by the Covid-19 pandemic. That gave MHC and Heberle’s team the chance to “do a real deep dive” before the November election, she said.��

“If you don’t have it documented, it makes it harder to hold folks accountable or keep moving it forward, especially in something as complicated as housing,” Heberle said. ��

The current report will serve as a road map for the new administration. It is jam-packed with tables, charts, maps and graphics used to help MHC and others advocate for housing changes in Louisville. ��

UofL students also contribute mightily to the report, with several taking a lead on data analysis every year. Some are undergraduate students, some are graduate students. Some are sociology majors, while others are from urban and public affairs. ��

This applied research is a “way of teaching them how to make sense and talk about the importance of research for policy change, for social change, for social justice,” Heberle said.��

 “Figuring out how to understand this complicated structure of funding and policy that comes down from the federal government and shapes how Louisville is able to function is a really important learning opportunity for our students,” she added. Students have used their experience working on the report to help them apply for jobs, she said.��

Tony Curtis, executive director of MHC, noted the many years Heberle has worked on the report.��

“Producing this report is not only important to drive the fair, accessible and affordable housing conversation in Louisville and making the best housing data and analysis available for policymakers, advocates, and the community, it is a research and educational tool that Lauren uses to teach her UofL students and give those students the opportunity to engage in research that has real community impact,” Curtis said. “This is the beauty of the State of Metropolitan Housing Report collaboration between MHC, Lauren and her team.”��

There have been some years that the report focused on research topics suggested by Heberle or her students, while other years the report is in response to a specific need or request that MHC has, such as preparing for upcoming legislation.��

“They’ve understood the value of working with students and have seen that work to their benefit over the years,” Heberle said of MHC, “and have been really supportive of our students in that work.”��

As director of the in A&S, Heberle might have two or three graduate students working with her on the MHC report or another project each semester.����

Students bring different interests and talents to the project. “I’ve had folks come to the table saying, ‘I want to learn how to make better maps,’” she said, and they produced maps for the report. Additionally, she and her students often work closely with UofL’s and the .��

Learning how to obtain and report federal census data is a big part of compiling the report. Students learn how to put the information that is available — which fluctuates — into a form that MHC can use for its needs — which also fluctuates. ��

“That’s a learning experience for students,” she said. ��

Heberle also leads community engagement for the created at UofL about five years ago to support research on the cardiometabolic effects of volatile organic chemicals (VOCs). As a social scientist, her focus is community engagement, or working with the public affected by the sites. UofL is one of several universities that conduct research or outreach on the sites .��

The North Hardin High School graduate’s exposure to UofL classrooms started about a decade prior when her aunt, Tanisha Thompson ’06, ’14, hauled her along to her courses in Strickler Hall and elsewhere.

Now Hampton’s aunt and the rest of her extended family will be celebrating with her May 7, when she graduates with an undergraduate degree in political science and English and with a long-term dream of working in Middle Eastern foreign relations for the U.S. State Department.

With faith, the support of many and with the love of other special people she lost during her four-year college journey, she has made it.

“By the grace of God, this degree – I did it for them,” Hampton said.

Hampton, born to teenagers, grew up in the military town of Radcliff, Kentucky. She was adopted by her grandparents at age 17 and watched over by many other relatives.

“My aunt took a big responsibility in my life,” she said. “When she went to college, she made an effort to make sure I was exposed to (higher) education. That influenced a lot of my decisions.”

Both Thompson, her aunt, and her husband earned UofL degrees. When it was Hampton’s turn to call Belknap Campus home, she earned full-tuition scholarships and found new circles of support in the Society of Porter Scholars and the McConnell Center as well as Zeta Phi Beta sorority.

“Definitely coming back to UofL was very familiar,” Hampton said. “I really enjoyed that.”

As she settled into college life, she became increasingly interested in political science and international relations, minoring in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies and adding Arabic language courses to broaden her skills.

Hampton earned scholarships for international study, visited Israel and Pakistan, and won a Critical Language Scholarship, sponsored by the State Department, for summer travel to Ibri, Oman, to study Arabic.

“I love the Middle East,” Hampton said. “I had a good time.”

But once she returned to the United States to start her 2019 fall semester, a series of tragedies began.

Starting with the unexpected death of her father, she lost four immediate family members over a series of months, including one relative the week before her spring finals. Then COVID-19 affected Hampton’s aunt’s mother-in-law, who had taught her to how to cook and influenced her life; at the beginning of Hampton’s senior year, she too was gone.

Under the circumstances, others might have quit on college, but Hampton felt encouragement from many fronts, including her school circles and her larger family.

Her sorority sisters have helped a lot, as have her McConnell Center leaders and fellow scholars.

“And if not for the Porter (Scholars) community, I don’t know what I would have done,” she said.

She thought it important to stick with her educational plan and not lose momentum by stepping away. “Once you get a cadence going, you need to grind it out,” she said.

“I want people to know that while the tunnel is dark, there is light on the other side. Finish if you can – do it for everyone.”

Hampton also gives credit to many faculty and staff members who supported her personally and pushed her academically. With help from several, ranging from her adviser, Luke Buckman, to her Arabic teacher, Khaldoun Almousily, to McConnell Center Director Gary Gregg, she was able to chart and stay her course at the university.

Professors David Anderson and Karen Chandler, with their expertise in African American literature, guided her also. And when she was applying for competitive travel scholarships, she received helpful guidance and editing assistance from Bethany Smith in the Office of National and International Scholarship Opportunities.

With COVID constraints derailing international travel plans, Hampton intends to work for a year before pursuing graduate studies the following year in diplomacy or international relations. But before that, she’ll be celebrating commencement with “a pretty big shebang” with the rest of her family, now that most have been fully vaccinated.

Does she have any advice for other students discouraged by personal hurdles on their way to graduation?

“I would tell them, ‘At the end of every storm, there is a sunny day’,” Hampton said. “Ultimately, you have to pick it up and keep moving.”

Welcomed in 2018 on the condition he would keep up his grades, Kridos graduates this month with his bachelor’s in political science. He credits his parents and UofL’s dedication to every student’s success for giving him the second chance he needed to make his dreams come true.

“The only place that even gave me an opportunity to show that I had matured and learned from my mistakes was UofL by admitting me on a GPA-restricted basis,” said Kridos, who transferred from Methodist University in North Carolina. “Granting me this opportunity was a blessing, as I was able to make use of all the programs they have in place to make students successful, such as (Resources for Academic Achievement) and other tutoring services and now will be graduating with a 3.8 GPA. I’m so thankful UofL took a chance on me and I was able to obtain my degree.”

The former Army corporal and Coral Springs, Florida, native served at Fort Campbell as a field artillery operator. He graduated from at the top of his class and earned four Army commendation medals. He worked part-time at The Cheesecake Factory while taking his UofL classes and plans to go to law school in the fall.

In the spring, with a busy schedule of 21 credit hours, the sudden change to online classes due to the Covid-19 pandemic restrictions “threw me for a loop at first,” he said.��

“Taking 21 credit hours a semester already presents its own challenges, but then to abruptly move all of that online … was very tough. But I was able to overcome and finish that semester with all As,” he said. “This fall semester has been much smoother and my professors are very accommodating.”

Among his favorite professors was Tami Harbolt of women’s, gender and sexuality studies.��

“She cares about her students and it shows,” he said. “The amount of times she had one-on-one conversations with me after class just to gauge how I was doing or check on my mental health is something I will forever be grateful for.”

Kridos said he is also thankful for his parents, who “worked tirelessly my entire life to make sure I always had a roof over my head and a meal to eat. … My graduation is because of them. They believed in me when no one else did and I can’t explain what it means to have that type of support and inspiration in your life every day.”��

We think you just did, corporal.

The UofL is part of the ground-based team for NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) program, which launched in spring 2018 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.��

The mission is to identify Earth-like planets revolving around nearby stars, with the UofL team helping verify results and figuring out the characteristics of the discovered planets.

The program has identified 20-some planets in its first year. According��, citing a study in that includes a “rocky super-Earth” and two “sub-Neptunes.”

These three help fill in��our understanding of how planets form, the article said, because they’re somewhere in between planets like Earth — rocky and small — and��Neptune — gaseous and big.

“There’s kind of a gap in examples between these two,” said��Dr. John Kielkopf, a professor of physics and astronomy at UofL and member of the TESS team.

The TESS satellite will search about 85 percent of the sky for planets over two years. The images will be somewhat low-resolution and cover huge sections of sky, so there will be some blending of stars with one another.��

The data and management for the TESS program are led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The ground-based partners, including UofL and its Moore Observatory, in Crestwood, Kentucky, will help check the information collected by the satellite, and expand on it.

“The data come back to us, and we analyze it to measure the transit events precisely, or in some cases to show that the event does not happen, or is mimicked by some other event,” Kielkopf said.��“Our measurements improve on the precision of the satellite, and are used to find the radius of the planets and the exact times at which they pass in front of the star.��

Dr. Karen Collins, who is leading the TESS follow-up program through Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, helped develop the software behind this research as part of her doctoral studies in the department of Physics and Astronomy at UofL. The software she developed is now widely used for studying planet candidates identified by the Kepler satellite and for TESS followup.

In addition to UofL’s Moore Observatory, university researchers and students will work with UofL’s telescopes at the Mt. Lemmon (Arizona) and Mt. Kent (Australia) observatories. The telescopes will use photometry and spectroscopy to measure the brightness of the star and speed of the planet’s orbit, in collaboration with the University of Southern Queensland.

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“The University of Louisville and its professors are such an amazing resource for the community,” said Paul Burns, LFPL’s communications director. “The Louisville Free Public Library started the MyLibraryU program to make college-level learning experiences accessible to the public by scheduling free short courses and fast classes on a variety of topics during the year.”

For the first 2019 short course, the library staff wanted to explore social justice movements. LFPL Program Coordinator Aaron Rosenblum suggested Catherine Fosl, director of UofL’s Anne Braden Institute for Social Justice Research, would be perfect to help spearhead the six-week, multi-instructor course, Burns said. Here’s the speaker lineup for that course:

Jan. 17-Feb. 21:��“Social Justice Movements: Past and Present,” a short course on Thursday nights, will feature six scholars from UofL’s College of Arts and Sciences, Brandeis School of Law and the School of Public Health and Information Sciences, as well as University of Kentucky, presenting aspects of social movements. .��

• Jan. 17: “100 Years of Housing-Justice Movements in Louisville,” Catherine Fosl, Anne Braden Institute for Social Justice Research and women’s and gender studies
• Jan. 24: “Youth-led Immigrant Justice Movements,” Enid Trucios-Haynes, law
• Jan. 31 – “Using History to Build a Movement,” Lara Kelland, history and comparative humanities
• Feb. 7 – “School-to-Prison Pipeline and Mass Incarceration,” Cherie Dawson-Edwards, criminal justice
• Feb. 14 – “Global Solidarity,” Karen Tice, UK women’s and gender studies
• Feb. 21 – “Transgender Health and Social Justice,” Ryan Combs, public health and information sciences

“Also, through LFPL’s ongoing partnerships with the Commonwealth Center for the Humanities and Society and the Liberal Studies Project, the Main Library is delighted to host Andreas Elpidorou’s upcoming fast class on ‘The Bright Side of Frustration’ and Karl Swinehart’s fast class on ‘Indigenous Languages of the Americas,’” Burns said. Here are details about those one-night educational events:

• Jan. 15:��“The Bright Side of Frustration” fast class, UofL philosophy professor Andreas Elpidorou will share examples of how negative emotions can have a positive impact on life. He’ll share stories of art, mathematical discoveries, animal behavior, video games and neuroscience. The professor will explore how frustration surprisingly can lead to invigoration and energy, as he also discusses in his forthcoming 2019 book “Propelled Toward the Good Life.”
• Feb. 12:��“Indigenous Languages of the Americas” fast class. Linguistic anthropologist Karl Swinehart, comparative humanities, will give an overview of how Native American languages live on in certain words as well as the means of communication for millions of people throughout the hemisphere. He will discuss grammatical features, address some language myths and share examples of contemporary language activism such as hip-hop among youth in Bolivia.

All the January and February MyLibraryU short courses and fast classes will be at 6:30 p.m. at the Main Library, 301 York St. Although they are free, registration is requested to reserve a spot by calling 502-574-1623.

A 38-year member of the UofL faculty, Billingsley currently serves as professor of English in addition to his vice provost duties. He is a former Faculty Senate chair and a 21-year member of the provost’s senior staff.

“Dr. Billingsley is intimately familiar with the workings of the university and the provost’s office,” Pinto said. “He is respected and admired by the entire university community, having served in various roles in his department, his unit and university-wide.”

Pinto said Billingsley will oversee the continued implementation of the 21^st Century University Initiative, a plan to position UofL for excellence for decades to come.

He noted that Billingsley previously had announced his intention to step down from his role as vice provost and return to the classroom in 2017.

“When the new appointment ends, he plans to return to the classroom to teach until his retirement,” Pinto said.

Billingsley received his B.A. magna cum laude in English and history from Texas Christian University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He was a Rotary International Fellow at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, and returned to the United States for graduate study in Renaissance literature at Yale University, where he earned master of arts, master of philosophy and doctorate degrees.

Billingsley received the 1998 Trustees’ Award for his contributions to the student experience at the university. In 2007 he received Distinguished Service Awards from the College of Arts and Sciences and the university. In 2009 he received the from the university’s Office of Student Affairs “for his unwavering support for both students and the university.”

The allows eligible undergraduates to make their senior year of college also count as their first year of law school. That means scholars could complete a juris doctor — or law degree — a year earlier. Savings would be more than $20,000 for in-state students and more than $37,000 for non-resident students.

The program is a partnership between the College of Arts and Sciences and the Brandeis School of Law. Currently, students majoring in criminal justice, history and women’s and gender studies are eligible to apply during their junior year. If accepted, they can then apply to Brandeis provided they meet minimum GPA and law school admission test (LSAT) score requirements.

“As a National Jurist and preLaw magazines’ Best Value Law School, we pride ourselves on providing a high-quality legal education and ample career opportunities at a reasonable cost to our students,” said Susan Duncan, Dean of Brandeis School of Law. “The 3+3 program takes this focus on efficiency a step further by allowing students to jump-start their legal careers a year earlier than in traditional models.”

UofL administrators said the collaboration between the two colleges is a good example of interdisciplinary teamwork and innovative solutions to help students graduate quickly and with less debt.

“This partnership is an opportunity for A&S students to demonstrate how a degree in the liberal arts and sciences is an excellent foundation for the Brandeis School of Law,” said A&S Dean Kimberly Kempf-Leonard. “We are confident that students who complete one of the 3+3 programs will be poised for success in their chosen career paths.”

The new approach has already attracted the interest of Owensboro native Lacey Parham, an incoming UofL student who first entered college at age 16 and graduated high school with a pair of associate degrees. Parham was drawn to the opportunity to accelerate her education toward her goal becoming a U.S. Air Force Judge Advocate General, an elite law professional who offers counsel to the military.��

“Because of my nontraditional academic background, the 3+3 law program at the University of Louisville could not have fit more perfectly into my academic plans,” said Parham. “Through 3+3 law, I will be afforded the opportunity to experience unrivaled education at my dream school on a timeline that works for me.”

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The Digital Media Academy’s objective is to interest the rising 6th graders in STEM fields while also empowering the campers.��

“Our goal with them at the beginning of camp is always building confidence,” said Michelle Day, a UofL grad student, adding that middle school is typically when girls start being “pushed away” from STEM fields. ��

This was the third year for the academy. More information is available here:��