Greetings all,
I wanted to start of the semester by welcoming you all back to Gainesville, either physically or, at least, in your hearts if you happen to be elsewhere. Many of you know, but it bears repeating, that Chris McCarty is now our former chair, having accepted a position as Associate Dean in CLAS, effective as of last week. Congratulations, Chris! In the meantime, I’ve been appointed the interim chair for the upcoming academic year.
While you’re here, I’d like to pass along a few notes that I have not yet completely forgotten about:
Faculty News
- We have four new members of our department this year, and we welcome Dr. Pheobe Stubblefield, who fills a new position in the C.A. Pound Lab as a Research Scientist, Dr. Stephanie Bogart, who joins us as a Lecturer, Dr. Kate Grillo, Assistant Professor, and Adrienne Strong, Assistant Professor. Welcome to all four!
- Dr Grillo, newly-arrived, has a recent publication in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (the link is here), and a nice article published earlier this week in the New York Times (found here).
- Dr. Aaron Broadwell was notified (just a few hours ago, in fact), that he received an NSF award to supplement his work with CoLang, which includes research experience for undergraduate (REU) funding. Congratulations, Aaron!
Training Opportunities in R
RSSIG (R Social Sciences Interest Group) is an interest group for University of Florida social scientists who use or are learning how to use the R programming language for statistical analysis. RSSIG mainly works through a Canvas website to which any UF student or faculty can register. In collaboration with the UF Informatics Institute and F3S, RSSIG organizes yearly free R workshops with a focus on social data analysis. The next workshop series will take place in October-December 2018.
Based in the Department of Sociology and Criminology & Law, the group gathers UF faculty and graduate students from various other social science departments, including Anthropology, Political Science, Economics, Psychology, Linguistics, and Geography.
We aim to facilitate and coordinate R learning for UF social scientists through workshops, courses, and similar events on campus; to distribute information about R learning resources and facilities at UF and beyond; to discuss R resources for social scientists (functions, packages, tutorials, websites, books, etc.); and to foster interaction among UF colleagues who are learning and using R.
You can visit this page to sign up and receive updates about RSSIG activities, including our Fall 2018 workshops: http://www.raffaelevacca.com/teaching/rssig/
All the cool kids these days are using R, so this is a good opportunity for both faculty and students to acquire and hone their skills.
Faculty Picnic and New Faculty and Student Welcome!
Finally, I’ll close by reminding one and all that the department will host a welcome back picnic from 1-4 pm at Depot Park, this Sunday, in downtown Gainesville. The department will provide main dishes, and everyone is invited to bring a side dish to share. Hopefully, UF’s otherwise excellent meteorology team will be dead wrong about the weekend forecast and it will not rain.
We are also hosting our Annual New Faculty and New Graduate Student Reception on Wednesday, August 29th from 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. in the Keene Faculty Center in Dauer Hall. This event is for all anthropology faculty, affiliates, and new graduate students only. This will provide the new graduate students an opportunity to meet as many faculty as possible.
Wishing you all an excellent and relaxing weekend,
Pete
Jessie Ball duPont-Magid Term Professor
Interim Chair
Department of Anthropology
University of Florida