Listen to this story Bryan Hill receives a blessing from the lama in the Pangboche Monastery. Bryan Hill knelt before the Buddhist monk as the monk prayed a blessing for safe passage and then firmly tied a necklace of narrow red string with two knots around his neck and those of the others pursuing a dream up a mountain. Hill, like other hikers, planned to wear that prayer of protection until it fell off months or even a year in the future. But first, Hill (Knoxville ’08) would be part of a team guiding blind Navy veteran Lonnie Bedwell up the mountain known as Chomolungma, “Goddess Mother o ..read more

On a 32-degree night in mid-December, County Technical Assistance Service (CTAS) Criminal Justice Consultant Derrick Woods answered the call from the Newport Rescue Squad to help locate a special-needs 17-year-old boy. Around midnight, parents of the boy reported that their son had left the house earlier and failed to return. Realizing they needed more than ground assistance to locate the teenager, the rescue squad and Cocke County Sheriff’s Office reached out to Woods, who is an experienced drone pilot, to assist in the search. Woods pilots a heat-sensing drone that allows him to identify peo ..read more

For graduate students Nina Klimenkova and Arsen Martyshchuk, UT Chattanooga has been a literal refuge. In 2022, the two were finishing their undergraduate studies in Kyiv, Ukraine, when the Russian invasion changed their lives. Now, due to UTC’s Global Response Assistantship, Klimenkova and Martyshchuk are scheduled to graduate in May. Klimenkova, who attended Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv as a computer science major, returned home to her family in Voznesensk after the invasion began. “My street in my hometown was ground zero for everything when we got occupied,” she says. “We d ..read more

Listen to this story Carla Corum grew up on a farm in Lawrence County and wanted her children to have a chance to enjoy the things she did. As an annual summer trip, Corum traveled with her 5-year-old son, Hudson, and his older sister, Josie, from their home in Idaho to visit her Tennessee family in June 2018. “Hudson loved to farm,” she says. He was a huge fan of big green John Deere equipment and was excited that a family friend on a nearby farm let him ride in the combine for a few hours one day. “I don’t know how he contained him,” Corum says, laughing. “He said he ate a lot of candy.” O ..read more

Listen to this story From left, George Ella Lyon, UT Southern Provost Judy Cheatham and Ronnie Erwin. “Ginny loved reading circle,” begins George Ella Lyon’s The Pirate of Kindergarten. But she wasn’t the only one loving reading during UT Southern’s second Lynn McKee Erwin Conference on Children’s Literature. More than 200 kindergarten through fifth grade teachers from Southern Middle Tennessee explored the joys of reading and the impact of children’s literature in education. “Poems and stories are companions, windows and teachers,” Lyon says. “They broaden our minds, deepen our hearts and t ..read more

What do emergency medicine and deep-sea diving have in common? Nothing, one might say. Dr. Richard Walker would beg to differ. For Walker, chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine at UTHSC, both involve staying calm and making life-and-death decisions under extreme conditions. At 51, Walker is board certified in emergency medicine and in undersea and hyperbaric medicine. He is also an international traveler, a certified dive instructor, an underwater cave diver, an experienced sailor and an instructor in wilderness medicine. His calm and quiet demeanor belies the scope of his experiences ..read more

In a time when small-town newspapers are being shuttered, Daniel Richardson is working to open them through his newly formed Richardson Media Group. The 2012 UT Martin business management graduate and former CEO of Magic Valley Publishing in West Tennessee established the Richardson Media Group in November with his sights set on bolstering community media. Richardson comes from a family of journalists. His late father, Dennis, studied journalism and communications at UT Martin before working at newspapers in West Tennessee and Middle Tennessee, including the Clarksville Leaf-Chronicle, the Wea ..read more

Angela Wegner The Center for Literacy, Education and Employment (CLEE) at UT Knoxville aims to ensure all students possess the knowledge, skills and opportunities needed to flourish in the classroom. The center’s work touches the lives of students across the state but especially students with disabilities. With a budget of $9 million from federal and state funds, the Access for All Learning Network (AALN) is the center’s largest initiative impacting literacy across the state. It originated as a $5.5 million State Personnel Development Grant the U.S. Department of Education awarded the Tennesse ..read more

Leaders from the University of Tennessee share the books that have impacted them—or ones they’re reading or planning to read. Randy Boyd Donde Plowman Steven Angle Linda Martin Yancy Freeman Peter Buckley Keith Carver Kerry Witcher Herb Byrd What are your favorite books? UT System President Randy Boyd: Built to Last by Jim Collins The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen Love Your Enemies by Arthur C. Brooks UT Knoxville Chancellor Donde Plowman: Good to Great by James Collins Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave by Ryan Holiday Dare to Lead by Brené Brown UT Martin Ch ..read more

For many children, the monsters under their beds are real, and Dylan Rivera, a 2020 graduate of UT Chattanooga, is working to help keep those monsters in check. As director of policy planning and implementation for the city of Chattanooga, his work directly influences Chattanooga’s minority neighborhoods by helping people “move up from where they are in their socioeconomic status” and making impactful changes for their families. Many of his efforts have focused on removing K-12 education challenges for students in Chattanooga’s most disadvantaged communities, where outside-the-classroom situat ..read more