January 16, 2025

Renowned speaker and higher education leader Walter Kimbrough, Ph.D., will deliver the keynote address at Georgia Southern University’s celebration of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s life and legacy on Friday, Jan. 17. 

“Dr. Kimbrough is an established leader in higher education and has recently emerged as a voice on free speech, which is a timely topic and a hallmark of campuses of higher education,” said Associate Vice President for Organizational Effectiveness, Leadership Development, and Inclusive Excellence, Dominique Quarles, Ph.D. “I am excited to have Dr. Kimbrough, someone who has served as a college president for two decades, discuss the challenges and importance of free speech within our community.” 

A champion for student success and economic development for historically Black colleges and universities, Kimbrough has served in student affairs roles at Emory University, Georgia State University, Old Dominion University and Albany State University, among others. He was named the 12th president of Philander Smith College in 2004. In 2012, he became the 7th president of Dillard University in New Orleans, Louisiana, where he served for 10 years. Presently, he serves as the interim president of Talladega College.

“Being asked to give a Martin Luther King, Jr. address is one of the engagements I accept with the deepest humility because it is an awesome responsibility,” said Kimbrough. “It is an opportunity to place in context the work of Dr. King which has been watered down to predictable sound bites, sharing parts of his work we never mention.”

Georgia Southern’s celebration of King’s legacy is open to the University community. The breakfast celebration event will be held on the Statesboro Campus at 8:30 a.m. in the Williams Center Multipurpose Room. The lunch celebration will be held on the Armstrong Campus in Savannah in the Armstrong Center Ballroom at 12:30 p.m.

Georgia Southern students are also encouraged to attend the King Holiday Celebration Parade in Statesboro Jan. 18, as well as the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Annual Parade in Savannah Jan. 20.

January 16, 2025

When the power goes out during a storm, there’s a team with a Georgia Southern University student at the Georgia Transmission Corporation (GTC) responsible for looking into what happened. Elizabeth Sills, a computer and electrical engineering senior from Savannah works in the system reliability department for the GTC.engin

“If there’s an outage and they don’t know what caused it, I’ll run a lightning study to see if there’s lightning in the area,” said Sills. “Then, for example, I’ll send out an email saying it was a negative five kilovolt bolt. That way when the field guys go out, they know what to expect.”

Sills hasn’t just been working on the reliability of current power grids, but is also working to bolster the reliability of future power sources. During the previous semester, she had been intrigued by the possibility of contributing to solar energy advancements. As part of an electric engineering course, she tested the strength and longevity of solar panels in various climates and other elements. 

Sills noted climate conditions can also impact how much technology can be added onto a solar panel to increase efficiencies or margins of error.

“There are different types of solar panels,” she said. “Some of them can rotate. So if the sun’s coming up, the panel will face the sun and then it will rotate with it. Some can also swivel, and there are some that can bend 90 degrees. If you get the whole range of motion, it’s more likely that more parts will fail.”

Her findings revealed that panels kept in temperatures between 30°F and 86°F significantly extended the lifespan of the solar panels. This information is critical for the expansion of their use across the globe. 

Her work has even garnered international attention.

Sills was invited to be part of a small research team going to Denmark over the next summer to continue her research into solar panels and their utilization. Her research team is made up of five other students from across the U.S. and is supported through funding from the National Science Foundation.

“Most of the research in this area is now over in Europe,” she said. “They have different transformer models and a whole different grid over there. We want to see if we can bring it to America and still be able to use the same functions.”

This isn’t her first accolade in this field of study.

More recently, Sills brought a statewide award back to Eagle Nation. Last fall, she participated in the Georgia Undergraduate Research Conference, hosted by Oxford College of Emory University. Out of 80 competitors from across Georgia, her research on power converters in solar panels won the “Outstanding Poster” award. Sills’ award-winning research revealed new possibilities that can assist with the reliability of power electronic converters, ensuring solar panels function efficiently under temperature and stress. 

“I was excited,” Sills said. “It was my first ever competition for research posters or anything of  that nature so I didn’t know what to expect. It was very surprising.” 

ATLANTA — The Georgia Ethics Commission voted unanimously on Wednesday to fine two advocacy groups that were founded by Democrat Stacey Abrams and led by Raphael Warnock before voters elected him to the U.S. Senate.

The commission found that the New Georgia Project and its affiliated New Georgia Project Action Fund illegally did election work for Abrams and others without disclosing their campaign contributions and spending.

The groups’ current leadership admitted 16 instances of illegal activity in a consent decree and will pay a $300,000 fine, the largest in state history according to the commission’s director, David Emadi.

The commission found that the entities raised $4.2 million and spent $3.2 million to support Abrams and other candidates in the 2018 election cycle.

David Fox, a lawyer for the New Georgia Project and the action fund, said his clients “understand and respect the commission’s positions on the facts and the law.

“The matter relates to events from more than five years ago, and respondents are eager to put the matter behind them,” Fox told commissioners by video.

Where ethics officials ruled the groups went wrong was failing to register as an independent campaign committee before taking contributions for electioneering, and failing to file campaign finance reports of contributions and spending before Abrams narrowly lost the governor’s race to Republican Brian Kemp that year.

The groups repeated the same illegal activity in 2019 when they campaigned to extend public transportation in suburban Gwinnett County, failing to disclose $646,000 in contributions and $174,000 in spending for a voter referendum to join the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority. The referendum lost.

Abrams founded the New Georgia Project in 2013 to register more nonwhite and young voters in Georgia and to urge them to turn out. The project is a charity that can accept tax-deductible donations. The New Georgia Project Action Fund is a nonprofit social welfare organization that can directly endorse candidates, although donations aren’t tax deductible. Neither group normally has to disclose donors. Emadi said the groups are likely to now file campaign finance disclosures for the period in question.

Abrams stepped down in 2017 and said she had no role with the groups thereafter. Warnock, a close Abrams ally and Baptist minister, was listed as the New Georgia Project’s CEO on corporate filings in 2017, 2018 and 2019.

“I’m not prepared to say he had direct involvement in this,” Emadi said. “I didn’t personally find evidence of that.”

Michael Brewer, a spokesperson for Warnock’s Senate office, said Warnock was working “as a longtime champion for voting rights” and didn’t know anything about violations. “Compliance decisions were not a part of that work,” Brewer wrote in an email.

The complaint was filed in 2019 and survived multiple court challenges, accessing emails in an effort to prove the groups improperly coordinated with Abrams’ 2018 campaign. Wednesday’s consent decree contains no such findings, but Emadi said a separate complaint alleging illegal coordination remains under investigation.

Lawyers for the New Georgia Project previously argued that the groups acted like other nonprofits and that Republicans including Emadi, who had donated to Kemp, were using their majority on the commission in a partisan witch hunt to damage Abrams’ political viability.

Abrams lost the 2022 governor’s race to Kemp by a much larger margin than in 2018, but the ethics case was little discussed.

The commission fined another group, Gente4Abrams, $50,000 in 2020 for failing to register and file reports on $240,000 it spent to help Abrams in the 2018 Democratic primary, the commission found. The group registered after the commission ruling, reporting it spent an additional $685,000 for Abrams in the 2018 general election.

Ethics Commissioner Rick Thompson, who was formerly the commission’s top employee, lauded commission staff and said he wished criminal penalties and not just civil ones were available under state law.

“I think actions like this should be criminal because of the significant impact secret money can have on elections,” Thompson said. “Organizations attempting to keep their election spending secret is shameful and does a disservice to our elections and voters.”