Two University of Georgia faculty members have earned the distinction of University Professor, a title bestowed on those who have made a significant impact on the university in addition to fulfilling their regular academic responsibilities.
The 2024–2025 University Professors are K. Paige Carmichael, Meigs Distinguished Professor in the department of pathology in the College of Veterinary Medicine, and Jessica Kissinger, a Distinguished Research Professor in the department of genetics in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.
“This year’s University Professors have made profound and lasting contributions to the University of Georgia,” said S. Jack Hu, senior vice president for academic affairs and provost. “I congratulate Drs. Carmichael and Kissinger on achieving this high honor, and I thank them for their deep commitment to our university and their efforts to strengthen our campus community.”
K. Paige Carmichael
During her distinguished career at UGA, Carmichael has made a lasting impact across the university’s mission areas, but she is most proud of her contributions toward advancing instruction.
“I am, first and foremost, a teacher,” she said.
For more than 20 years, Carmichael has served as the course coordinator for the core pathology class for second-year veterinary students. Her colleagues describe her as a pioneer who was well ahead of most of her peers in shifting to an interactive classroom approach that fostered critical thinking in veterinary students.
Building on her experience teaching professional students, Carmichael developed and taught one of the first undergraduate courses in the College of Veterinary Medicine, an overview of the mechanisms of mammalian disease that has become popular with pre-health majors.
Most recently, she helped develop the university’s undergraduate certificate in One Health, an approach that explores interconnections between the health of people, animals and their shared environment. While veterinary students in many universities may be exposed to One Health, UGA’s program is unique as it focuses specifically on undergraduate education, a critical period in a student’s academic career as they chart their choice of professions.
Carmichael has made a significant imprint on the broader university through her academic leadership. As a member of the UGA Teaching Academy’s Executive Committee, she co-developed the Teaching Academy Early Career Fellows Program, a mentoring program for faculty of all ranks in their first three years at the university. She has served as co-director of the program since its inception in 2011, and recently she was named co-director of the Teaching Academy.
Carmichael was a member of the Quality Enhancement Plan Committee from 2009-2011, a group that sparked the creation of the First-Year Odyssey program. She has served on the Foundation Fellowship Selection Committee for more than a decade, and she has provided leadership on the Georgia Museum of Art Friends Board of Directors as secretary and as president.
“She has a long record of active contributions towards the betterment of the university, and her presence and work on this campus have made it a stronger, better, and more responsive institution,” said Margaret A. Amstutz, dean of the Jere W. Morehead Honors College.
Jessica Kissinger
An integral voice on the university’s 2020 and 2025 strategic planning committees, Kissinger has championed initiatives designed to move UGA into the ranks of the world’s elite research universities. The recommendations developed by Kissinger and her colleagues helped lay the groundwork for strategic faculty hiring initiatives that have attracted leading researchers and scholars to UGA and new programs that have increased graduate student enrollment and support for graduate students.
“In a nutshell, I am a strategist and problem solver with a vision, who has worked hard to make UGA better for all,” she said.
Kissinger’s impact on the university includes her service as a member of the university’s Goldwater Selection Committee since 2015, and as a standing member of the Committee for Fellowships and Awards in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. She has also provided valuable guidance to senior leadership as a member of the Provost’s Working Group on Centers and Institutes and the Digital Infrastructure Development Committee.
Kissinger is a founding member of UGA’s Institute of Bioinformatics, a group dedicated to facilitating interdisciplinary research in bioinformatics and computational biology and its applications. Under her leadership as director from 2011-2019, the institute grew to include faculty from four colleges and more than 45 graduate students. The institute unifies the exploration of genomics and bioinformatics on campus and provides graduate training in a setting that melds the two disciplines unlike many bioinformatics programs in the U.S.
The success of the Georgia Advanced Computing Resource Center, a high-performance computing and networking infrastructure for UGA researchers, can also be linked to Kissinger’s leadership. She was part of a team that established UGA’s first centralized high-performance computing cluster, and she was a tireless advocate for expanding these resources for researchers across campus. Additionally, she encouraged the GACRC to provide centralized storage and she supported the early adoption of graphical processing units, or GPUs, the driving computational power behind artificial intelligence computing.
Kissinger has been recognized many times for research and leadership. She is a recipient of the Creative Research Medal, the Lamar Dodd Creative Research Award, the Faculty Excellence in Diversity Leadership Award and the Richard F. Reiff Internationalization Award, all presented by UGA. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. Most recently, she was awarded a Fulbright U.S. Scholar award to teach and conduct research at Makerere University in Uganda.
University Professors receive a permanent salary increase of $10,000 and a yearly academic support of $5,000. Nominations from the deans of UGA’s schools and colleges are reviewed by a committee, which makes a recommendation to the provost. To learn more and to see a list of previously appointed University Professors, visit https://provost.uga.edu/resources/faculty-resources/faculty-honors-and-awards/career-achievement-awards/university-professorships/.
Written by: Mike Wooten
