Regional Innovations for National Impact
UT-led research brings bold ideas to regional Appalachian issues, shining a torch for similar solutions across the country.
Research and creative activity centered in the College of Arts and Sciences plays many roles in groundbreaking discoveries that resonate far beyond campus labs and spaces. This year marks the tenth anniversary of one such accomplishment, and current work across disciplines continues to create new methods that inform research engagement across the country and around the world.
The element Tennessine was named in 2016 in honor of contributions by UT researchers like Robert Grzywacz, professor and associate head of Department of Physics. Grzywacz contributed to the discovery of three other elements, as well. The data acquisition technology he and his colleagues developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory was a game changer in the world of nuclear physics.
Ongoing research and creative activity in the college comes from all areas of inquiry and feature community collaborations that improve the ways people support each other and the land they live on, and how they share and respect the history of the region. The insightful approaches taken in these endeavors are models for future works.
Supporting Community Safety Across Cultures
UT’s Appalachian Justice Research Center (AJRC) brings together skills and resources from the College of Arts and Sciences and the Winston College of Law to help solve urgent and historically under-addressed issues affecting people across the Appalachian region. In a major recent project, the AJRC collaborated with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI) to develop a new process tool for risk assessment of individuals arrested for interpersonal violence—focusing on rehabilitation rather than incarceration, in alignment with Cherokee cultural practices.
“Most domestic violence risk-assessment tools treat risk as a fixed concept, applying standardized criteria that overlooks cultural context,” said Department of Sociology Professor Michelle Brown, the AJRC co-director who led the AJRC’s contributions to the project. “This results in tools that fail to capture the lived realities of Indigenous peoples on multiple levels and can deepen criminalization without addressing harm.”
The collaboration was co-led with EBCI partners Judge Sunshine Parker of the Tribal Court Freida Saylor, clinical director of behavioral Health for the Cherokee Indian Hospital Authority; and Maggie Jackson, founder of the Qualla Boundary Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives grassroots group. Together, project partners developed a culturally grounded tool that promotes accountability, identifies root causes of harm, and strengthens pathways to collective safety that better reflect the lived realities in the Cherokee community.
“Native-led approaches like this one have much to offer broadly in society. They tackle head-on the issue of working directly with people who commit harm and those who experience it to understand how to create greater levels of safety for the entire community.”
Michelle Brown
Co-Director and Professor
Appalachian Justice Research Center
Upcoming fall 2026 AJRC projects will extend this work, engaging with people and organizations across Appalachia to improve community understanding of the cyclical violence created through contact with the criminal justice system.
“Non-Native courts, alternative crisis response teams, violence interrupters, and social service and justice actors can learn from the process, the values, and focal points of the tool, deepening their own risk assessment and systems-mapping work,” said Brown. “Community organizations, schools, hospitals, workplaces, and justice systems looking to handle conflict and harm through restorative and transformative practices can use this model.”
Resilience of the Land and the People
Hurricane Helene’s devastating impact in 2024 gave rise to multiple projects examining better responses to landslides and flooding in smaller mountain watersheds. Anna Marshall, assistant professor in the Department of Geography and Sustainability, leads a National Science Foundation Rapid Response Research project that addresses this, and oversees student research into various aspects of the hurricane’s aftermath.
“Our Helene work began in a single headwater catchment and has since expanded across multiple basins to investigate how different watershed attributes mediate downstream impacts,” said Marshall. “We anticipate that these findings will advance broader understanding of how headwater systems buffer extreme events”
Although headwater streams comprise most river miles in the United States, the difficulty of accessing these streams or viewing them from aerial imagery make data collection challenging, leaving them understudied.
“The regional insights we are developing have strong potential to inform national science and management conversations,” said Marshall.
Across these projects, UT students are deeply involved, such as master’s student Rae Tennent, who leads the Helene headwaters project. Many have engaged with partners and networks that operate nationally, including The Nature Conservancy, American Rivers, the US Forest Service, and the National Park Service.
Geography MS student Hope Hutchinson is leading a project evaluating a dam removal in the Cherokee National Forest. It began as an on-the-ground collaboration with local partners with needs identified through collaboration with the Tennessee Aquatic Connectivity Team. This year undergraduate student Mya Robertson began synthesizing dam-removal efforts and associated monitoring across Tennessee.
“Because Aquatic Connectivity Teams exist across much of the US, the work we’re building here has strong potential to contribute to a broader, nationwide synthesis of dam-removal outcomes and monitoring practices,” said Marshall. “As part of the Cherokee National Forest project, we are also assessing the performance and geomorphic/ecological effects of restoration efforts to add wood back into rivers that have been altered by historic deforestation.”
The researchers’ findings from this work can inform restoration efforts nationally, especially as more states and federal agencies incorporate natural materials and process-based restoration into their stream management strategies.
“These connections create meaningful pathways for students to plug into national opportunities,” said Marshall. “We’re excited to see how these regionally grounded efforts are beginning to inform broader conversations in restoration, hazard response, and watershed management.”
Collaborations Support History with Respect
The McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture’s current major exhibition Homelands: Connecting to Mounds Through Native Art continues the museum’s tradition of spotlighting the Native American history and culture of the region. Historically, museums with similar exhibits would ask tribal representatives for input and approval towards the end of the curation process. For this exhibit, the McClung team flipped the script, engaging tribal partners from the start.
Mounds—like the one located on UT Knoxville’s agricultural campus—offer important cultural and historical connections for contemporary indigenous communities. To honor this, the McClung team co-curated the exhibit with representatives from four Native Nations connected to Knox County: the Cherokee Nation, the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, and the Muscogee (Creek) Nation.
“For this project we wanted to make sure all the Tribal partners we worked with received curatorial credit for the exhibition,” said Sadie Counts, McClung’s curator of cultural collections. “They were true co-curators of the exhibition rather than just collaborators. They weighed in on almost every aspect of the exhibition, down to the wall colors and fonts.”
Their innovative collaboration was recognized in fall 2025 at the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums’ international conference, held in Cherokee, North Caroline. The McClung hosted a pre-conference field-trip tour of the exhibit for conference attendees and Counts led a panel discussion with Tribal co-curators.
“I assisted with the tour and can attest to the number of interested attendees from across the United States who were asking about how we developed the partnerships and the exhibition itself,” said UT co-curator Lisa King, an associate professor in the Department of English.
Counts, King, former McClung Assistant Director Cat Shteynberg, and tribal co-curators also received national recognition for the collaboration with the 2025 SECAC Award for Curatorial Excellence.
The exhibit’s success is a model for stronger collaborations in future cultural exhibits across the nation.
“Approach every partnership with the notion of reciprocity,” said Counts. “Be open to possibilities that are outside the realm of what you or your museum ‘usually’ does. Embrace the unknown, and if your heart is in the right place, something truly beautiful and special can come out of a creative project.”
By Randall Brown
