UGA Real Estate Foundation Inc. now under UGA Research Foundation Inc.
As a result of actions at separate meetings earlier this month, the UGA Real Estate Foundation Inc. will be transferred from the University of Georgia Foundation to the UGA Research Foundation Inc.

The action, which transfers the membership interest and all assets and debt of UGAREF, is anticipated to be complete July 1, 2006, but no later than Sept. 30, 2006. The university will continue to lease the properties and facilities it currently leases from the Real Estate Foundation and the UGA Foundation.

The UGA Foundation and the Research Foundation boards each at meetings on Feb. 17 approved a set of actions that accompany the transfer. Each board agreed to proceed toward changes to bylaws and organizational and financial documents necessary to reflect the transfer.

In related action, the UGA Foundation board approved a shared services agreement with the University of Georgia for fiscal year 2007, which begins July 1, 2006. The agreement is substantially the same as an existing shared services agreement under which the university collects gifts to the UGA Foundation, provides disbursements in accordance with donor agreements, and manages financial and accounting services for UGAF.

Law school program heads to Far East
UGA’s School of Law is expanding its study-abroad opportunities with the addition of a three-week program in China this summer.

Partnering with two of that country’s top institutions of higher education, Tsinghua University in Beijing and Fudan University in Shanghai, the Summer Program in China will provide the opportunity for study in China’s largest two cities.

Approved by the American Bar Association to begin this summer, the program will offer an introduction to Chinese legal systems, with an emphasis on commercial and trade law, for up to 30 participants. Law students who have completed their first year of legal studies and are in good standing at an ABA-accredited law school will receive three-semester credit hours for their participation. The program is also open to practitioners with continuing legal education credit approval pending.

Additionally, UGA students will be offered the opportunity to remain in China at the end of the program for four-to-six week externships with law firms based in Shanghai, Beijing or Hong Kong.

Art professor receives sculpture grant
Sunkoo Yuh, an associate professor in ceramics at UGA’s Lamar Dodd School of Art, received a $25,000 grant in sculpture from the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

New to the art faculty this year, Yuh received an MFA in 1997 from New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, widely considered the best ceramics program in the U.S.

Yuh’s work is in the permanent collections of the Renwick Gallery at the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C.; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft; and the Oakland Museum of Art.

Established in memory of contemporary American artist Joan Mitchell in 1993, the Joan Mitchell Foundation seeks to demonstrate that painting and sculpture are significant cultural necessities by providing grants, stipends and scholarships for painters and sculptors.

The foundation celebrates Mitchell’s legacy by encouraging the ambitions of developing artists. In 2003, UGA faculty members Jim Barsness and Radcliffe Bailey received grants in painting from the foundation.