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Congratulations to students accepted as part of Early Decision on Wednesday, December 1. When students in the Class of 2015 arrive at the university in August 2011 they’ll join the ranks of generations of alumni who have called ������Ƶ home.

An ������Ƶ junior has been named the District Outstanding Brother of the Year for Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Inc., an annual competition that judges nominees on criteria that include involvement in the organization, academic standing, campus involvement and leadership.

Parents, students, community leaders and ������Ƶ administrators gathered Tuesday for a half-day conversation on the future of Jewish culture on campus as the number of Jewish students continues to grow and as the university embarks on a commitment to global engagement and diversity in its newest strategic plan.

������Ƶ senior Teri Horn has received the North Carolina Campus Compact’s fifth annual Community Impact Student Award for making significant, innovative contributions to her campus’ efforts to address local community needs. Horn was one of 34 college students across the state to receive the honor.

In May, NASA will point its Chandra X-Ray Observatory toward a black hole 150 million light years from Earth to collect data for more than three straight days, the longest observation ever made on such a cosmic feature. Leading the team behind the deep space research will be Dan Evans, one of ������Ƶ’s newest faculty members, and a rising star himself in the realm of astrophysics.

������Ƶ senior Anthony Rizzuto has been named the recipient of a 2010 Eastern Analytical Symposium Student Research Award, a highly competitive national prize in the chemistry field given each year to six undergraduate researchers.

Colonnades, ������Ƶ's literary magazine, received a 2010 national Magazine Pacemaker Award from the Associated Collegiate Press over the weekend at the organization's joint conference with College Media Advisers in Louisville. The Pacemaker is the highest honor ACP gives to its members.

Churches have always split on doctrinal or political grounds, and prior to the Civil War, that wedge issue, more often than not, was slavery. ������Ƶ senior Amber Woods explored how early churches in Kentucky responded to debates over emancipation, and her undergraduate research is the latest to be featured in a series of E-net profiles on Lumen Scholars in the Class of 2011.

Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine has ranked ������Ƶ among the nation’s top 50 best values in private higher education and the #9 university in lowest total costs, a distinction published in the magazine’s December edition. The 2010-11 ranking is the fifth consecutive top-50 placement of ������Ƶ by Kiplinger’s.

The Department of Environmental Studies has created an additional major, and a new minor, for ������Ƶ students with an academic or career interest in the fields of sustainability, wildlife ecology and conservation.