Elon Alumni

Why do sports teams perform better in their own stadiums or arenas than they do on the road? New research by assistant professor L. Kimberly Epting and Kristen Riggs ’10 suggests that it may not be the overwhelming applause that gives athletes a “home field advantage,” so much as it is the taunts that can ding their opponent.

UNC-TV, North Carolina's statewide public television network, will broadcast "We Can Be Better: Courageous Voices Confront Our Greatest Challenges," at 10 p.m., Thursday, June 23. The program is an edited version of Elon's April 7 Convocation for Honors moderated by NBC Nightly News Anchor Brian Williams.

It was in the middle of the mountains of Haiti where no English was spoken that the hymn “How Great Thou Art” took on a new meaning for Kyle Johnson ’10. “How Great Thou Art” was the only song Johnson’s father, Richard, had requested be played at his funeral six months before. Inspired by his father’s brave last days – which included creating a “bucket list” of things to do and places to see before he died – the younger Johnson embarked upon a yearlong mission program called The World Race mere days after graduating from Elon.

Peter Lindstrom ’94 received a $2.5 million Early Career Research Program grant from the U.S. Department of Energy for research he is conducting at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif. Lindstrom is a computer scientist in the lab's Center for Applied Scientific Computing.

A team of four Elon University business school students won first place this month in a national case competition that measured the ability to interpret, analyze, evaluate, synthesize, and communicate a solution to a management accounting problem.

Nineteen Elon University alumni from the Class of 2011 will return to the classroom this fall as part of Teach for America, a national nonprofit that recruits and trains new college graduates to help erase educational inequities found in many urban and rural low-income communities. It is the largest number of Elon alumni ever selected into the program for the same academic year.

Katherine Gilliam-Ruffin Pinson '81 received the Virginia Military Institute Distinguished Service Award, the highest recognition given to a civilian working at the Lexington, Va., school.