November 3, 2025
Contact: Anisa Zvonkovic  | 706-542-4879  | More about Anisa
Message from Dean Zvonkovic 
October was a busy month and we know how quickly November flies by! I’m hoping your one- day fall break was restorative. Many of us in the Dean’s Office, and others across the college, went to the first floor of Dawson to see children from the Child Development Lab parade in costumes. Several staff wore costumes as well! This fun event reminded me of what a special place FACS is and what a great community we have.  
We Are FACS 
As planned, we are continuing to roll out the “We Are FACS 2.0” student recruitment campaign on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.  
Last week, we released the first of eight videos and alumni testimonials for each of the alumni who were briefly profiled in the main video. These videos will continue to roll out weekly through the end of the year.  
Please use your socials to promote the features that relate to your units and also refer to the wearefacs.uga.edu landing page. 
As part of the campaign, we also profiled dozens of alumni on our Featured People page. We continue to solicit profiles, so please send our Share Your Story link with successful alumni so we can amplify their success! 
Partnering for Success 
On October 23, Associate Dean for Research Chuck Geier presented on “Partnering for Success” as our monthly Conversations with Deans. In addition to his report on FACS research activity, he announced that we will be providing a grant review service for faculty working on grant proposals: Dr. Emily Noble and Dr. Steve Kogan, both well-funded and active federal grant reviewers, have agreed to work with FACS faculty on grant writing. Please contact Dr. Geier for more information. His slides are available here: ​pptx icon ADR_presentation_final_.pptx
Newly Endowed Professors 
We celebrate the awarding of two endowed professorships by the Board of Regents in their October meeting: Dr. Alex Anderson has the Georgia Athletic Association Professorship and Dr. Charles Geier holds the William P. Flatt Professorship. Congratulations to these scholars! 
Safety Update 
The Active Shooter Lunch and Learn, hosted by the FACS Staff Council, was informative and helpful for all those who attended. I’m pleased to share that faculty and staff from every department were in attendance. 
Alex Nichols, Office of Emergency Preparedness, also brought Emergency Response Guidebooks. You can view physical copies in the main office of each department, SSAC, CDL, LMC, and the Dawson mailroom. Please share it with your colleagues and students! 
OneDrive – What is it? How to use it? 
Microsoft OneDrive is “Cloud Storage” that we have available through UGA’s Microsoft licensing. A few important notes about it: 
  • Several FACS employees have had a network drive mapped to M: and we removed that server on10/31/2025, so those files should be moved by now. 
  • Each FACS user (staff, faculty and students alike) has a OneDrive account associated with their Microsoft Office account, and it has a terabyte of space available (1025 gigabytes)! Lots of storage space! 
  • Access OneDrive through a web browser (on any machine), and you can also access it on your work computer via a new drive, the G: drive. (OTIS will help you set this up). 
  • Files saved in OneDrive have a “file history” option, so if you accidentally overwrite a file, you can go back to previous versions. 
  • Files in OneDrive can be easily shared. This is a great place to upload video files, and other large files that are too large to email, then share them with everyone, with just UGA folks, or to specific individuals. You can share access that includes editing or read-only access.  
 Mark your calendars for the fall college assembly on Nov. 13. 
Staff Council and Dean Zvonkovic invite staff to register for tickets. Faculty are encouraged to purchase tickets for the same day. 
Digital Accessibility 
The U.S. Department of Justice has issued a federal accessibility rule for websites, instructional materials and mobile applications requiring all state entities, including UGA, to make these materials accessible by April 24, 2026.   
Under this rule, digital accessibility means designing course materials, websites, and applications so that all users have equal access, regardless of ability or circumstance. At its core, it is about removing barriers so that members of our community do not face unnecessary obstacles when engaging with UGA’s digital resources.  
In response, UGA is launching a coordinated accessibility initiative to meet these requirements, including deploying Ally, a new tool that scans websites for accessibility issues and guides users in fixing them.  
Ally for Web will be launched on November 10, 2025.  Detailed instructions about Ally for Web will be provided after it launches.   
Training opportunities and consultations will also be available later this fall and throughout the spring, including one scheduled for Nov. 17 referenced below. For questions, contact the Digital Accessibility Services team. 
 
 The next FACS Teaching Faculty Learning Community will focus on using Ally in eLC to support ADA compliance. This event is open to graduate students as well, and an invitation was sent to the graduate student listserv. Register here or scan the code below. If you would like to attend, please register by November 11. 
Upcoming events 
November 13 – Fall College Assembly, focused on Health 
December 5 – Winter Wonderlights, UGA State Botanical Gardens 
December 11 – Fall 2025 Convocation 
Sincerely,  
  
Anisa M. Zvonkovic 
Dean and Georgia Athletic Association Professor in Family and Consumer Sciences 
Tags: college update • dean's update