
Terry student Wyatt McAvoy took home the $10,000 FABricate prize for his performance beverage startup, Niche Supplements.

The UGA Alumni Association honored Terry College alumnus Larry Benson (BBA ’74) with its 2026 Alumni Merit Award at its annual awards luncheon on April 2. The Jim Nalley (BBA ’65) and Renee Nalley family received the 2026 Family of the Year Award. Brian E Harmon (BBA ’11) won the Young Alumni Award. In addition to alumni, the association honored professor emeritus Rob Hoyt, the Terry College Dudley L. Moore, Jr. Chair of Insurance, with the 2026 Faculty Service Award.

Finalists for the UGA Terry College of Business 2026 Student of the Year Award include, from left, Andre Akinyemi, Katie Fields, winner Dylan Van Saun, Sophia Beasley and Dominic Roselli.
Van Saun’s passion for financial markets and helping others understand them earned him the honor of being named the 2026 Student of the Year.

Elena Karahanna and J. Marshall Shepherd, the university’s newest Regents’ Professors, delivered the 2026 Charter Lecture, an event established in 1988 to honor the university’s founding ideals. The lecture highlighted how their research, spanning more than three decades, has progressed from theoretical inquiry to addressing urgent global challenges.

Last week, U.S. juries delivered two verdicts holding Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta and YouTube liable for endangering physical and mental health. Whether or not the verdicts hold up under appeal, legal studies professors Lindsay Sain Jones and Tim Samples say the moment could mark a new approach to regulating digital services.

The UGA Office of Service Learning has recognized Stacy M. Campbell, Synovus Director of the Institute for Leadership Advancement (ILA), with its Service-Learning Excellence Award. Service is a core component of the ILA experience. Campbell connects her students with partner agencies across Georgia, providing them with the opportunity to make a real-world impact with their coursework.

Teff — an ancient grain that forms the foundation of Ethiopian cuisine — has fueled human achievement for at least 4,000 years. Now, University of Michigan MBA student Saron Mechale wants to turn it into a go-to fuel for sports performance. Her sports snack creation, goTeff, took home the $15,000 top prize at the University of Georgia Collegiate Great Brands Competition.

When Allison O’Kelly BBA ’94 had her first child, she was working at Toys “R” Us and struggling to balance the demands of motherhood and working full time. Aiming to reduce her stress while remaining professionally competitive, she started an accounting firm, offering part-time and freelance work to local clients.

A former English major who transitioned into the world of linguistics and data science, Ireland joined the Terry College of Business in 2025 as the assistant director of the M. Douglas and V. Kay Ivester Institute for Business Analytics and Insights. Now, as the college’s director for the Terry Analytics Lab, she is proving that analytics tools are for people who work with words and numbers alike.