Accelerating innovation, serving food, making art, winning the prize

Another major building project is complete on the UAB campus.

Blazer Kitchen has a new home.

A UAB professor’s book has been honored in Spain.

AEVIA is hosting a powerful art exhibition about incarceration in America.

New tech center

UAB cut the ribbon on its new Technology Innovation Center at 17th Street and Ninth Avenue South on Sept. 15.

The $26.5 million facility is home to the university’s Security Operations Center and Network Operations Center, according to UAB News.

The center houses a data center powered by a cost-efficient Tesla Powerpack battery system.

It also features the Cheaha supercomputer, the fastest university internet connectivity in Alabama and expandable technology infrastructure.

“UAB has empowered our team to be agents of innovation, and now we have a world-class facility to help accelerate that innovation,” said Curtis A. Carver Jr, UAB vice president for information technology and chief information officer.

New home

Blazer Kitchen, the on-campus food bank serving employees and students, has moved from Medical Towers to a renovated space at 1613 11th Ave. S that offers more space to serve and other amenities.

“Relocating Blazer Kitchen to this brighter, more open space ensures we can better serve the customers who shop here,” Kaydian Jordan, kitchen program coordinator, told UAB News.

Art in jail

The Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts is hosting a major exhibition about the experience of being imprisoned in America.

On view until Dec. 11, “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration” features art made by people in prisons and works by nonincarcerated artists concerned with state repression, erasure and imprisonment.

“Marking Time” comes to UAB from MoMA PS1 in New York.

Prize winner

A professor of Spanish in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, John K. Moore Jr. has won the 2021 Prize for Research on the Road to Santiago and Pilgrimages from The University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain.

He won the award for his book, “Mulatto • Outlaw • Pilgrim • Priest: The Legal Case of José Soller, Accused of Impersonating a Pastor and Other Crimes in Seventeenth-century Spain,” published by Brill in 2020.

The book tells the story of a man jailed for impersonating a priest in 1693 Spain, when he was likely trying to escape racial persecution.