Jieun Lee
Robert C. Anderson Memorial Award 2019
Jieun Lee completed a Ph.D. in theatre and performance studies and a graduate certificate in women’s studies in spring 2018 and is now
Ana M. Gutiérrez-Colina
Robert C. Anderson Memorial Award 2019
Ana M. Gutiérrez-Colina, a recent graduate student in the Department of Psychology and current postdoctoral fellow at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, investigates cross-cutting issues relevant to multiple pediatric populations. Her work examines adherence to prescribed medication regimes, quality of life, cognitive and psychosocial function, and medical outcomes. She has pursued novel research ideas with direct clinical implications and has demonstrated sophistication in study conceptualization, design
Xiaoxiao Sun
Graduate Student Excellence-in-Research Award 2019
Xiaoxiao Sun, who completed his Ph.D. in statistics in 2018, is now a tenure-track assistant professor at the University of Arizona. He has combined creativity, computational skills and statistical knowledge to take on important challenges in the modern development of data science. Although he focused on statistical theory and methodology development in his doctoral research, he also spearheaded several bioinformatics projects, including one that addressed the issue of statistical computing in big data. For decades, asymptotic theory has been the most common theoretical analysis in statistics and has been used to extrapolate the statistical inference in moderate size samples. But some have questioned whether this analytical method can be translated into practice with the rise of big data. He came up with a simple two-step translational method for big data analysis that performs better than competing methods in terms of both accuracy and computational time.
Zheng Ruan
Graduate Student Excellence-in-Research Award 2019
Zheng Ruan earned his Ph.D. in bioinformatics in 2018, delving deeply into how signaling proteins work in both normal and disease states. Using an interdisciplinary approach that combined bioinformatics, biochemistry and cell biology, he uncovered the mechanisms by which cancer mutations alter cell signaling functions. Ruan pursued a unique research strategy by generating hypotheses from computational structural modeling and designing detailed experiments to test these hypotheses. His approach allowed him to answer fundamental questions in cancer genomics and structural bioinformatics. Ruan’s work has generated tremendous interest in the signaling field and will contribute to the understanding and treatment of human cancer. As a postdoctoral researcher at the Van Andel Institute in Michigan, he is studying large macromolecular ion channel proteins using single particle cryo-EM techniques, a rapidly evolving area that has the potential for major breakthroughs.
Jitendra Pant
Graduate Student Excellence-in-Research Award 2019
Jitendra Pant focused on developing and characterizing nitric oxide-releasing materials for use in biomedical and tissue engineering applications for his Ph.D. dissertation, completed in the School of Chemical, Materials and Biomedical Engineering. The biomaterials he developed have been reported to have greater than 99 percent antibacterial efficacy without harming human and mouse cells. Some of the biomedical device applications that Pant developed include instant clot wound patches, vascular catheters, device topcoats, 3D bone scaffolds and antibacterial packaging materials. He has also demonstrated the role of nitric oxide-releasing patches in preventing skin cancer and psoriasis. His research thus far has resulted in 18 publications, seven patent disclosures and multiple honors, including a TEDx talk, the Brahm Verma Award, and acknowledgement from the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. To commercialize his research, Jitendra co-founded a biomedical startup called
Philip Limerick
Graduate Student Excellence-in-Research Award 2019
Philip Limerick completed his Ph.D. in Romance languages with a concentration in Hispanic linguistics and is now adjunct instructor of Spanish at Eastern Kentucky University. His doctoral research addressed the emergence of new varieties of Spanish among immigrant populations in the Southeastern United States, an area whose representation in the linguistics literature is small compared to the major Spanish-speaking populations in other U.S. regions. Limerick gained access to a community of speakers in Roswell, Georgia, undertaking two dozen interviews that provided the natural speech data used for his work. This research provides a framework for understanding the mechanisms that underlie linguistic variation in this community. His work is innovative, both in its treatment of this community of U.S. Latinos and in its blend of sociolinguistic and pragmatic perspectives. It could represent an important contribution to the still nascent understanding of the linguistic features that characterize new dialect formation.
Douglas Atkinson
Graduate Student Excellence-in-Research Award 2019
Douglas Atkinson earned a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Cardiff in Wales, United Kingdom, after completing his Ph.D. in political science and international affairs in 2018. Many scholars of international conflict argue that war onset, duration and termination can be explained largely by countries’ relative strength. But this approach doesn’t fully account for the issues over which war occurs. Atkinson undertakes in-depth case analyses that explore how government leaders use issues to signal their resolve for potential conflict or war. He explores which issues countries fight about, how leaders introduce those issues into a conflict or war, which trade-offs between issues might exist and how the net effect of a constellation of issues might influence conflict behavior. He is now exploring how to classify issues in possible orders of importance, which remains a complex task, but this approach offers the field a significant advancement over existing research.
Bertranna Muruthi
Robert C. Anderson Memorial Award 2018
Bertranna Muruthi is a doctoral graduate of the Marriage and Family Therapy program in the Department of Human Development and Family Sciences. Central to her research is the analysis of factors related to risk and resilience for immigrant families. She is developing interventions to advance the well-being of immigrant families in the Washington, D.C., metro area. Muruthi uses culturally responsive methods to examine the family as the unit of analysis within the context of communities and the organizations that serve them. She has provided vital knowledge on black immigrant mother-daughter communications about substance abuse and risky sexual behaviors at a time when black women remain one of the most vulnerable populations in the U.S. With a steady stream of external funding and 13 publications in peer-reviewed journals, she is on her way to becoming a powerhouse in the field of family sciences. She is an assistant professor at Virginia Tech.
Danielle Jensen-Ryan
Graduate Student Excellence-in-Research Awards 2018
Danielle Jensen-Ryan, a recent doctoral candidate in anthropology, is recognized for her innovative work in environmental policy. She asks fundamental but previously neglected questions about how policy decisions are made and where science might belong—if at all—in the hierarchy of influences. In her dissertation, she integrated two methods typically applied in isolation: a meta-synthesis of published case study data in Georgia to explore the formal features of a science-policy interface and ethnographic research to understand the informal factors shaping water policy. Her current work includes an ethnographic analysis of three case studies, allowing her to explore the internal dynamics of Georgia’s water-policy process. In another study, she found an outsized influence of informal factors on water-policy outcomes with decisions guided by social capital, established relationships and existing power relations. After her postdoc, she will serve as grants director with the Cheyenne Regional Medical Center Foundation to help fund health care programs in Wyoming.
Alexandra Scharf
Robert C. Anderson Memorial Award 2017
Alexandra Scharf, a recent doctoral graduate in bioengineering and large animal medicine and surgery, is recognized for her research in MRI-based molecular and cellular imaging and the application of this technology to cell-based, regenerative therapies. Scharf has been instrumental in developing techniques using equine and ovine models of tendonitis to elucidate the contribution of cell therapy to the overall soft tissue healing process. Specifically, using iron particle labeling techniques, she has been able to trace the cells in the tendon for up to two weeks from injection. This work has led to a series of remarkable opportunities to perfect the delivery as well as understand the therapeutic benefits and the predictability of outcomes following cellular treatment of injured soft tissues. Scharf is now pursuing her veterinary degree in large animal medicine at UGA.