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Author: ovprweb

Erin Baker

ovprweb on April 2, 2018

James L. Carmon Scholarship Award 2018

Erin Baker, a doctoral student in genetics, is studying the molecular mechanisms governing thymus aging that could be used to treat disease and improve regenerative therapies. The thymus, which plays a crucial role in immune system function, is the organ where T cells proliferate, differentiate and mature. During fetal stages, T-cell proliferation in the thymus increases rapidly as the organ expands in size. But as people reach adulthood, the thymus loses mass and output of specialized T cells, increasing the body’s predisposition to disease and infection. Baker is employing novel mapping technologies to discover and characterize the molecular mechanisms that control this transition from the fetal expansion phase to the adult maintenance phase. If clinicians could use this knowledge to stimulate T-cell production in immunocompromised patients, debilitating if not deadly conditions—including various cancers and infectious diseases—could potentially become less virulent and even treatable.

James C. Beasley

ovprweb on April 2, 2018

Portrait of James Beasley outdoorsFred C. Davison Early Career Scholar Award 2018

James C. Beasley, assistant professor in the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory and Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources, incorporates modern field techniques to study the spatial ecology and population dynamics of vertebrate wildlife in human-altered ecosystems. He has received international recognition for his research expertise and peer-refereed publications in international-level journals. He has obtained more than $2.3 million in grants and contracts from numerous agencies and organizations as principal investigator or co-PI. His knowledge of wildlife biology has allowed him to devise innovative approaches to the discipline of radioecology—the study of radioactive contamination in the environment and its effects as an ecological stressor. His research at Chernobyl has been recognized among key scientists within the radioecology community. Since 2014, he has served as the International Atomic Energy Agency’s sole wildlife adviser to the Fukushima Prefecture government in Japan, in response to the 2011 tsunami and nuclear accident.

Sungjin Kim

ovprweb on April 2, 2018

Postdoctoral Research Award 2018

Sungjin Kim, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Sciences, has reached two important conclusions about biochemical processes in cancer cells. First, he clearly demonstrated that a high-fat diet plays a critical role in the progression of prostate tumors, supporting the epidemiological evidence. Clinicians could apply this knowledge to dictate the daily consumption of fats in patients’ diet with no added risk while attenuating tumor progression. Second, he and his collaborators have identified an important chemical inhibitor that could be a potential treatment option for advanced stages of prostate cancer. His research has resulted in two publications, one in Cancer Research and the other in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, top journals in his field. He serves as first author on both papers and as co-author on two additional research papers under review or preparation. He already has a total of 18 publications in his career.

Anat Florentin

ovprweb on April 2, 2018

Postdoctoral Research Award 2018

Anat Florentin, a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Tropical and Emerging Global Diseases, studies molecular mechanisms that drive life stages of Plasmodium falciparum, the deadliest of parasite species that infect humans with malaria. During her exceptionally productive years at UGA, she has advanced two related areas of research to learn more about the functions of P. falciparum genes and metabolic pathways. First, she established a highly efficient, markerless system to create mutants more rapidly using the powerful CRISPR-Cas9-based genetic editing tool. Her data from this project was published in the high-impact journal mSphere. Second, she used the CRISPR-Cas9 tool to understand P. falciparum’s unique plastid known as the apicoplast, which harbors essential metabolic pathways for the parasite’s growth and whose biological processes could be ideal parasite-specific drug targets. This work has been recognized by multiple invitations to present her work and a first author publication in Cell Reports.

Andreas Copan

ovprweb on April 2, 2018

James L. Carmon Scholarship Award 2018

Andreas Copan, a doctoral student in chemistry, has consistently shown himself to be self-motivated, highly talented and perceptive in identifying important problems. In his years at UGA, he has developed a deep understanding of molecular electronic structure theory and wide-ranging experience in computer programming and numerical algorithms. With this combination of skills, Copan has shown how to generalize density cumulant theory for the description of electronic excited states. Researchers can use this new model to predict the spectroscopic signature of a molecule, facilitating its identification. He also created a stand-alone software package that optimizes tensor contractions and improves numerical algorithms for large matrices to increase the range of chemical systems that can be modeled with this theory. These ideas contributed to a successful research proposal recently funded by the National Science Foundation.

Daniel Becker

ovprweb on April 2, 2018

Robert C. Anderson Memorial Award 2018

Daniel Becker, a recent doctoral graduate in ecology, is recognized for his explorations of food subsidies and infectious disease both broadly and in vampire bats. In Latin America, vampire bat populations have expanded during recent decades in response to the proliferation of livestock, which are a readily available food source for these blood-feeding animals. For his thesis research, he traveled to Belize and Peru to capture bats, and in the laboratory, he compared how the animals’ diet, immune measures, movement, and infection by bacterial and viral pathogens differed in areas with high versus low livestock abundance. He found that some pathogens have taken advantage of higher bat density and contact rates in livestock-provisioned areas. He has published 14 manuscripts since 2014, serving as first author for nine, and he has 10 more papers in review or ready to submit. He is now a postdoctoral researcher at Montana State University.

Jonathon Vandezande

ovprweb on April 2, 2018

Graduate Student Excellence-in-Research Awards 2018

Jonathon Vandezande, a recent doctoral candidate in computational and quantum chemistry, has established a record of distinction in both academics and independent research. With a creative understanding of how to overcome scientific challenges, he has shown a strong ability to bring chemical insight into reaction mechanisms. During his time at UGA, he co-authored four papers on the design of catalysts for the reduction of carbon dioxide, and he has recently published another manuscript on the mechanistic pathway of the catalyst. He also collaborated extensively with experimentalists, using computations to illuminate their results. He continues to tackle new challenges as shown by his recent research on spin-orbit splitting in p-block elements. His work with the developmental computer code (BAGEL) indicates an ability to tackle complex problems, helping developers improve their code and learn the intricacies of relativistic quantum mechanics. He is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute für Kohlenforschung in Mulheim an der Ruhr, Germany.

Joseph Kindler

ovprweb on April 2, 2018

Graduate Student Excellence-in-Research Awards 2018

Joseph Kindler, a recent doctoral graduate in foods and nutrition, has created a body of work that is already influencing the field of nutrition and bone health on an international scale, publishing as the lead or co-author on nine peer-reviewed publications. His innovative research suggests that obesity and Type 2 diabetes progression in childhood might adversely influence bone health. His most recent manuscript published in Calcified Tissues International demonstrated in a case-control design that obese adolescents have inferior bone strength compared to non-obese adolescents, challenging the common belief that obesity is protective of bone. Kindler has developed sophisticated skills in numerous laboratory techniques, including bone and body composition imaging, cardiovascular health assessment and structural equation modeling statistical techniques. He is now a postdoctoral trainee at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Dan Du

ovprweb on April 2, 2018

Graduate Student Excellence-in-Research Awards 2018

Dan Du, a recent doctoral candidate in history, combines analytical methods drawn from economics, cultural studies, and material culture in an extraordinarily innovative way. Her dissertation examined the impacts of the Sino-American tea trade from 1784 through the early 20th century. During this era, global commodity markets became more integrated, European powers established colonies or foreign concessions in Chinese coastal cities, and Western consumers increasingly used exotic Asian foodstuffs. Her pathbreaking work traces the commodity chain through a huge cast of characters from peasant producers who grew the tea, men who transported it, workers who processed the leaves, Canton tea merchants (and American and British buyers), to American retailers and consumers. Unlike previous work in this field, her dissertation is culturally sensitive to Chinese, Americans and Europeans alike. Outside foundations, understanding the significance of her research, have repeatedly granted her predoctoral fellowships. She now holds a one-year visiting position at Wake Forest University.

Kyle Benowitz

ovprweb on April 2, 2018

Graduate Student Excellence-in-Research Awards 2018

Kyle Benowitz, a doctoral graduate in genetics, has distinguished himself as one of the top researchers applying molecular studies to evolutionary aspects of animal behavior. He has published several papers in top journals examining species-specific aspects of behavior in two species of burying beetles. His dissertation produced a major paper published in Evolution, the leading journal in his field, in which he examines variation in transcription among the most divergent individuals in a population. He developed strong bioinformatics skills and pioneered the use of unusual and sophisticated methods that allowed him to look for subtle transcription variation. His novel approach and paper have been highlighted by Evolution’s “Digest” section. Although his Ph.D. was performed in the laboratory, he was willing and able to visit field stations to collect beetles and has proved a talented observer of behavior. He is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Arizona.