Author: slquinlan

Christopher West, head of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and a researcher in the Complex Carbohydrate Research Center, belongs to a small group of internationally recognized parasite glycobiologists. His rigorous, transformative research explores cellular processes involving various structures, enzymes and roles of glycans, or sugar chains. His studies have identified fundamental cell-to-cell mechanisms of environmental sensing and signaling in glycobiology. Some of his seminal discoveries involve the biosynthesis and roles of novel glycan molecules in the model organism, Dictyostelium discoideum. One of his crucial contributions to glycobiology has been to describe at molecular resolution that organism’s biochemical response pathway to altered oxygen levels, allowing it to respond to its environment’s available oxygen. Since arriving at UGA, he has translated these findings to an opportunistic human pathogen, Toxoplasma gondii, which can grow and infect cells in low-oxygen environments. His research with collaborators at UGA and internationally has opened a new field of oxygen-sensing in protists, exploring how this environmental factor can control the behavior and virulence of pathogenic parasites.

Joshua D. Miller, professor in the Department of Psychology, is a preeminent researcher in the field of psychopathological impairment, specifically in personality disorders with a focus on narcissism and psychopathy. Among his accomplishments is demonstrating that personality disorders are “built” from the same basic components found in “normal” personality but represent problematic configurations because of their extremity and inflexibility. Many clinicians prefer this approach because it provides more focused tools for conceptualization, assessment, and treatment. Over the past two decades, his research helped lay the groundwork for changes in the official “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition.” He is an exceptionally productive and influential scholar, producing 325 peer-reviewed publications and book chapters, an acclaimed edited text on narcissism and a recent edited handbook on the assessment and treatment of antagonism. According to Google Scholar, he has been cited more than 33,000 times, and about 21,000 of those have been in the last five years.

Sujata Iyengar, professor in the Department of English, has established herself as an internationally influential voice across a range of fields, including book history, early modern women studies, disability studies, critical race and gender studies, digital scholarship, medical humanities, pedagogy and editing. But she is perhaps best known as the preeminent authority on Shakespearean appropriation, exploring how audiences engage with, undo or transform Shakespeare. Iyengar has published three single-authored books, “Shakespeare and Adaptation Theory” (2022), “Shakespeare’s Medical Language” (2011), and “Shades of Difference” (2005), which have transformed the study of Shakespeare and the British Renaissance. She is the founding co-editor of the award-winning digital peer-reviewed journal, “Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation,” a premiere venue not only for scholarship but also an important forum for educators and students of Shakespeare  She has co-authored seven books, producing collections of essays that have enabled and supported communities of practice.