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Author: slquinlan

Emily Noble

slquinlan on April 6, 2023

Charles B. Knapp Early Career Scholar Award 2023

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Emily Noble, assistant professor in the College of Family and Consumer Sciences, has consistently made advances at the leading edge of research on eating behavior, focusing on the neurobiology of food consumption, impulsivity, working memory, gut microbiota and obesity. She studies the bidirectional nature of the neural control of food intake, providing important insights into how nutritional factors affect brain functions, including impacts on specific neural circuits. In studies published in influential journals, she has addressed how diets high in saturated fat and sugar affect neurocognitive functioning, particularly learning and memory. She has also shown that eating behavior is regulated through neuropeptides transmitted through cerebrospinal fluid in the brain. Her research on obesity and cognitive dysfunction has become a crucial focal point in evolving understanding of obesity’s causes and consequences. Her creativity and communication skills have earned her important merit-based research awards at national and international meetings, and her scholarly contributions have received significant media attention.

Puliyur MohanKumar

slquinlan on April 6, 2023

Entrepreneur of the Year 2023

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Puliyur MohanKumar’s translational research, in collaboration with Sheba MohanKumar and Yen-Jun Chuang, led to five invention disclosures and multiple patent filings focused on nanoparticle technology use in clinical settings. A professor in the College of Veterinary Medicine, MohanKumar formed the company, SG Endocrine Research, with Sheba MohanKumar to pursue commercial development of this technology. Its lead product is a non-surgical spaying/neutering technology, dubbed “Gonads Be Gone,” that is administered intravenously and causes complete inactivation of the gonads in two weeks. After preclinical validation, the technology has proven 100% effective in studies done with male and female cats. Under MohanKumar’s leadership, the company is also developing nanoparticle-based technologies to facilitate non-invasive imaging of brain neurotransmitters, a prostate cancer therapy and other applications. SG Endocrine Research licensed the nanoparticle technology under the Georgia Startup License program. The company has received Phase 1 STTR funding from the National Institutes of Health and is in active discussions with potential commercial partners.

Michael Hahn

slquinlan on April 5, 2023

Inventor of the Year 2023

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Michael Hahn’s research on plant cell walls (PCWs) led to a development of a molecular toolkit for PCW characterization that addresses a critical need in PCW research. Hahn, a professor of plant biology, has used this toolkit to develop a comprehensive experimental approach that allows for simultaneous identification and quantification of carbohydrates present in PCWs—critical information for understanding cell wall biology and optimizing PCW utilization. Hahn’s innovative, monoclonal antibody-based approach is faster and more efficient than prior methods requiring complex, time-consuming chemical analyses. Advanced knowledge of PCW composition enables the design of sustainable and economically viable processes appropriate for use with a specific biomass. Hahn’s invention has been applied to numerous plants, including switchgrass, sugar beet, Arabidopsis, corn blueberries, sugarcane, silvergrass, agave, cotton and multiple hardwood trees. He has developed and licensed over 100 monoclonal antibodies, including to companies specializing in reagents for plant, algal and bioenergy research. More than 30 commercial products have been derived from his research.

Karen Norris

slquinlan on April 5, 2023

Lamar Dodd Creative Research Award

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Karen Norris, professor and Charles H. Wheatley Georgia Research Alliance Chair in Immunology & Translational Biomedical Research, is a global leader in the fields of immunology and infectious diseases as well as cardiopulmonary diseases associated with long-term HIV infection. She has expanded her research interests in a series of innovative, well-funded and transformative programs. Her major contributions include establishing the first non-human primate models of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), pulmonary arterial hypertension and Pneumocystis pneumonia. She assisted in the formation of the University of Georgia Center for Vaccines and Immunology and helped establish and directed the Non-human Primate Research Core. Her laboratory has developed a broadly protective vaccine and immunotherapeutic agents to prevent and treat life-threatening fungal infections, including pulmonary aspergillosis and invasive candidiasis. She holds patents for related technologies and her work has led to the establishment of NXT Biologics, Inc, a company founded by Norris to advance life-saving vaccines and immunotherapies.

Natarajan Kannan

slquinlan on April 5, 2023

Lamar Dodd Creative Research Award

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Natarajan Kannan, professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the Institute of Bioinformatics, leads an internationally recognized program at the interface of bioinformatics and biochemistry. Developing and applying sophisticated statistical and computational tools, he maps the complex relationships connecting sequence, structure, function and regulation in large families of protein kinases. These enzymes turn signals on and off in cells, a critical part of cell communication. Kinases are involved in many diseases and in related drug development studies as anti-cancer and infectious disease targets. He has also developed powerful informatics tools and deep learning models for the classification and evolutionary analysis of glycosyltransferases, a large family of enzymes. He is leveraging new information from these proteins from different cell, tissue, disease types and organisms to develop predictions about how they propagate signals in diseases. And he continues to train the next generation of scientists to apply new computational tools for biological discovery.

James C. Beasley

slquinlan on April 5, 2023

Lamar Dodd Creative Research Award

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James C. Beasley, Terrell Professor of Forestry and Natural Resources in the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory and Terrell Professor in the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources, has developed an acclaimed research program in wildlife ecology and conservation. His innovative and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of radioactive contamination in the environment and its effects as an ecological stressor have challenged fundamental assumptions about the status and health of wildlife in radiologically contaminated landscapes, leading to the discovery of abundant and diverse wildlife communities. Since 2014, he has served as the International Atomic Energy Agency’s wildlife adviser to the Fukushima Prefecture government in Japan in response to the 2011 tsunami and nuclear accident. He is recognized as one of the world’s experts on invasive wild pigs, building one of the most important academic research programs studying invasive wild pigs in the US. And he is engaged in high-impact carnivore conservation research projects to reduce human-wildlife conflicts globally.

Bradley Wright

slquinlan on April 5, 2023

William A. Owens Creative Research Award 2023

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Bradley Wright, professor and head of the Department of Public Administration and Policy, has built a globally influential body of research addressing how work environments in government affect public employee attitudes and behaviors. His research is highly regarded for expanding the understanding of human motivation in public sector settings. Wright has united different streams of knowledge into a coherent whole, raising his profile as a scientist who explores innovative ways to study topics in his field. Wright is particularly skillful in bringing research methods used in psychology to questions in public administration. By designing models of methodological rigor and sophistication, he has created illuminating measurements of public service motivations and values with real-world implications. For instance, he has furthered understanding of government employee behavior in highly stressful work environments in the US and internationally, such as police officer motivation and stress during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Jed Rasula

slquinlan on April 5, 2023

Albert Christ-Janer Creative Research Award 2023

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Jed Rasula, scholar, poet, and translator, is Helen S. Lanier Distinguished Professor of English. He is a preeminent scholar of modernism across the arts, and is also widely known as a jazz historian, for which he was awarded a research fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin. His research has been recognized with the prestigious Matei Calinsecu Award from the Modern Language Association for History of a Shiver: The Sublime Impudence of Modernism. He has authored 10 scholarly books, two large anthologies, three poetry collections, and over 150 articles in books and journals. He has delivered more than 70 keynote and invited lectures around the world. His work has been translated into Japanese, German, Spanish, Rumanian and Serbian. His writing is distinguished by the remarkable erudition of his interdisciplinary expertise and a lively jargon-free style, encompassing poetry, prose, art, music, architecture, dance and film, spanning periods from pre-history to the present.