Robert C. Anderson Memorial Award

Hoang Luong, who completed his Ph.D. in physics in 2021, is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He consistently shows creativity in solving problems, mastering multiple technical and analytical/computational skills and developing theoretical and simulation insights. At UGA, he made three outstanding contributions to the metallurgical coating and thin-film community. He explored fabricating nanostructures of composite noble metals and magnetic materials as magneto-plasmonic systems. He investigated the design and apprehension of active chiral metamaterials. And he made a breakthrough in hydrogen sensor applications using a similar approach. He contributed as the first/co-author for more than 20 published research papers over nearly five years at UGA, some with high-impact factor journals in cutting-edge research topics. In his postdoctoral position at UCSB, he has been working on an entirely new research direction, studying long-term stability of organic photodetectors and organic photovoltaics.

Grace Cushman, who completed her Ph.D. in 2021 in the Department of Psychology, is a postdoctoral fellow at Brown University’s Child Mental Health T32 Program, a competitive research-focused, NIH-funded program. As a pediatric psychologist, she collaborates with medical providers in children’s hospitals. Cushman’s research focuses on understanding the interplay between psychology and medicine to find modifiable factors that could improve health outcomes and the lives of chronically ill children and their families. She investigates factors that facilitate or impede adherence to medical and treatment regimens in youth, including parent functioning and their perspectives on their children’s well-being. She has successfully transferred her skills from patients with solid organ transplants and inflammatory bowel disease during her Ph.D. research to those at Brown University with food allergy and asthma. Publishing 30 peer-reviewed articles in top journals, she is on a trajectory to be one of the leading researchers in her field.