Category: Charles B. Knapp Early-Career Scholar Award

Charles B. Knapp Early Career Scholar Award 2025

Yilang Peng, assistant professor in the College of Family and Consumer Sciences, is a rising leader in computational social science, investigating how digital technologies shape consumer behavior, strategic communication, and the spread of misinformation. His research integrates computer vision, machine learning, and social science methodologies to analyze visual misinformation and its impact on public perception. His work has appeared in top-tier journals such as Journal of Communication, Political Communication, and New Media & Society, earning over 820 citations and multiple awards from the International and National Communication Associations. Peng co-founded the Computational Multimodal Communication Lab, advancing interdisciplinary research on digital media. With a $500,000 NSF grant, he explores how visual misinformation influences credibility perceptions, informing strategies for combating disinformation. His work has been featured in Forbes, The Washington Post, and on ABC, highlighting its real-world relevance. As his research continues to expand, Peng is poised to shape the future of computational media analysis and digital communication studies.

Charles B. Knapp Early Career Scholar Award 2024

Drew Abney, assistant professor in the Department of Psychology, is an internationally prominent scholar and an intellectual leader in developmental and cognitive science. He studies how behaviors and social interactions affect developmental trajectories through infancy and into toddlerhood. With the research tools of developmental psychology, complex adaptive systems, and artificial intelligence, Abney has conducted highly creative studies focusing on infants’ developing vocalizations and how they change during interactions with caretakers. He has shown that caregivers and infants engage in more coordinated responses when vocalizations are relatively speech-like. He has identified a non-random structure to the clustering of vocalizations by infants as early as 11 days of age. Over the first two years, infants and caregivers become increasingly coordinated, providing the infrastructure for conversational turn-taking. By questioning widely held assumptions about fundamental aspects of communication and trust, Abney offers new and better ways to measure and explore the complex interactions of infants, toddlers, and caregivers.

Charles B. Knapp Early Career Scholar Award 2023

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.

Charles B. Knapp Early Career Scholar Award

Man Kit “Karlo” Lei, assistant professor in the Department of Sociology, combines interdisciplinary theories and methods to examine the social determinants of health and aging across the lifespan, with a particular focus on minority populations and disadvantaged communities. His research focuses on two research questions: How do social stressors “get under the skin” and affect well-being? Why do some people, but not others, thrive despite facing adversity? He is a rare triple-threat scholar skilled in sociological theories, genetic and biological data, and advanced statistical models. His research has made advances in understanding and addressing social and environmental factors that can become embedded biologically via gene expression and, in turn, foster pathological physiology and onset of illness. A co-investigator on three NIH grants totaling more than $7 million, his revolutionary research blends rigor in basic science and novel approaches to treat and prevent chronic illness.

Charles B. Knapp Early Career Scholar Award 2021

Katherine Ehrlich, assistant professor in the Department of Psychology, leverages cutting-edge biological methods to understand health consequences of problematic parenting, racial discrimination and socioeconomic disadvantage. Her research often focuses on how children’s experiences become embedded in their physical health, including their immune systems, during development. In one study, she and her colleagues examined whether early-life adversity versus current stress more strongly predicted inflammatory response to challenge over time. From children’s blood samples drawn over several years, the researchers found that adversity in early life predicted enhanced interleukin-6 production whereas current stress did not. This research could provide critical information about sensitive periods for immune system development. In another study, she reported that children’s attachments to their parents were associated with asthma management. Her more recent research explores health disparities and resilience among high-achieving African American children and youth.

Charles B. Knapp Early Career Scholar Award 2020

Dorothy R. Carter, assistant professor of industrial-organizational psychology, conducts research that helps organizations rethink the management of complex human systems comprised of multiple teams. Multi-team systems are deployed to tackle high-risk/high-reward challenges in contexts such as the military, medicine, disaster response, and space exploration. Carter’s work aims to answer fundamental questions about the drivers of team and multi-team system effectiveness. In her work with NASA, she is identifying processes and interventions to support multi-team collaboration throughout long-duration missions to Mars. Through her NSF-funded research, she and her collaborators are surveying and providing feedback to senior-level executives about the teamwork processes needed to ensure strategic effectiveness. Carter also works with the U.S. Army to enhance military team staffing decisions, and she studies team- and institution-level interventions to support interdisciplinary science teams. Her research has already made an impact across a range of disciplines, including psychology, management, communications, and medicine.