Category: Creative Research Medal

Creative Research Medal 2025

Justin Lavner, professor of psychology in the Franklin College Department of Psychology, led a landmark study investigating the impact of a responsive parenting intervention on health outcomes among first-time Black mothers and their infants. The study, conducted in collaboration with UGA’s Center for Family Research and Augusta University Medical Center, examined how structured home visits in the early postpartum period influenced infant sleep, maternal well-being, and child health. Lavner’s findings, published in JAMA Network Open and other high-impact journals, showed that the intervention increased infants’ nighttime sleep by 40 minutes and 24-hour sleep duration by 73 minutes—critical improvements given longstanding sleep disparities. Additional research linked the intervention to healthier infant weight trajectories, enhanced maternal sleep, and reduced maternal depressive symptoms. Lavner has helped secure over $12 million in grant funding and published nearly 100 peer-reviewed articles. His work highlights the importance of culturally tailored parenting interventions in addressing health inequities and promoting family well-being.

Creative Research Medal 2025

Elizabeth Brisbois, associate professor and Distinguished Faculty Fellow in the College of Engineering, is recognized for her pioneering work on light-based nitric oxide (NO) release technology for medical devices. Her research team developed a wearable fiber optic device that uses photoactive NO donor chemistry to deliver controlled antimicrobial NO therapy. This breakthrough has significant potential to prevent infections in catheters and wound dressings, addressing a major clinical challenge in healthcare by reducing complications and improving patient outcomes. Her findings, featured on the cover of the Journal of Controlled Release, led to a $2 million NIH R01 grant to develop and advance to preclinical testing. Brisbois has secured over $12 million in research funding, has more than 20 issued or pending patents, and co-founded Nytricx Inc. to commercialize biomedical technologies. A Senior Member of the National Academy of Inventors, she has also received multiple national awards recognizing her impact on biomaterials research and translational medicine.

Creative Research Medal 2025

Krista Capps, associate professor in the Odum School of Ecology and the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, has led groundbreaking research on global carbon cycling in rivers. As part of a landmark study published in Science, Capps and colleagues conducted an experiment across 514 streams on six continents to measure organic matter decomposition. The team used a standardized assay to assess microbial activity, generating the first global-scale model of riverine carbon breakdown and identifying key environmental drivers. This research showed that accelerated decomposition rates were linked to regions dominated by human activities, such as urbanization and agriculture, potentially altering aquatic food webs and increasing carbon release into the atmosphere. Capps and co-authors used machine learning to develop a model explaining 70% of the variance in prior decomposition rates and created a predictive tool for environmental forecasting. A recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, she continues to advance freshwater ecology with globally impactful research on ecosystem resilience.

Creative Research Medal 2025

Rumya Putcha, associate professor in the Hugh Hodgson School of Music and the Institute for Women’s and Gender Studies, explores the cultural politics of Indian dance in transnational contexts. Her book, “The Dancer’s Voice: Performance and Womanhood in Transnational India” (Duke University Press, 2023), examines how South Indian classical dance shapes narratives of caste, race, and migration. Combining ethnographic research and historical analysis, Putcha demonstrates how the figure of the Indian dancing woman reinforces social hierarchies while also serving as a site of resistance. The book has received widespread acclaim for its interdisciplinary approach, engaging ethnomusicology, performance studies, and postcolonial theory. It has been reviewed in leading academic journals and was recognized with the 2024 de la Torre Bueno First Book Award from the Dance Studies Association and the 2025 Bernard S. Cohn First Book Award from the Association for Asian Studies. Through this work, Putcha offers a critical rethinking of how performers cultivate citizenship in India and its diasporas.

Creative Research Medal 2025

Timothy Yang, associate professor in the Franklin College Department of History, explores the intersection of business, medicine, and empire in the making of modern East Asia and Japan. His book, “A Medicated Empire: The Pharmaceutical Industry and Modern Japan” (Cornell University Press, 2021), is a micro-history of how a multi-national drug company, Hoshi Pharmaceuticals, expanded alongside Japan’s imperial ambitions, using state connections to dominate colonial markets. Through extensive archival research, Yang reveals how the company capitalized on imperial policies, marketing medicines in colonies while adhering to domestic narcotic bans, shaping both commercial and medical landscapes across the world. Widely praised for its innovative approach, the book won the Hagley Book Prize for best book in business history and has received glowing reviews in leading academic journals. Yang’s work bridges the history of science, economic history, and colonial studies. As director of UGA’s Center for Asian Studies, he continues to advance interdisciplinary scholarship across Asia and beyond.

Creative Research Medal

Juliet Sekandi, associate professor in the Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics and the Global Health Institute, has conducted one of the first pilot evaluations of the feasibility, acceptability, and cost of using video directly observed therapy (VDOT) among tuberculosis patients in her home country of Uganda. She recently published results of a federally funded randomized clinical trial showing VDOT improved treatment completion to nearly 90%. In VDOT, a smartphone app records the patient taking the prescribed medication; the patient then sends the video via an encrypted message to a health provider who views it and assesses adherence. For patients with drug-resistant tuberculosis, VDOT helps ensure adherence to a new oral antibiotic available to treat this disease strain. Tuberculosis control workforce, however, remains overburdened. Sekandi is working with colleagues in the School of Computing to develop novel facial recognition software using advanced machine learning and computer vision to read and interpret videos of patients’ adherence with minimal human input.

Creative Research Medal

Susan Rosenbaum, associate professor in the Department of English, collaborated with colleagues at Davidson College and Duquesne University in a field-changing digital humanities project, Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde. The project, which has brought Mina Loy from the margins of modernist studies into the spotlight, is a scholarly contribution of various approaches, depending on which parts of the website you visit. The website offers a scholarly guide to Loy’s career including close readings of her writing, designs, and visual art; edited biographies of Loy and her cohort; a venue for student scholarship featuring digital humanities tools; and an intensive immersion in Loy’s style, writing, life, and travels. The site is playful and experimental, even as it rises to a high degree of scholarly integrity. Combining archival research and creative activity and linking elements of avant-garde design to original scholarship, this initiative has sparked greater interest in modernist women writers and paved a new path for research.

Creative Research Medal

Giorgis Petridis, associate professor in the Department of Mathematics, and his colleague Brandon Hanson (now at the University of Maine), published a 2021 breakthrough paper in The Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, the flagship journal of the LMS. The paper deals with a well-known problem in the structure of Paley graphs, a fundamental model allowing mathematicians to address deep questions with applications in coding theory and cryptography. In an argument that takes slightly more than a page, Petridis and Hanson apply the polynomial method to make progress on a problem many others have tried but failed to crack. The paper attracted the attention of mathematicians because of its surprisingly brief and elegant proof based on a creative and imaginative approach. Petridis has published several other high-impact research papers, many on longstanding questions. His research has been continuously funded by the National Science Foundation since 2015 with many invitations to present his work at national and international meetings.

Creative Research Medal

Logan Fiorella, associate professor in the Department of Educational Psychology, has developed a novel framework of how students “make sense” of what they are learning, particularly within science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The framework is based on his extensive program of empirical research investigating the benefits and boundaries of generative learning activities, including learning by explaining and learning by drawing. Fiorella’s work fills several gaps in prior research by specifying the unique and complementary cognitive functions of distinct modes of generative sense-making—explaining, visualizing, and enacting—and by providing practical recommendations for implementing appropriate instructional methods and learning activities. His work demonstrates how guiding students to mentally visualize and enact the learning material allows them to explain and generalize what they have learned to new situations.

Creative Research Medal

Assaf Oshri, associate professor of human development and family science, researches the biopsychosocial mechanisms of resilience and risky behavior in children exposed to adversity. In more than 100 peer-reviewed articles in high-impact venues, he seeks to understand how individual children and adolescents respond to different rearing environments, the developmental pathways toward and away from addiction and the emergence of resilience in youth. Oshri’s research team has been collecting developmental, psychological, psychophysiological and brain imaging data for a longitudinal cohort study on more than 300 children, youth and their parents. His work has shown that children’s emotional regulation, their ability to modulate an emotion or set of emotions, is at the core of resilience to adversity. He has contributed knowledge and insights into the mechanisms of how chronic stressors (child maltreatment, poverty) become biologically embedded in the body’s reactions and make children and adolescents more vulnerable to engaging in risky behaviors that threaten their health and well-being.