Category: Creative Research Medal

Creative Research Medal

The research of Jin Ye, associate professor in the College of Engineering, focuses on the cyber-physical security of power electronics and electric drives with applications in smart grids, manufacturing systems and electric vehicles. She has been a major contributor in the Multilevel Cybersecurity for Photovoltaic Systems research project, which has already resulted in several high-impact scholarly contributions and technologies and highly competitive research funding such as a $3.6 million award from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Solar Energy Technologies Office. For the DOE effort, Ye is leading a UGA team that collaborates with a consortium of partners from the public and private sectors to shore up the country’s power grid defenses. The goal is to design, develop and test a two-level cybersecurity software solution for the solar photovoltaic (PV) industry. Ye and her team aim to integrate several security monitoring technologies into one integrated toolbox to defend the PV system against a variety of cyber-attacks.

Creative Research Medal

Thirty years ago, eagles were discovered dying of a mysterious disease in the southeastern U.S. Susan Wilde, associate professor of aquatic science, led a team to investigate. Eventually they found a clue: invasive aquatic plants called hydrilla, which are abundant in the manmade lakes and reservoirs where affected eagles and other waterfowl were discovered. Working with agencies and other universities, Wilde’s team discovered a novel cyanobacteria harbored by hydrilla that produces a neurotoxin, now known as aetokthonotoxin, which was responsible for the vacuolar myelinopathy affecting birds of prey. More recently, working with collaborators in Germany, the team connected the final puzzle pieces: exposure of the cyanobacteria to bromide resulted in production of the deadly neurotoxin. The resulting paper, published in “Science,” was awarded the AAAS Newcomb Cleveland Prize in 2022. Through this interdisciplinary, career-defining project, Wilde helped solve a medical mystery decades in the making.

Distinguished Research Professor 2024

Jamie Kreiner, professor in the Department of History, is a historian of Europe and the Mediterranean world in the early Middle Ages (400 to 800 CE). Her prizewinning research asks how and why cultures changed in societies that remade themselves as the Roman Empire fractured. She questions how ideas and norms—about good government, wealth, or nature, for example—were intertwined with different forms of power and influence, and attempts to discover how early medieval communities themselves wrestled with those dynamics. These questions have guided her research from political elites to pigs to the medieval clergy. Most recently, her book, “The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction” (Liveright, 2023), tracks early Christian monks’ frustrations with distraction and their inventive and sometimes contentious efforts to make themselves concentrate — and it shows how their moralization of the problem foreshadowed our own age of distraction.

Creative Research Medal

Susanne Ullrich, professor of physics, is advancing innovative applications of time-resolved ultrafast laser spectroscopy to molecular photochemistry. Ullrich and her team study how light, made of particles called photons, interacts with molecules and how these interactions play critical roles. To explore what happens after a molecule absorbs a photon requires observing molecular processes that occur on timescales of a few quadrillionths of a second in real-time. Like stroboscopic photography that uses flashes of light to capture images of high-speed motion, she uses ultrashort bursts of laser light to take a series of “snapshots” of photoinduced molecular behavior. Linking these snapshots into “movies,” she can elucidate the underlying mechanisms. She has conducted experiments on the ability of our building blocks of life, such as nucleobases, to retain their integrity under exposure from the sun’s harmful UV light, and how the light-absorbing parts of the skin pigment eumelanin protect our DNA.

Creative Research Medal

Gregory Strauss, Franklin Professor of Psychology in the Franklin College Department of Psychology, is an internationally recognized leader in schizophrenia research, specializing in the study of negative symptoms: deficits in motivation, pleasure, and social engagement that significantly impact quality of life. His work has reshaped the conceptualization, measurement, and treatment of these symptoms, establishing him as a major force in the field. Strauss directs the Clinical Affective Neuroscience Laboratory and the Georgia Psychiatric Risk Evaluation Program, where his team develops innovative assessment tools and targeted interventions for individuals at risk for psychotic disorders. His research has been cited over 13,000 times, and he has secured more than $85 million in grant funding. With over 230 publications, numerous invited talks, and high-impact awards—including the Rising Star Award from the Schizophrenia International Research Society—Strauss continues to advance understanding and treatment of schizophrenia’s most challenging symptoms.

Creative Research Medal

Douglas Menke, professor in the Department of Genetics and director of the Developmental Biology Alliance, and his group have produced the first gene-edited reptile, an albino Anolis lizard. With more than 10,000 species of reptiles, scientists have been searching high and low for techniques to explore the rich but untapped biology of reptilian gene function. CRISPR gene-editing technology has been successfully used in non-reptilian vertebrates, and now Menke’s team has developed an effective method to deliver CRISPR gene-editing components into unfertilized lizard eggs while they are still maturing inside the mother. The new technology could be customized for use in many reptile species or other egg-laying vertebrates such as poultry. The world’s first gene-edited reptile is a milestone in reptilian genetics, opening the door to discovering vast and uncharted areas of animal biology.

Creative Research Medal

Douda Bensasson, associate professor in the Department of Plant Biology, has pioneered a new understanding that wild plant environments serve as reservoirs for a common fungal pathogen of humans. Her laboratory discovered that old oak trees harbor Candida albicans, which is responsible for potentially lethal yeast bloodstream infections in humans. Scientists thought that this species could only thrive in warm-blooded animals, but she showed that three genetic strains in oaks were more closely related to strains isolated from warm-blooded animals like humans than to other oak strains. The high genetic diversity found in oak strains implies that C. albicans has moved between humans and oaks multiple times and that plants could be the pathogen’s ancestral source. Her work in isolating, characterizing, genome sequencing and analyzing C. albicans has reshaped her field. She has inspired researchers worldwide to explore the evolution of this and potentially other human pathogens in wild plants.

Creative Research Medal 2021

Zachary Wood, professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and his team have challenged the longstanding structure-function paradigm in biology. In a 2018 paper published in Nature, Wood and graduate student Nicholas Keul reported results of experiments on the function of unfolded parts of proteins called intrinsically disordered segments. For 50 years, biologists believed that only the folded structure of proteins was important for function, and the unfolded portions were considered “junk segments” left over from evolution. But Wood and his team discovered that the unfolded segments harness entropy to produce a force that can alter the activity of the folded portion of a protein. This finding shows that disordered segments can be functional, and since the only requirement is a lack of structure, these segments are easy to evolve. Wood and his team have inspired new research initiatives worldwide and could reshape understanding of protein structure for decades to come.

Creative Research Medal 2021

David T. Gay, professor of mathematics, has made breakthroughs in topology through the development of “trisections of 4-manifolds,” a novel way of representing and studying the topology and geometry of 4-dimensional spaces. In dimensions 3 and 4, manifolds are the models for our universe (considering space as 3-dimensional, and space-time as 4-dimensional). In recent decades, the study of manifolds has been one of the most active fields of research in mathematics, building historical interactions between mathematics and physics. In 2016 Gay, in collaboration with Robion Kirby, introduced the notion of a trisection of a 4-manifold and proved the foundational existence and uniqueness results, an effective way of constructing and studying all smooth 4-manifolds. This transformative finding led to a series of papers by Gay and others, introducing new concepts and approaching longstanding problems in new ways.

Creative Research Medal 2021

Amanda J. Abraham, associate professor in the Department of Public Administration and Policy, is a top researcher in the field of addiction health services. She studies sociological dimensions of addiction treatment, ranging from organizational change to the impact of government policy on treatment accessibility and quality. She has identified crucial policy questions involving the opioid epidemic, pursued new research approaches, and offered evidence-based policy recommendations that could change the epidemic’s trajectory. Her research has documented what type of insurance coverage matters most for gaining or restricting access to needed medications and services during the epidemic. Her studies also highlight where serious gaps in treatment occur for Medicare and Medicaid enrollees. She pinpoints particular geographic areas, such as the Southeast, with the largest gaps between opioid use disorder (OUD) treatment need and estimated treatment capacity for Medicaid enrollees. Her research also reveals a serious shortage of OUD medication providers in Medicare and highlights implications for access to needed treatment.