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Category: Creative Research Medal

Phaedra Corso

on March 2, 2016

CreaPhaedra Corsotive Research Medal 2014

Phaedra Corso, professor of health policy and management, has been a pioneer in the application of economic evaluation methods to inform policy making in public health. Economic evaluation refers to applied analytic tools used to systematically assess the impact of policies, programs and practices on costs and health outcomes. Increasingly, governmental funding sources require, in addition to efficacy and effectiveness data, economic evaluations of programs to justify allocation of resources to providers. Despite their value, the field of public health is in the nascent stages of fully incorporating economic evaluations into their mainstream research. Corso has helped to remedy this neglect by developing fundamental primers on how to conduct economic evaluations, leading national and international trainings on economic evaluation and applying the tools of economic evaluation to public health interventions in the state and across the country. She is expanding her application of economic evaluation to new areas of public health that impact vulnerable populations, including substance abuse and obesity.

Walid Alali

on March 2, 2016

Walid AlaliCreative Research Medal 2014

Walid Alali, assistant professor of epidemiology at the Center for Food Safety, conducts critical research focused on the epidemiology and control of Salmonella in poultry production. Poultry meat is a significant source of Salmonella infections, and Alali’s research provides an improved understanding of the pathogen’s frequencies and transmission dynamics. He led a project funded by the USDA to collect data on Salmonella in poultry from emerging market countries, such as China, Russia and Colombia, where there was little data or the data did not exist. In addition, Alali investigated the presence of antibiotic resistant strains of Salmonella in these locations and found high levels of multi-drug resistance in these organisms. Alali worked closely with the World Health Organization and local officials to plan and execute a response to this problem. From these experiences, he has published a series of well-reviewed manuscripts in some of the field’s top journals.

Daniel Krashen

on March 2, 2016

Daniel KrashenCreative Research Medal 2013

Daniel Krashen, associate professor of mathematics, is recognized for his contributions to a branch of algebra known as “field patching.” Field patching assigns geometric shapes to complex algebraic systems called function fields. The method uses the tools of topology—an area of mathematics concerned with describing shapes—to more easily scrutinize the properties of equations in function fields. These are pure mathematical problems requiring great technical knowledge to understand and solve. While it is difficult to predict how or when discoveries in this field might translate into applied technologies for biology, physics or engineering, Krashen’s research creates an essential scaffolding from which applied technologies may emerge. These algebraic structures have deep underpinnings in the understanding of fundamental applications of mathematics from the symmetries and structure of space, time and matter, to the optimization of error-correcting codes in cell-phone communication.

Chris Cuomo

on March 2, 2016

Chris CuomoCreative Research Medal 2013

Chris Cuomo, professor of philosophy and women’s studies, is recognized for her unique and groundbreaking interdisciplinary work on the epistemology and ethics of global climate change. In 2003, Cuomo formed a research team with physical geographers who study the history and resilience of permafrost. Drawing upon her more than 25 years of scholarship related to ethics, feminist theory, social justice and environmentalism, Cuomo used research methods informed by feminist epistemology to integrate interviews with members of vulnerable populations into scientific research on landscape changes on Alaska’s North Slope. Her team’s interviews with Iñupiaq elders resulted in the creation of a community-based geographic information system that incorporates cultural information and memories along with geo-specific information about changes in the landscape. This unique blend of quantitative and qualitative data not only clarified the ecological changes in the North Slope region, but also produced excellent resources on the subsistence practices and gendered divisions of labor for contemporary Iñupiaq communities.

Noel Fallows

on March 2, 2016

Noel Fallows Distinguished Research Professor 2015

Noel Fallows is Associate Dean of International and Multidisciplinary Programs and the senior Professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance Languages. Literary critic, historian, translator, and editor, Fallows is one of the foremost authorities in the world in the field of Medieval and Renaissance chivalric culture. His work focuses on Western Europe, with particular emphasis on the Iberian Peninsula. He has published a large number of influential books and articles on topics as varied as jousts, tournaments, military medicine, early equine medicine, knightly cults of wounds, propaganda campaigns, psychological warfare, mounted combat and riding techniques and arms and armor. The clear and accessible style of his books and articles offers a wide range of readers the opportunity to consider social and political questions from the past that remain powerfully resonant today, including questions of war and peace as well as the complexities of relations between Christians and Muslims. His research publications have garnered numerous international awards, and have been widely acclaimed for their innovative interdisciplinary research, meticulous textual analysis, and thorough cultural contextualization.

Previous Award

Albert Christ-Janer Award 2014
Creative Research Medal 2013

John Burke

on March 2, 2016

John Burke in labDistinguished Research Professor 2019

John Burke, professor in the Department of Plant Biology, is a world leader in fusing traditional evolutionary analyses with state-of-the-art genomic approaches in plant domestication research. His research has increased understanding of the genetics and genomics of crop domestication, the critical role of hybridization in plant evolution, and the risks associated with crop-wild gene flow. In his studies of sunflowers and related species (Helianthus species complex), he has examined the molecular and phenotypic evolution of crop plants and the potential for such research to inform modern breeding efforts. Burke has advanced knowledge of the genomic basis of how plants respond to stressful environmental conditions and how hybridization can facilitate such adaptation. These insights, along with the tools and genomic resources that he has developed, represent major contributions to the discipline. In addition, his research on gene flow and introgression is widely recognized as significant in the growing field of risk assessment of genetically engineered crops.

Previous Award

  • Creative Research Medal 2013

John Lynch

on March 2, 2016

John LynchCreative Research Medal 2012

John Lynch, professor of music and UGA director of bands, is a leader in the field of new music for wind ensemble, a relatively new medium that began in earnest when serious composers started writing for the genre in 1950. Lynch is a staunch supporter of contemporary music and he has commissioned premiered many new works. His concert programs always include recently composed music, and his various professional recordings feature new music prominently. His latest compact disc, “Street Song,” to be released this July on the international Naxos label, gave UGA students a professional recording experience with some of the top engineers and producers in the business. The CD contains four contemporary works, two of which Lynch commissioned. Lynch is also the creator and artistic director of the “neXt festival of Contemporary Music,” which brings together new and established composers writing for wind ensemble, and he founded UGA’s “Arch Award for Contemporary Wind Compositions.”

Michael Hahn

on March 2, 2016

Michael HahnCreative Research Medal 2012

Michael Hahn, professor of plant biology, is a pioneer in research on plant cell walls. His laboratory has generated more than 150 new antibodies that recognize specific carbohydrate structures within plant cell walls, thereby quadrupling the number of such antibodies that exist worldwide. This antibody toolkit provides new tools to researchers and is available through the CarboSource stock center. These antibodies have made possible, for the first time, broad and comprehensive studies of plant cell wall biology. Hahn’s lab has developed a reliable robotized system that makes possible the rapid screening of cell wall/biomass samples for the presence of specific structures recognized by the antibodies in the toolkit. His lab also utilizes the antibodies for visualization of where cell wall structures are located in plant tissues, providing new insights into how walls change during plant development, and for observing how cell wall structure is altered during biomass processing for the production of biofuels and other products.

William Kazez and Gordana Matic

on March 2, 2016

William Kazez and Gordana MaticCreative Research Medal 2012

William Kazez and Gordana Matic, professors of mathematics, are recognized as experts in a branch of mathematics called three-dimensional contact topology. They are particularly interested in three-dimensional manifolds, which are the possible global shapes of the three-dimensional space in which we live. The basic questions in two-dimensional geometry were answered long ago, but the basic structure of three- and four-dimensional objects has proven more difficult. Because human beings live in three dimensions, the understanding of these objects is of tremendous importance. In a series of five papers, Kazez and Matic resolved many longstanding difficulties in relating properties of contact structures to another popular approach used to analyze three-dimensional manifolds called open book decompositions. They also demonstrated a novel method of calculating an abstruse technical device known as Heegaard-Floer cohomology, a difficult and sometimes intractable method of analyzing basic topological information.

Adam Goodie

on March 2, 2016

Adam GoodieCreative Research Medal 2012

Adam Goodie, associate professor of psychology, studies pathological gambling and the cognitive processes, decision-making and personality characteristics associated with this dangerous condition that affects millions of Americans. Goodie discovered that the likelihood for one to gamble does not depend entirely on objective probabilities or how the individual perceives them, but on whether the individual perceives they can control the probabilities. Goodie developed an instrument for studying this called the Georgia Gambling Task (GGT), in which study participants answer trivia questions, indicate the likelihood that their answer is correct, and decide whether to accept bets on their answers. In his studies of active gamblers, pathological gamblers were willing to bet regardless of their level of control over the game, whereas nonpathological gamblers only bet when they actually had control. This leads to the suggestion that pathological gamblers are more easily convinced that they are in control of the game when in fact they are not.