Category: Creative Research Medal

Creative Research Medal 2011

Joseph Fu, professor of mathematics, is a leading authority on integral geometry, the mathematical structure behind the transforms used in CAT scans, MRIs, and crystal diffraction that reconstruct three dimensional images from multi-perspective two dimensional data. His research seeks to develop relationships between integral quantities, such as the volume of a solid body and the areas of planar slices of the body.

Although certain elementary cases had been understood since the 1930s, the much more complicated case of so-called “hermitian integral geometry” resisted solution until 2006, when Fu discovered a mysterious underlying algebraic structure. The full implications were then explained in a series of papers by Fu and his collaborators between 2006 and 2009. These papers also describe possible useful machinery for handling the integral quantities and their transforms in this new case.

Creative Research Medal 2011

Scott Merkle, professor of forest biotechnology, has been studying chestnut trees for more than 20 years. Over the past five years, his lab has made significant progress in efforts to restore the American chestnut to Eastern forests. Its loss to chestnut blight in the 1920s and ’30s is regarded as the most devastating forest disease in history.

Merkle’s success with somatic embryogenesis provided the enabling technology to mass propagate American chestnut trees with genetic resistance to the blight for reforestation — and to develop trees with transgene-based resistance to the blight. His work also led directly to the development elsewhere of a second method of regenerating trees, from micropropagated shoots derived from somatic embryos, rather than directly from embryos. His work goes far beyond a single tree species, extending the use of biotechnology to much broader effect.

Creative Research Medal 2011

Prashant Doshi, associate professor of computer science, is recognized as an expert on a novel computational framework for decision-making in situations with multiple other unknown agents. Called the interactive partially observable Markov decision process (or I-POMDP), the framework combines aspects of game and decision theories. It fills an important gap in computer science about how to control agents in multi-agent settings. Prashant developed novel algorithms enabling its mainstream recognition as an expressive and normative computational theory for modeling the processes that drive individual decision making. I-POMDP was recently used by researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to model the problem of terrorism-related money laundering, and by researchers in the Air Force to identify trust levels of agents with hidden agendas. Not only has Prashant made original contributions to both modeling and decision-making but also to the development of efficient solutions.

Creative Research Medal 2011

Brian Bride, associate professor of social work, is a leading authority on secondary traumatic stress, a phenomenon in which those close to victims of post-traumatic stress experience the same negative images, thoughts, and physical and mental symptoms.  The syndrome occurs among a significant number of human services professionals — social workers, substance abuse counselors, child and family case workers — and also in families of combat veterans.

Though secondary traumatic stress was vaguely recognized for many years, Bride’s research brought it front and center. He developed a standardized instrument, the Secondary Traumatic Stress Scale, to document the prevalence and severity of secondary traumatic stress, which is associated with lower job satisfaction and high staff turnover. Thanks to Bride’s work, the syndrome is today acknowledged as a very real occupational hazard for those who provide clinical, educational, and supportive services to traumatized populations.

Creative Research Medal 2010

David Starkweather, professor of music, produced one of the most comprehensive explorations of the Six Suites for Violoncello by J.S. Bach ever published. He combined his scholarship and technical exper- tise to produce a print edition as well as a three-DVD set. Starkweather edited all of the audio and video, producing DVD-ready masters for his publisher, Lorenz Music. The DVD format allowed him to combine the score with the performance, and using the DVD angle button, viewers can move seamlessly between the score and manuscripts. These manuscripts are the contemporaneous copies made by Anna Magdalena Bach and Johann Kellner, as the autograph manuscript in Johann Sebastian Bach’s hand is lost. The set also includes two slideshow style lectures entitled “Disagree- ment of Sources” and “Comparison of Copyists Accuracy,” discussing deci- sions regarding bowings and notes. This unique use of the DVD medium provides an easy method for students or professional cellists to compare the relevant passages of the different versions of the musical texts in real time. Starkweather’s lectures point out the many textual divergences that might otherwise escape notice. The result is a highly original contribution for both professionals and students that are relevant not only to cellists but perform- ers of the violin, viola, keyboard and wind instruments. His work furthers our understanding of Bach and performance for all musicians.

Creative Research Medal 2010

Doug Peterson, associate professor of fisheries, is an internationally recognized expert on sturgeon, an ancient family of bony fish native to rivers, lakes, and coastlines of Eurasia and North America. He has conducted research on the life history and population dynamics of sturgeon populations in Georgia, New York, Michigan, Canada, and Europe. While originally working on the captive culture of lake sturgeon for reintroduction to the Coosa River in northwest Georgia, Peterson saw potential to apply his newly developed techniques to alleviate commercial harvest impacts on wild populations of Russian sturgeon, which have been severely over-fished in recent years. Peterson pioneered a new, cost-effective, sustainable method for farming sturgeon that has potential to alleviate the caviar-harvest threat to wild sturgeon—and to create a lucrative commodity for Georgia fish farmers. His techniques combine key elements of sturgeon life history with an efficient filtration system using fresh spring water from the mountains of north Georgia to produce fine caviar from Siberian sturgeon. Peterson is currently developing business models based on the poultry industry where young fingerling sturgeon are sold to farmers who raise them to harvest age.

Creative Research Medal 2010

Kanzo Nakayama, associate professor of physics and astronomy, is a world leader in theoretical nuclear physics, especially hadron structure and reactions. In particle physics, a hadron is a particle made of quarks held together by the strong force. He is involved in a worldwide effort to unravel the complex technical problems of Quantum Chromodynamics, whereby quarks are prevented from being observed isolated in nature. Nakayama and his collaborators developed a new reaction theory that is currently being applied with great success to describe a variety of photoproduction pro- cesses—and to analyze data from major hadron physics laboratories around the world. It’s also helping to settle a long-standing discrepancy between the prior theory and high-precision experimental data on the nucleon- nucleon bremsstrahlung reaction process, one of the fundamental processes in hadron physics. Nakayama’s remarkable predictions are already serving as a guide in the design of new experiments that will probe the most relevant physical observables and thus, provide the greatest insights.

William A. Owens Award 2015

Keith Campbell, department head and professor of psychology, is a nationally recognized expert on narcissism, society and generational change. Narcissism—an inflated and grandiose sense of self—is associated with a range of social problems. Campbell’s research focuses on the role of narcissism in close relationships, organizations, cultural trends and broader sociological and economic issues. He has demonstrated that narcissists devalue and destabilize their close relationships with friends and loved ones, and his work also shows that narcissistic leaders can be both charismatic and cause significant problems in organizations. Campbell has examined narcissistic behavior on social media like Facebook, and he is currently examining the phenomena of geek culture and “selfies.” In addition to his numerous research articles, Campbell is author of the books, When You Love a Man Who Loves Himself and The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement and co-editor of the The Handbook of Narcissism and Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

Previous Award

Creative Research Medal 2010

Creative Research Medal 2009

Dorothy Fragaszy, professor of psychology, studies adaptive behavior in primates, specifically manipulation and problem-solving, including using tools. Her objective is to understand the genesis of adaptive behavior within the framework of evolution. In 2003, Fragaszy and her team documented capuchin monkeys’ routine use of heavy stones as hammers for cracking nuts, a discovery that excited primatologists around the world. Since then, she has discovered similarities in tool use—such as the prospective selection and transport of tools and nuts, and the repeated use of anvil sites and hammers—among wild capuchin monkeys, chimpanzees and ancestral humans. He research, which creatively combines field experiments and observational work from multiple disciplines, provides insights into the physical, cognitive, ecological, social, and developmental dimensions of tool use among primates. It provides a new reference point for models of human evolution as well.