Category: Distinguished Research Professor

Distinguished Research Professor 2020

Julie A. Luft, Athletic Association Professor of Mathematics and Science Education in the College of Education, is a leading scholar of science education. Her widely published research studies continue to significantly influence science teacher induction and teacher development both nationally and internationally, shedding light on central issues of teacher preparation, professional learning and retention. Luft has translated her research on teacher education and learning into applications that benefit practicing teachers and the broader education community. She served on the committee that wrote the influential 2015 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine report on science teachers’ learning, which identified a lack of opportunities and recommended changes to address science teachers’ professional development. Luft’s current work focuses on improving such opportunities for newly hired science teachers, exploring a novel format of professional learning for science teacher leaders, and examining the content knowledge and instruction of early-career science teachers when they teach outside of their expertise.

Distinguished Research Professor 2019

Diana Downs, professor of microbiology, has made transformative contributions to her field by exploiting genetic analysis to help solve important biochemical mysteries of bacterial life. A key theme of her research is that pulling one thread of metabolism reveals interconnected threads in unexpected ways. By using a biochemical genetic approach, she has advanced understanding of thiamine synthesis, specifically uncovering connections between this pathway and others in the cell. Her genetic research has also provided insight into the complexities of chemistry inside all cells and the evolution of new pathways. Her work has yielded ideas and information critical to understanding how pathways are controlled and have evolved. Downs has elucidated previously unknown metabolic networks, revealed subtle metabolic connections in bacteria and mapped new mechanisms of metabolic regulation. These mechanisms are conserved in biology, making her basic biomedical research relevant to applied fields like metabolic engineering, synthetic biology and infectious disease.

Distinguished Research Professor 2019

Jason Colquitt, the William Harry Willson Distinguished Chair in the Department of Management, conducts research that clarifies the benefits of managing employees fairly. He has been a major force in growing this research area from a narrow social psychology topic to a thriving research field. He explores behavior that leaders can develop in themselves to treat their employees fairly, as well as the impact of fair behavior on employee trust in leaders, satisfaction with work and commitment to employers. Colquitt developed a four-dimensional measure of fairness that is by far the most commonly used measure in the field. He was one of the first to find that fairness occurs as a workplace climate—a collective, shared experience—and that “justice climates” have important implications for team performance. His work includes meta-analyses, longitudinal field studies, laboratory experiments and theory papers. Many of the most productive scholars in the field today got their starts as his Ph.D. students.

Distinguished Research Professor 2019

Jon Amster, professor and head of the Department of Chemistry, is a pioneer in mass spectrometry-based analytical approaches to understanding glycosaminoglycans (GAGs). These carbohydrates are essential to organisms from bacteria to humans, binding to proteins for cell signaling, inflammation, pathogenic infections and cancer. But GAGs are among the most challenging molecules to analyze. Scientists don’t fully understand how cells create these highly complex molecules, which can exist in many similar but different forms. Identifying how GAGs are created and how they may be involved in disease could lead to the development of drugs that block their action. Amster was a leader of the first team to develop high-powered tools into which GAGs were placed and broken into predictable pieces, allowing scientists to learn their sequences and structures. He also developed new software for automated analysis of the data, providing faster sorting and identification tools that could someday hasten biomedical applications including new treatments.

Distinguished Research Professor 2025

Sonia Altizer, Martha Odum Distinguished Professor in the Odum School of Ecology, is a global leader in infectious disease ecology. Her research explores how host behavior, environmental change, and migration patterns shape pathogen dynamics in wildlife populations. She is best known for pioneering work on monarch butterflies, demonstrating how long-distance migration reduces infection risk through migratory escape and culling, reshaping ecological understanding of host-pathogen interactions. Altizer’s interdisciplinary approach integrates field studies, citizen science, and mathematical modeling, revealing how climate change, resource provisioning, and habitat fragmentation influence disease spread. With over 120 peer-reviewed publications, including in Science and Nature, her research has been cited more than 22,000 times. She has received continuous NSF funding since 2002 and secured over $7 million in grants. A Fellow of the Ecological Society of America and American Association for the Advancement of Science, Altizer has also served as interim dean of the Odum School and leads impactful outreach through Project Monarch Health, engaging volunteers in large-scale disease monitoring.

Distinguished Research Professor 2018

Michael Tiemeyer, professor and associate director of the Complex Carbohydrate Research Center, has catalyzed advancements in a broad range of areas including neural development, neural dysfunction, neurodegeneration, respiratory inflammatory diseases and analytic carbohydrate chemistry. His research addresses the biological function of cell surface carbohydrates (glycans) in mediating cellular interactions that underlie normal development and human disease progression. His laboratory builds on the understanding of biological function in model systems, especially the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, by creating novel tools to detect dynamic changes in glycan biosynthesis. His studies in Drosophila have made use of the powerful genetic approaches provided by this model system to make groundbreaking discoveries related to the roles of glycans in neural development. His contributions to glycan analysis and glycomic toolmaking have significantly enhanced the understanding of glycan functions in cellular differentiation, tissue development and inflammatory disease progression, while simultaneously expanding the appreciation of glycan structural diversity across animal species.

Distinguished Research Professor 2018

Silvia J. Moreno, professor in the Department of Cellular Biology and director for an NIH Training Grant at the Center for Tropical and Emerging Global Diseases, is recognized internationally for her studies on calcium signaling in parasitic protozoa. Her work defined the link between calcium signaling and pathogenesis of infectious organisms. Her research focuses on Toxoplasma gondii, a pathogen that infects one-third of the world population. She and her team discovered mechanisms of calcium signaling in parasites and novel compartments that store calcium that are different from those present in mammalian cells. Her laboratory developed new genetic tools to study calcium that could be used for high-throughput assays to find new pharmacological agents for the potential treatment of parasitic diseases. Based on another fundamental discovery from her lab—that Toxoplasma takes specific nutrients from its host—she proposed the development of therapeutics that combine host-encoded and parasite-encoded functions as a novel approach for chemotherapy.

Distinguished Research Professor 2018

Wayne Parrott, professor in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, is one of the world’s leading authorities on soybean genomics and enabling technologies for the improvement of crop plants. He developed biotechnology protocols for soybean and other crops that made it possible to obtain whole plants from single cells. This process allows scientists to add genes into soybean for testing and agricultural release. In a parallel research program on insect resistance, he led development of new soybean cultivars that require fewer insecticide applications to control pests. He has been an influential advocate and communicator on the importance of genetic engineering and genetically modified organisms in agriculture. An expert in the complex regulations that govern GMOs, he has helped multiple countries with their regulations. He has held important leadership positions in his discipline such as editing prominent journals, organizing scientific meetings, serving on grant panels and guiding the future of soybean genomics research.

Distinguished Research Professor 2018

Dorothea E. Link, professor in the Hugh Hodgson School of Music, has emerged as a major scholar of the music of the 18th century, particularly in the works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the cultural life of Vienna, and the operatic milieu of that age. Her book The National Court Theatre in Mozart’s Vienna: Sources and Documents, 1783-1792 is one of the most significant reference books on Viennese musical culture during the last decade of Mozart’s life. Her influential work on the Viennese singers who first performed in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro (1786) and Così fan tutte (1790) are critically important for late 18th-century musical scholarship. Her recent induction into lifetime membership of the Akademie für Mozart-Forschung at the Stiftung Mozarteum Salzburg—currently accommodating only 25 scholars worldwide who are considered the premier research leaders of Mozart studies in their time—acknowledges the importance of her work by the international Mozart community.

Distinguished Research Professor 2018

Brett Clementz, professor in the Department of Psychology, has rapidly advanced the understanding of the biological bases of psychoses with the use of brain scan technologies, batteries of patient tests, and sophisticated data analysis. His early goal was to learn how inaccurate sensory processing can lead to abnormalities in brain functioning and behavior. His laboratory later identified biomarkers of neurobiological deviations that are associated with manifestations of different subgroups of psychoses. These biomarkers could allow clinicians to diagnose and target medications more accurately. With growing evidence to support a novel taxonomy of psychiatric illness, he helped spearhead a game-changing movement to re-envision diagnoses of psychoses based not on century-old symptom groupings but using the tools of modern neuroscience. His work on alterations in brain oscillation patterns has also shown how integrated brain activity supports higher level cognition, emotion processing and other aspects of behavior.