Category: Fred C. Davison Early-Career Scholar Award

Fred C. Davison Early Career Scholar Award

Chester Joyner, assistant professor in the College of Veterinary Medicine, is integrating molecular biology, immunology, and vaccine development to develop new therapies needed to treat and prevent malaria. His work addresses some of the biggest challenges in the field by studying Plasmodium vivax dormancy in the liver, investigating why malaria infections fail to generate long-lived immune responses and leading the preclinical testing of an innovative vaccine strategy that counteracts the parasite’s ability to inhibit development of such long-lived immunity. Through these studies, his lab has overcome one of malaria’s greatest challenges—the inability to genetically manipulate P. vivax in the lab—developing novel techniques to introduce genetic modifications into the parasite and opening new avenues for biology and vaccinology. Joyner has secured over $7.3 million in research funding, authored 30 peer-reviewed publications, and been invited to share his work at major international conferences. His work is helping to guide the future of malaria treatment and eradication strategies.

Fred C. Davison Early Career Scholar Award 2025

Christopher Cleveland, assistant professor in the College of Veterinary Medicine, is advancing wildlife disease research through a One Health approach that integrates ecology, epidemiology, and parasitology. His work focuses on zoonotic parasite transmission, vectors, and the surveillance of pathogens in wildlife. His research has provided critical insights into how environmental and wildlife factors contribute to the persistence of parasitic diseases, influencing both public health and conservation strategies. Cleveland has published 34 peer-reviewed articles since 2020, with 14 as first or corresponding author, and has secured over $1.4 million in research funding as principal investigator. He has mentored numerous graduate, undergraduate, and veterinary students, contributing to workforce development in wildlife health. A leader in his field, Cleveland has held presidential roles in professional societies, organized international research workshops, and serves as associate editor for the Journal of Wildlife Diseases, positioning him for continued impact in wildlife disease ecology and global health.

Fred C. Davison Early Career Scholar Award 2025

Matthew Bilskie, assistant professor in the College of Engineering, is advancing the field of coastal resilience through innovative modeling of storm surge, flood risk, and nature-based infrastructure. As head of the college’s Coastal Ocean Analysis and Simulation Team and an affiliate of the Institute for Resilient Infrastructure Systems, he develops high-resolution hydrodynamic models that inform risk reduction strategies for vulnerable coastal communities. Bilskie’s research integrates engineering, computer science, and natural resource economics, providing critical insights into how tidal dynamics, sea-level rise, and climate change impact coastal flooding. His collaborations with the U.S. Marine Corps, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers have led to real-world applications, including flood mitigation planning for military installations. With over $32 million in research funding, 53 peer-reviewed publications, and leadership in interdisciplinary resilience efforts, Bilskie is at the forefront of shaping coastal adaptation strategies. His work continues to influence both policy and engineering solutions for climate resilience.

Fred C. Davison Early Career Scholar Award 2025

Kelly Hines, assistant professor in the Franklin College Department of Chemistry, is advancing bioanalytical chemistry through innovative applications of mass spectrometry. Her research integrates ion mobility-mass spectrometry (IM-MS) with multi-omics approaches to investigate antibiotic resistance at the molecular level. By developing high-throughput analytical techniques, Hines is uncovering how bacterial lipid composition influences resistance mechanisms, offering new insights for diagnostics and therapeutics. Her work has earned national recognition, including the American Society for Mass Spectrometry Research Award and designation as a Rising Star in Measurement Science by the American Chemical Society. She has published over 35 peer-reviewed articles, secured a $2.3 million NIH R01 grant, and contributed as a co-investigator on multiple NIH and NSF projects. With ongoing research into host-pathogen lipid interactions and translational applications in clinical microbiology, Hines is poised to make lasting contributions to analytical chemistry and infectious disease research.

Fred C. Davison Early Career Scholar Award

Amanda Frossard, assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry, has developed new techniques to study the ocean surface and marine aerosol production through a combination of field and laboratory studies. This work has implications for atmospheric chemistry, Earth systems, and climate. She has built an international reputation as an expert in ocean surfactants—chemicals that reduce surface tension—and their transfer to sea spray aerosol. Her group developed analytical methods for surfactant characterization in aerosol particles and seawater. Frossard designed and fabricated an aerosol optical trap instrument to study single-particle absorption of water, and she has undertaken six field studies for sample collection, including multiple research cruises. She received a five-year National Science Foundation CAREER grant award, reflecting that her work is reshaping long-held conventional views of the cycling of particulate organic matter in marine air.

Fred C. Davison Early Career Scholar Award

Pengpeng Bi, assistant professor in the Department of Genetics and Center for Molecular Medicine, has contributed substantially to understanding the molecular mechanisms of muscle development and regeneration. His role in discovering, characterizing, and naming the protein myomixer was a substantial advance. Muscle growth and repair depend on the fusion of smaller muscle cells. Bi identified myomixer as a long-sought switch for human muscle cell fusion. Furthermore, his group used a suite of model and non-model organisms to investigate the evolutionary origin of muscle cell fusion, shedding light on a deep mystery of vertebrate evolution. His group is spearheading the development of a powerful CRISPR toolkit to create genetically engineered mouse models and identify new genes essential for muscle development. These works have been published in prestigious journals and constitute a resource for all investigators who employ mouse models, including those outside the muscle biology field.

Fred C. Davison Early Career Scholar Award

Lin Mu, assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics, has emerged as one of the most successful applied mathematicians of her generation. She has already published 77 research papers in reputable journals of computational and applied mathematics with 2,273 Google citations and 1,254 MathSciNet citations (third highest in the department). Mu’s research has shown both depth and breadth and already has had a profound impact both within and beyond the computational mathematics community, underpinning many models in sciences and engineering. She has made significant progress in several different areas of mathematics, including finite element methods, optimal control, a posteriori methods, multiscale modeling, domain decomposition methods, uncertainty quantification and model reduction methods. These areas use different toolsets, and learning a new area takes time and dedication, but she has had outstanding results in each one. Her international stature is further shown by her numerous invitations to deliver lectures at prestigious universities in both the US and China.

Fred C. Davison Early Career Scholar Award

Breeanna “Bree” Urbanowicz, assistant professor in the Complex Carbohydrate Research Center and the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, has made critical contributions to plant cell wall research. The plant cell wall is one of the most abundant sources of renewable materials available for producing biobased fuels and other bioproducts. Urbanowicz synthesizes innovative, cutting-edge theories of how plants grow and develop and employs state-of-the-art techniques to address her biological questions. She uses a unique combination of plant molecular biology and biochemical analytical techniques, providing fundamental information on cell wall structure and synthesis. Her publication record is outstanding and accelerating, and studies from her lab have recently been published in major journals in her field. Beyond her accomplishments in fundamental scientific research, she is spearheading the development of enabling technologies that could open the door to creating more new materials and energy from wood and other sustainable resources. 

Fred C. Davison Early Career Scholar Award

Caterina Villari, an assistant professor in the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources, has built a highly productive research program bridging basic and applied forest pathology and spanning disciplines from molecular disease diagnostics to tree defense mechanisms. Her laboratory examines tree pathology, particularly interactions among trees, fungal pathogens and insect herbivores. She applies cutting-edge molecular techniques to diagnose critical forest pathogens directly in the field. Her group is also exploring a new way to identify traits within seedlings that could help them ward off disease. Using vibrational spectroscopy technology, which allows rapid “fingerprinting” of chemical compounds in trees, her team phenotypes resistance in seedlings. These fingerprints, for instance, can identify pines with increased resistance to fusiform rust, a fungus affecting Southern forests. She co-founded and co-directs the Southern Pine Health Research Cooperative (SPHRC), officially launched during fall 2018 and the first of its kind at the Warnell School.

Fred C. Davison Early Career Scholar Award

Sheng Li, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, has already demonstrated significant achievements in his career in artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science. He focuses on designing machine-learning models to provide trustworthy representations from large-scale data. His novel algorithms to extract knowledge from raw data have been used in many real-world applications such as data clustering, causal inference, scene understanding, time series analysis, visual reasoning, bioinformatics, and public health. He has published over 110 journal/conference publications, which have attracted international attention with more than 3,400 Google Scholar citations (h-index: 32). In 2020, he received the Aharon Katzir Young Investigator Award from the International Neural Networks Society, which recognizes “exceptionally promising young investigators in the field of neural networks.” In the past three years at UGA, he has received multiple grants as principal investigator for more than $1.5 million to support his research.