Xinlian Zhang

ovprweb on April 3, 2020

Graduate Student Excellence-in-Research Award 2020

Xinlian Zhang, who graduated with a Ph.D. in statistics in May 2019, is an assistant professor in residence in the Division of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics at the University of California at San Diego. With a research breadth that is highly unusual among her peers, Xinlian and her partners are improving statistical models to address complex questions and making significant contributions to a wide range of research topics, including mainstream statistics, machine learning, epigenetics and genomics. She has collaborated on statistical analyses with a zebrafish retina development lab that could benefit drug discovery for retinal degeneration. She has also assisted her research colleagues by developing methods to improve mathematical analyses for rapid empirical feedback systems and to make better use of currently available computing power. A co-author of 12 peer-reviewed articles with several more submitted for publication, she has served as referee for many papers in a variety of statistics and bioinformatics journals.

Lauren O’Connor-Korb

ovprweb on April 3, 2020

Graduate Student Excellence-in-Research Award 2020

Lauren O’Connor-Korb, who graduated with an MFA in 2019, is a lecturer at the University of Georgia. Acknowledging that technology plays a growing role in our intimate relationships and serves as a repository for our most sensitive information, her work explores an evolving tendency to integrate ourselves (willingly and unwillingly) with machines and how this process changes the way we communicate with one another. She integrates robotics, speakers and sensors with other digital technologies, creating sculptures that resemble common, low-tech objects such as hat stands, exit signs and musical instruments. This method allows O’Connor-Korb to question entanglements with the technological “other” within the framework of shared cultural symbols. Borrowing from comedy and stage magic, she creates sculptural test cases that play out anxieties and fears about how technological creations might render humans obsolete. O’Connor-Korb was awarded the International Sculpture Center’s Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award for 2019.

Kyle Mattingly

ovprweb on April 3, 2020

Graduate Student Excellence-in-Research Award 2020

Kyle Mattingly, who graduated with a Ph.D. in geography in August 2019, is a postdoctoral fellow at the Rutgers University Institute of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences. His work has already contributed to greater understanding of the Greenland ice sheet’s role within the climate system and its impact on global sea level. Awarded a NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship, he has helped identify the role of “atmospheric rivers” on the rate of the ice sheet’s melting. Mattingly’s research revealed that unusually intense atmospheric rivers transporting massive amounts of water vapor to Greenland from lower latitudes are driving extreme melt events that reach the highest elevations of the ice sheet. Now he and his colleagues are examining the role of atmospheric rivers on sea ice melt in the Weddell Sea near Antarctica. He is co-author of nine peer-reviewed studies and recipient of multiple awards for his research presentations.

Erinn Duprey

ovprweb on April 3, 2020

Graduate Student Excellence-in-Research Award 2020

Erinn Duprey, who graduated with a Ph.D. in human development and family science in May 2019, is a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for the Study and Prevention of Suicide at University of Rochester Medical Center in New York. She studies the developmental antecedents of psychopathology among youth. Generating transdisciplinary ideas and integrating behavioral, socioemotional and psychophysiological data, she investigates impacts of childhood maltreatment on psychopathology, suicide risk, and resilience in adolescence and young adulthood. Duprey’s research suggests that adolescent suicide-prevention efforts may benefit from identifying youth who exhibit comorbid internalizing (depressive and anxious) and externalizing (aggressive and disruptive) psychopathology. Her studies reveal that therapeutic interventions designed to bolster self-esteem and emotion regulation may reduce suicide risk for emerging adults with a history of childhood maltreatment. Duprey’s scholarly work has been published in top peer-reviewed journals, and she has presented more than a dozen first- and co-authored research projects at national conferences.

Yingjia Chen

ovprweb on April 3, 2020

Graduate Student Excellence-in-Research Award 2020

Yingjia Chen, who graduated with a Ph.D. in toxicology in August 2019, is a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College. She studies health impacts of the Western diet, which is characterized by high levels of glycation products from red meats, high-fat dairy and refined grains. Chen’s research shows that introducing food-derived proteins known as early glycation products (EGPs) into a mouse diet decreased the incidence of type 1 diabetes in mice and increased the survival rate of aged male mice with autoimmune prostatitis, strongly suggesting a potential application as “medical food.” She and her collaborators also showed that consumption of cellulose nanofibrils, which are used in food packaging and have potential use as non-caloric ingredients in foods, reduced the intestinal absorption of nutrients and resulted in negative health consequences.

Xiaoxiao Sun

ovprweb on March 21, 2019

Graduate Student Excellence-in-Research Award 2019

Xiaoxiao Sun, who completed his Ph.D. in statistics in 2018, is now a tenure-track assistant professor at the University of Arizona. He has combined creativity, computational skills and statistical knowledge to take on important challenges in the modern development of data science. Although he focused on statistical theory and methodology development in his doctoral research, he also spearheaded several bioinformatics projects, including one that addressed the issue of statistical computing in big data. For decades, asymptotic theory has been the most common theoretical analysis in statistics and has been used to extrapolate the statistical inference in moderate size samples. But some have questioned whether this analytical method can be translated into practice with the rise of big data. He came up with a simple two-step translational method for big data analysis that performs better than competing methods in terms of both accuracy and computational time.

Zheng Ruan

ovprweb on March 21, 2019

Graduate Student Excellence-in-Research Award 2019

Zheng Ruan earned his Ph.D. in bioinformatics in 2018, delving deeply into how signaling proteins work in both normal and disease states. Using an interdisciplinary approach that combined bioinformatics, biochemistry and cell biology, he uncovered the mechanisms by which cancer mutations alter cell signaling functions. Ruan pursued a unique research strategy by generating hypotheses from computational structural modeling and designing detailed experiments to test these hypotheses. His approach allowed him to answer fundamental questions in cancer genomics and structural bioinformatics. Ruan’s work has generated tremendous interest in the signaling field and will contribute to the understanding and treatment of human cancer. As a postdoctoral researcher at the Van Andel Institute in Michigan, he is studying large macromolecular ion channel proteins using single particle cryo-EM techniques, a rapidly evolving area that has the potential for major breakthroughs.

Jitendra Pant

ovprweb on March 21, 2019

Graduate Student Excellence-in-Research Award 2019

Jitendra Pant focused on developing and characterizing nitric oxide-releasing materials for use in biomedical and tissue engineering applications for his Ph.D. dissertation, completed in the School of Chemical, Materials and Biomedical Engineering. The biomaterials he developed have been reported to have greater than 99 percent antibacterial efficacy without harming human and mouse cells. Some of the biomedical device applications that Pant developed include instant clot wound patches, vascular catheters, device topcoats, 3D bone scaffolds and antibacterial packaging materials. He has also demonstrated the role of nitric oxide-releasing patches in preventing skin cancer and psoriasis. His research thus far has resulted in 18 publications, seven patent disclosures and multiple honors, including a TEDx talk, the Brahm Verma Award, and acknowledgement from the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. To commercialize his research, Jitendra co-founded a biomedical startup called inNOveta Biomedical with his Ph.D. mentor, Hitesh Handa.

Philip Limerick

ovprweb on March 21, 2019

Graduate Student Excellence-in-Research Award 2019

Philip Limerick completed his Ph.D. in Romance languages with a concentration in Hispanic linguistics and is now adjunct instructor of Spanish at Eastern Kentucky University. His doctoral research addressed the emergence of new varieties of Spanish among immigrant populations in the Southeastern United States, an area whose representation in the linguistics literature is small compared to the major Spanish-speaking populations in other U.S. regions. Limerick gained access to a community of speakers in Roswell, Georgia, undertaking two dozen interviews that provided the natural speech data used for his work. This research provides a framework for understanding the mechanisms that underlie linguistic variation in this community. His work is innovative, both in its treatment of this community of U.S. Latinos and in its blend of sociolinguistic and pragmatic perspectives. It could represent an important contribution to the still nascent understanding of the linguistic features that characterize new dialect formation.

Douglas Atkinson

ovprweb on March 21, 2019

Graduate Student Excellence-in-Research Award 2019

Douglas Atkinson earned a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Cardiff in Wales, United Kingdom, after completing his Ph.D. in political science and international affairs in 2018. Many scholars of international conflict argue that war onset, duration and termination can be explained largely by countries’ relative strength. But this approach doesn’t fully account for the issues over which war occurs. Atkinson undertakes in-depth case analyses that explore how government leaders use issues to signal their resolve for potential conflict or war. He explores which issues countries fight about, how leaders introduce those issues into a conflict or war, which trade-offs between issues might exist and how the net effect of a constellation of issues might influence conflict behavior. He is now exploring how to classify issues in possible orders of importance, which remains a complex task, but this approach offers the field a significant advancement over existing research.